Cybersilly

Brian Doherty from the August/September 2000 issue

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But it isn't clear that Borsook has strong intellectual objections to the "free minds and free markets" matrix that undergirds most of what libertarians say and think. She spends a chapter dissing cypherpunks, for example, chiding them for being overly concerned with government meddling in their lives (she thinks they haven't suffered enough to complain). Yet she agrees with their central goal of halting government interference in the sale, development, and possession of cryptography.

So what is Borsook's case beyond pique, beyond finding Bionomics conferences to be "little shops of horror," beyond lamenting that technolibs prefer Edge Cities to "real" urban centers, beyond finding libertarians "psychically exhausting"? Boiled down, she makes two arguments: First, high-tech people have no right to attack government since their industry would not have existed without government funding. Second, successful businesses are successful because they operate in a world where governments keep schools going, food and drugs pure, banks honest, and the like.

The first argument is simply a non sequitur. Government is involved with just about any commercial transaction or field imaginable, if only because it builds roads. But the fact that the government paves streets hardly makes it responsible for all the businesses that spring up alongside them. (There is, moreover, ample evidence that road building would continue even if government disappeared.)

The Defense Department's role in developing ARPANet, the forerunner to the Internet, was more as a customer than as an engineer creating something by design; it provided money for researchers doing early work on a decentralized computer network, but didn't plan or anticipate anything like the Internet we use today. Indeed, the essentially unplanned way in which the Internet developed is an example of the biologically informed models of growth and self-regulation that libertarians celebrate. It's also worth pointing out that the Internet's huge growth, both in terms of infrastructure and customers, came about due to commercial investment, not government financing.

As for Borsook's second line of attack: Anyone advocating a smaller role for the state is by necessity thrust into the realm of historical fantasy, of imagining the way things could be. Government has arrogated so extensive a role to itself that it's understandable that many people might imagine that nothing the government has a hand in could possibly have happened without it.

One of the key insights of libertarianism revolves around the notion of the "spontaneous order," the idea that social orders and markets can, do, and will develop to meet human needs without central direction or control. For instance, just because government has taken it upon itself to finance and run schools does not mean that no one would be educated if it didn't. Nor would restaurants start poisoning their customers if municipal food inspectors disappeared overnight.

But Borsook doesn't understand what libertarians mean when they talk about spontaneous order. Thus she asserts that such a theory of "self-organization" appeals to "engineers' physics envy" and that "the reason for the rise in technolibertarianism is that engineers are practical and like to fix things and get things right, so of course only the sensible political choice of libertarianism would fit."

In fact, the engineering mentality, which presumes a single best way of doing things in accordance with unchanging "natural" laws, is the exact opposite of the spontaneous order mentality that pervades libertarian thinking. That's why Hayek specifically identified the engineering mentality as the mind-set from "which all modern socialism, planning and totalitarianism derives."

But Borsook hasn't thought about libertarian philosophy hard enough to make fine distinctions. To her, anything and everything anti-government--from militiamen obsessed with what they consider a Zionist-Occupied Government to people who want more foreign tech workers than current immigration laws allow--is tossed into the libertarian stew she finds so distasteful.

The root of Borsook's problem--and perhaps of libertarianism's problem with mainstream writers and thinkers--is encoded in her book's title: Cyberselfish. She spends most of a chapter musing over the well-known "fact" that people who get wealthy from high-tech are unprecedentedly stingy with their corporate and individual giving. When I presented this thesis to Ann Kaplan, editor of Giving USA, one of the prime data collection sources for American philanthropy, she told me there are no accurate macro data to support that contention.

In fact, even the "data" Borsook cites don't support her contention. She notes that the regional United Way goal in Silicon Valley has not increased during the '90s and that, although San Jose has double the average U.S. per capita income, local charities do not receive twice the national average in donations. (She doesn't say how much they do receive and doesn't cite any sources for the data.)

Additionally, she notes a survey by the Community Foundation Silicon Valley (CFSV) of area residents across all income lines that indicates they give to charities at a level similar to the national giving rate (about 2 percent of annual income). What's more, in Silicon Valley, "the percentages of those giving in each income bracket are somewhat above national averages."

Such data are her main evidence for the oft-bruited assertion that the high-tech world is uniquely stingy. Borsook simply assumes that Silicon Valley can be equated with the entire high-tech sector and that United Way is a reasonable proxy for all charity. And if you look at the CFSV report that she mentions, you find that 83 percent of Silicon Valley households donate to charity, compared to 69 percent nationally, and that Silicon Valley adults volunteer at a rate exactly equal to the national average (49 percent). But 40 percent of Silicon Valley charitable giving goes outside the immediate area, which might help explain the local United Way situation.

Borsook's problem with an inherent "selfishness" that may not even exist is part of a general negative feeling about people who don't want as much government as she does. She doesn't feel spiritually akin to these espousers of libertarianism; their strongly expressed belief in a philosophy she only half-understands but associates with stinginess disturbs her. That kind of sociological prejudice rests on a false supposition, reflected throughout Cyberselfish, that "social" and "governmental" are coterminous, and that anyone who is against governmental action is therefore essentially "atomistic." The libertarian insight that the state is the nexus of legalized violence and coercion--and awareness of the special moral and practical dilemmas that its use thus involves--escapes Borsook entirely; she never even mentions it to try to refute it. Ignorant of the philosophical and intellectual background behind small-state thinking, she condemns it for being against cooperation. In fact, libertarians rely on uncoerced transactions and charitable fellow-feeling as the web holding civil society together--cooperation on mutually agreed terms at its finest, without force entering the equation.

Why do Borsook and other anti-libertarians miss this? Willful, ideologically motivated blindness no doubt plays a role. But libertarians themselves must share a good deal of the responsibility. In public debate, they should be less negative and spend more time pointing out the ways in which a culture can survive and thrive by relying on spontaneous orders and voluntary exchanges that make all the world richer, cleaner, safer, and saner.

Libertarians can perhaps take some solace that in over 200 pages Borsook fails to make a coherent case against "terribly libertarian culture." But they would do well to rely less on defenses of the right to be left alone, which can be interpreted as mere selfishness and hence something easy to dismiss. Recognizing that may be the key to understanding why so many are likely to agree with Borsook despite her inability to actually prove her case.