In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia, who passed away in 2023, traced how digital evangelism has driven a worldwide shift toward the political right, concealing inequality, xenophobia, dishonesty, and massive corporate concentrations of wealth and power beneath the idealistic presumption of digital technology as an inherent social good. George Justice wrote the foreword to Cyberlibertarianism, and is joined in conversation with Frank Pasquale.
George Justice is professor of English literature and provost at the University of Tulsa.
Frank Pasquale is professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School.
"If you want to understand the origins of our information hellscape with its vast new inequalities, corrupt information, algorithmic control, population-scale behavioral manipulation, and wholesale destruction of privacy, then begin here." —Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
"Cyberlibertarianism is essential for understanding the contemporary moment and the recent past that got us here. It stands as a monumental magnum opus from a meticulous thinker and sharp social critic who is sorely missed." —Sarah T. Roberts, director, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, UCLA
In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia, who passed away in 2023, traced how digital evangelism has driven a worldwide shift toward the political right, concealing inequality, xenophobia, dishonesty, and massive corporate concentrations of wealth and power beneath the idealistic presumption of digital technology as an inherent social good. George Justice wrote the foreword to Cyberlibertarianism, and is joined in conversation with Frank Pasquale.
George Justice is professor of English literature and provost at the University of Tulsa.
Frank Pasquale is professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School.
"If you want to understand the origins of our information hellscape with its vast new inequalities, corrupt information, algorithmic control, population-scale behavioral manipulation, and wholesale destruction of privacy, then begin here." —Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
"Cyberlibertarianism is essential for understanding the contemporary moment and the recent past that got us here. It stands as a monumental magnum opus from a meticulous thinker and sharp social critic who is sorely missed." —Sarah T. Roberts, director, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, UCLA
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
George Justice:
What's the alternative to that, frankly, scary way of letting the technology take care of itself?
Frank Pasquale:
If we were to create a world where the stuff created by generative AI is all of the data out there or majority of it, that would lead to model collapse because the human data is what's really of great value.
George Justice:
Hello, everyone. My name is George Justice, and I'm joined by Frank Pasquale today to talk about David Columbia's cyber libertarianism, the right wing politics of digital technology, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Frank, why don't you introduce yourself, who you are, and then I'll say a few words and and then ask you some questions.
Frank Pasquale:
Oh, thanks so much, George. It's really a pleasure to be in conversation with you. I know how much your insight and friendship meant to David, throughout. And I wanted to introduce myself. I am a professor of law at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech.
Frank Pasquale:
I'm based in New York City. I have worked on issues of law and technology for a while. That led me to, get to know David. I believe we first met at a privacy conference. And, over that time period, you know, since I met him probably ten years ago, I got to know his work very well and was in correspondence with him and, just find him to have been a tremendous scholar.
George Justice:
And as our listeners may or may not know, David Columbia, a great friend of mine since 1988, died on 09/14/2023. It's such a privilege to have you here today, Frank, to talk over cyber libertarianism, which I consider to be David's magnum opus. I'm myself, I'm a professor of English literature and serve as provost at the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma. David was one of my closest friends since we met on the first day of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. It has just been a really important thing for me to be able to work with the press, the outstanding work by the University of Minnesota Press to bring to life David's final book containing his best thoughts and his most deep ideas about what's happening in our world, thought very, very broadly.
George Justice:
And, Frank, let me let me kick things off with a question about our contemporary world here in the fall of twenty twenty four. Deeply going through the editing process with David's book at the same time that the presidential campaign has been unfolding, I've noticed, both explicit links, let's say, between, the Republican vice presidential candidate and some of the themes and specific ideas that come up in David's book. Have you seen those, similarities? And going further, would you expect a Trump administration to carry out some of the things that David warns about in cyber libertarianism?
Frank Pasquale:
Oh, thanks, George. And I do think that's a very interesting question, and it's it's a fascinating question on a few levels. One is just to introduce what I take to be the core ideas of cyber libertarianism. I think it's the idea that the cyber libertarian believes that technology is going to lead to tremendous advances in human well-being and that because this golden goose, this sort of Promethean gift of technology is so great in its potential, we should be extremely cautious and skeptical of any efforts to regulate it. Right?
Frank Pasquale:
Now thinking about the Trump administration one point o from 2017 to 2021, that administration, I think, had a somewhat mixed record on technology. I mean, it served on some level. It was pro tech in its general deregulatory emphasis. It was anti tech in some of its antitrust actions, you know, which the case against Google, began in the Trump administration. So it was I thought it was a bit of a mixed bag.
Frank Pasquale:
But I think what's fascinating in terms of the consolidation of Silicon Valley support behind Trump and now Vance in 2024 is that I would expect, just as your question suggests, there would be a lot of protect activity in a Trump Vance administration. And I think that comes down to things like crypto, which, has was the subject of, I think, David's first book or, no, second book. David's second book was, called Bitcoin Software's Right Wing Extremism. And this is a book just to go on a little tangent, but I think it's really helpful to sort of get a sense of, you know, where David was coming from and how prescient he could be. The Bitcoin book came out in 2016.
Frank Pasquale:
And at that time, there were so many people that were so deeply enthusiastic about cryptocurrency and about particularly the blockchain as being this liberatory, emancipatory aspect of technology that would allow us to tear down old hierarchies and to decentralize our existence in a way that would, you know, really be liberatory and and and be be, progressive. And David came into that sort of status quo, those received ideas, and just said absolutely not. So, you know, if you really understand the foundations of what's going on in crypto, that it was this, the original, a document from Satoshi Nakamoto, who's the sort of the cryptonymous, founder, referred to the financial crash and was in a way trying to either take advantage of it or at least to, you know, if not stoke, take advantage of a panic over fiat currency, the governments. And David sort of built on that to look into the deep history of those who tried to get outside of the monetary system, of the of the state driven monetary system into this sort of private crypto system. And in doing so, really illuminated a lot of the energy and momentum now that we see in a big crypto backing of Trump advance.
Frank Pasquale:
And so therefore you know? And they they have been very upset about, like, Gary Gensler, who I think has been doing a relatively a good job, but, you know, a pretty modest regulatory agenda on what's really become in many ways a wild west space. But to them, it is just seen as being utterly, you know, too dare jeez, authoritarian, etcetera. And I think that in that hyperbole of anti regulatory movements that David traced way back in his crypto book and and also in the present cyber libertarianism, you see in that hyperbole the roots of a cyber libertarian emerging governing ideology that at its most extreme extent would take on, I think, all of the ideas in the recent techno optimist manifesto, by Marc Andreasson, which, you know, has has has a ton of ideas that are just really trying to say that the the regulatory infrastructure is the enemy of progress. And so I I I'm sorry for that very long answer, but I think it's it's a very rich question.
Frank Pasquale:
Yeah.
George Justice:
And I I noticed that Vance himself has been a reader of the works of, Curtis Yarvin, Menckheus Moldbug, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, as David, outlines his strange work in cyber libertarianism. Vance himself, who was, of course, been supported by Peter Thiel, one of those, Silicon Valley, cyber libertarians. Vance has actually been brought up within the ideological stew of some of the thinkers that, if you wanna call them thinkers, that David takes to task in cyber libertarianism. I'm thinking of sort of three d's that came up in your remarks, Frank. Deregulation, decentralization, and the sense of technological determinism that the technology, and we'll get into this later, that the technology is driving towards particular aims.
George Justice:
With the we'll talk about the metaphor of the printing press and, the kind of misunderstanding of historical analysis of the history of the printing press that many of the cyber libertarians have adopted. And so figures like Elon Musk, who may have said he was gonna, support Democrats four years ago, maybe not, has come out very strongly now for Donald Trump. I'm also struck by in David's book, and I this is a a curiosity I have. David, in his life and in his writing, is fearless about taking on interests and taking on people who even would seem to be allied with him. As an aside, I remember in graduate seminars, and, you know, we're all pretty similar thinkers in English PhD programs, the knock down drag out fights we'd have even in seminars on Renaissance literature.
George Justice:
He had a a really strong bent in his life not to go along to get along, so to speak. And there are some self described or at least widely understood progressive thinkers whom he takes to task in cyber libertarianism, legal scholars like Tim Wu and Lawrence Lessig. You're a law professor, which I'm not. Does his his taking those people to task make sense to you, or is he overreading? Because he seems to sort of analyze some of their writings as believing in things that they themselves might not personally say that they believe in.
Frank Pasquale:
Yeah. I mean, it's a very complex question, you know, with respect to the engagement with different figures. And I I think I mentioned to David once, you know, in terms of thinking about, it was a past project, just saying, you know, maybe it's it's better to just go after narrow beliefs of people rather than sort of suggesting that the person themselves might be have a certain ideology on the basis of disagreement. But I I mean, I think with respect to, you know let me just talk concretely about both of the I think you mentioned, Larry Lessig and Tim Wu. I mean, Larry Lessig is someone that I think this is something that has now been noted about intellectual property as a political matter that I think is really important.
Frank Pasquale:
So Lesson begins his career with this or at least comes to prominence with this book called Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, where essentially the idea is that he's worried that computer code is going to take on this somewhat authoritarian role in terms of controlling people's access to information, particularly controlling their access to intellectual property. And he became part of a movement of, say, open access persons that wanted to say, really, IP, we need to fight things like the recording industry, fight, big publishers, try to make things free so that things are available for free online. Okay? And and I think at the time, it didn't strike many as a very progressive movement. You know?
Frank Pasquale:
There were there Disney was pushing to extend the copyright term by another twenty years, and, you know, Lessig was fighting against that, etcetera. But what was interesting was that as someone like Lessig began to articulate a larger vision of the nature of value and labor in the digital economy, then what started happening is, you know, he would make analogies, and this is one that I've taken a test on, that would say things like, well, Google may be trying to copy all the books in the world or it may be copying all the websites. But couldn't we think of Google as the painter and the websites and the books as the paint? And, you know, isn't the painter, the picture worth more than the paint? You know, and things like that.
Frank Pasquale:
And and and just sort of play playing with those sort of metaphors, and I started thinking, that's a really bad metaphor because, you know, because I just sort of feel like there's a lot of thought going into this, You know, any particular piece of of information online, it reminds me also of someone I think Hal Varian once said that, you know, there's been more information created in the last two years, and this was done in the February or something, than has been ever created in the history of human history. And it's like, you know, I know I'm working quantify things in those way. You know? So I feel like that sort of is, and and, of course, that plays out now, in intellectual property battles, which we'll get to later in our conversation. But, you know, that's one part of it.
Frank Pasquale:
Just to finish up with Lessig, I do think that Lessig in his anti corruption work one thing that's really fascinating about Lessig is he made a point at some point where he said, I think scholars should declare intellectual bankruptcy after a decade and say they've said enough about one topic and move into another. And he stopped talking about intellectual property by and large. He started becoming anti corruption activists and advocate. And, you know, that clearly is incredibly important work. So, you know, that's bravo to to learn lesson for that.
Frank Pasquale:
Tim Wu, you know, did work on net neutrality, became was sort of like seen as the the godfather of that term or sort of originator of that term. And, you know, I think that David advances in cyber libertarianism a very complex argument about what the press for net neutrality misses in terms of the larger digital ecosystem, whereby if you are just a net neutrality activist, you wanna make sure that your telephone carrier or cable carrier can't discriminate against certain, content because you wanna reduce their power. But if you are a critical Internet studies scholar, you see that, like, maybe this is just a battle among big giant companies. And, like, do I really have a dog on this spot? Fight?
Frank Pasquale:
Right? That was sort of, I think, where David was going with that. But I think, again, with someone like Tim Wu, I think that, you know, by by later debates on net neutrality, he did get that. But moreover, you know, he certainly has been this this very key figure in terms of, like, fighting corporate power in the Biden administration. He was one of the architects of Biden's competition policy.
Frank Pasquale:
So, you know, as I sort of feel like there's there's a way in which David, as as you state, when he sees a position of someone can be very focused on that position. And I think that there might be a certain epistemic justice in saying, well, in any of these papers that's criticized, always consider their broader their their broader affiliations and what they work on. Yeah.
George Justice:
I see that, and, I would endorse what you would say because it it also rings true to him as a person. He got very dogged about how he could pursue an argument to its very end. On the other hand, that yields in terms when it's not tied to individual human beings who may have different thoughts one way or another. But when it gets tied to ideas, that kind of relentlessness, as you were just saying about net neutrality, it really yields, at least to me, new insight into the topic. So I was somebody who kind of naively bought the arguments about net neutrality.
George Justice:
Yeah. The arguments that David associates with cyber libertarianism. Similarly, with free software. Well, it sounds really good, and David talks about the aphorism free software, not as in, free beer, but as in free liberty. But undercutting the kind of pretentious claims to large scale positive social change that comes out of these movements.
George Justice:
I mean, I admit I use Wikipedia on a regular basis. David goes to town on Wikipedia. And I can see the pros and cons and, you know, the editorial structure is not a great open structure as Jimmy Wales may see. But if you actually look at the the way that editors, kind of guard jealously guard their privilege within that system, and in some ways, on an even more profound basis because, I mean, I wouldn't go to Wikipedia for anything more than understanding when Katy Perry was born and what her career has looked like on a surface level. But he goes after Julian Assange, who is definitely not a good guy.
George Justice:
And yet, he seems to associate the very negative aspects of character of Julian Assange with a condemnation entirely of WikiLeaks. It brings up a broader question to me, which I'd like to get to in the course of our conversation about democracy and the government. So Assange breaks the law and is not a good guy on top of that. And therefore, according to David, the WikiLeaks leaks are in fact provided in contradiction to democratic governance. There are times in the book that, it's a very powerful gesture that the regulation of these spaces by the government is in fact a perfect embodiment of democracy because we live in a system in which we vote for the government.
George Justice:
The government directly responds to us as active citizens within a democratically conceived nation. And yet at the same time, I'm personally glad that WikiLeaks brought to light some of our government actions. I wonder if you have any thoughts about what I see as, David's bringing together in ways that are both powerful but may not go directly everywhere we wanna go of identifying the government with democracy. How does that play out? And do you think, particularly in the case of WikiLeaks, how do you how do you understand the the role of WikiLeaks within our world over the past fifteen years?
Frank Pasquale:
Yeah. This is a really good question. I think that and I I particularly appreciate your bringing together the Wiki pedia and WikiLeaks phenomena. And let me maybe I'll start with WikiLeaks. One of the things that fascinated me about WikiLeaks at the very beginning was where is the Julian Assange of Russia or China?
Frank Pasquale:
Right? So if we were sort of shift from a just shift from the perspective of a domestic perspective of I wanna see bad things that the US government has done exposed to the world, yes. You know, there's a certain positive angle to that. But if we shift to a geopolitical perspective and say, well, if there's no similar figure in Russia or China, you know, then maybe you start wondering, like, is our openness being weaponized against us in that way? And I think that was something, you know, I would sometimes discuss with with, David about that sort of, like, thinking about the overarching normative import.
Frank Pasquale:
One thing I found absolutely fascinating recently is I have heard reports that, actually, Iran has, hacked Donald Trump's campaign, but media are not talking about it. So I don't know. I can't verify that, but I think they've said, well, we learned from 2016. We're gonna stop, you know, talking about these sort of hacks or things like that. So you know?
Frank Pasquale:
And and then again, there's another asymmetry, right, where you could say, oh, well, I guess they've learned their lesson. But then on the other hand, it's like, well, somehow but that lesson ended up really helping one side of the political spectrum, protecting another. So that's one side. Yeah. You know, this this, this dilemma.
Frank Pasquale:
And I think another side of it with respect to Wiki Wikipedia is that I think there have been interesting studies sort of saying, like, what is the power exercised by the Wikipedia editors? How is this group developing? What are its emphases? If you compare it to traditional encyclopedia, what's the nature of its emphasis versus non emphasis? And finally, is it doing labor that ought to be compensated?
Frank Pasquale:
Right? And that's another area where, you know, to come back, this will be, I think, a thread of our conversation where at first, open access looked like, you you know, if you want to be sort of an anti copyright or a copyleft, type of position, that has many progressive aspects of it. I mean, Ju and Chang has written brilliantly about how limiting copyright protection has allowed, or at least ways around it have allowed very important materials to get to developing countries. But on the other hand, if you take an absolutist position about it, then it looks like what an appropriation of the labor that goes into not only the writing of books, but the editing, all the other aspects, the editing, promotion, aspects of of of creating an intellectual ecosystem. And so to me, you know, that is part of maybe an aspect of the cyber libertarianism of of David's Columbia's cyber libertarianism book critique of of of Wikipedia.
Frank Pasquale:
And also, yeah, just just the idea of, like, I've definitely seen concerns about there not being a representative group of people that's editing it in a world where information is not simply being used to help edify people, but also there are information wars. You know, there are information there are battles over narrative. There are battles over different you know, how different events are represented. And if that's the case, then if you have this sort of, like, massive website that may have certain hidden agendas that are very hard to reveal given its structure, given, you know, anonymity of, you know, certain editors, whatever it might be, that might be a concern, you know, that one one would have. And so, yeah, I think that you're right to say to note the double edgedness of this because we want whistleblowers to be able to report out problems.
Frank Pasquale:
We want there to be a public website that has immense amounts of information, well organized in an accessible way. But we have to be cognizant of the problems that David recognizes with respect to the potential hidden agendas or biased agendas of those sort of entities.
George Justice:
Well, in open access, free software, transparency, which is another word that David unpacks the use of in cyber libertarian, dogma. Of course, we're all for transparency, But in many cases, the way that some of the corporate interests and the thinkers behind the corporate interests look at transparency, it is utterly a violation of privacy, of copyright, of rights of the individual as we have typically understood them. How do you see the the relationship between transparency and privacy playing out in the book's arguments, but also in the way that our culture is developing. And I know you're an expert on AI, and it's been shocking to me the ways in which some of the things you just said about Wikipedia get ramped up in AI, which, you know, reflects the combination of information that's brought into it. Sometimes that information not being brought into it with the will of the people who actually created, created the words.
George Justice:
The cyber libertarians trumpet transparency as an ultimate goal. And yet how does transparency get in the way of other values that we might hold dear in a democratic government?
Frank Pasquale:
Terrific question. And just to to start and answer, I'll make it really concrete, which is, there was a proposal actually by a legal scholar who later played a role in the Trump administration, that you would have complete transparency as to what all administrators in the administrative state were doing. You could have, video cameras at their desk. You could have reports out. Yeah.
Frank Pasquale:
Right. You know, video cameras at their desk, reports out as to what every email that they sent from their work computer was. You know, imagine, like, a super FOIA that would be not only is there sort of an orderly process of releasing documents, but it's just a big dump of all the data that happened on any government computer any day, and no government business could be transacted except in that way. Now, of course, that's sort of, you know, that's a reductio ad absurdum. But even, you know, some of the some more common demands for transparency have been critiqued by legal scholars.
Frank Pasquale:
Like David Posen of Columbia has written a great article called Transparency's Ideological Drift. And he's saying in that article that, you know, in the sixties, there were a lot of progressive activists that were, like, saying, we wanna make big government more transparent. But nowadays, there are a lot of individuals that are trying to make the demand for transparency or weaponize it to discredit ordinary governmental functioning. Imagine, for example, again, like in a vote counting context, know, someone says, I wanna know the names and addresses and phone numbers of all poll workers in a given area. I wanna publish that for everybody.
Frank Pasquale:
Right? Now on the one hand, maybe it's good that we know who all the poll workers are. On the other hand, given the rise of stochastic terrorism, it's pretty terrifying. Right? And I don't think you'll have many people that wanna sign up for it if they know that that's gonna be the price the price of transparency, you know, that they're gonna have to bear burden be burdened with.
Frank Pasquale:
So I think that's yet another very smart interrogation by David of a term that, you know, from the outside could be seen as entirely a positive. Right? And I'll also note that, like, in this, he he stands in very interesting ideological footsteps or or philosophical footsteps. I think there's a book by Stefano Sherallanes called Transparency in French Thought that looks at sort of the history of French philosophers and theorists questioning transparency. I mean, there's work on, four opacity.
Frank Pasquale:
So you know, you have a lot of people that are working in this field, and I think David is, you know, really emphasizing and dramatizing the problem of taking on transparency as a a all important value when it's not balanced by concern for privacy, concern for, administrative burden, and other things like that.
George Justice:
And what are the ways that we do that balancing? So from a from a cyber libertarian perspective, it'll all take care of itself because technology is gonna fix it for us. What's the alternative to that, kinda to me, frankly, scary way of kind of letting the technology take care of itself. How do we do that balancing between legitimate, wish for transparency in public actions taken on behalf of or by the government versus legitimate reasons why transactions, and information might be kept private? How do we come to the right balance, to use your word?
Frank Pasquale:
Yes. It's a terrific question, and I think that it really gets to a core philosophical contribution of David and something that I was in conversation with him, you know, for for many years in the October, which was about the the concept of judgment. Right? So I think there are ways of conceiving knowledge that would say and I think this is deeply embedded in cyber libertarian thought, in terms of if it has an epistemology. I would say that algorithms, computers, computation, and quantification are the only paths to reliable knowledge of the world, right, versus judgment.
Frank Pasquale:
Right? And judgment is going to involve sometimes narrative modes, more reflective qualitative modes of inquiry that would do things like say, well, we're going to consider the balance of interests on either side with respect to how much transparency do we demand and how much capacity do we permit to say, given governmental authorities or others. I recently was reading a wonderful article that was about different political legislative compromises over video cameras in nursing homes. Right? So do we allow one version of complete transparency would say we will video camera everything that happens in a nursing home to make sure that anyone responsible for a breach of patient safety is recorded and held accountable.
Frank Pasquale:
But that also is really violative of people's privacy, not least the people living in the nursing home. Right? And so so we have to we have to sort of think about, you know, when is it reasonable? Like, do we have controls where someone can turn it off? The person who's in the room, who's the resident, could turn it off at any time versus the person who's, say, working there could turn it off with permission or with the right justification or something along those lines.
Frank Pasquale:
Those are the sorts of things that I think are these judgments where we reason together about a problem from a diverse array of normative authorities and guidelines that we may we may draw from the humanities, from philosophy, from social science. That sort of judgment, I think, is critical. And a lot of, and I think David is recognizes that. And and I think at its best, his work exemplifies that type of judgment where he's calling for those types of reasoning together in a political context that is never gonna be reducible to an algorithm, but which nevertheless is trying to, in a context sensitive way, do justice to the rival claims of of individuals in a in a given setting.
George Justice:
I love that. I also love it as an English professor because I think the way you've described your conversations with him and this focus on judgment as stemming pretty directly from his own deep commitment to the humanities. There isn't a lot of literature or literary criticism that shows up in cyber libertarianism. But for me, especially in the final chapters of the book, the sensitivity to rhetoric, the complexity of understanding a situation in the world that you might get from reading novels, and David was a gigantic reader of novels, that's what allows us to kind of, hone our skills in judgment when we understand the world in, analog complexity rather than a kind of digital back and forth leading to an algorithm making decisions. And I I think that's beautiful, and I think it also points to the very direct and, powerful rhetoric of the book itself.
George Justice:
Because it is a book that is deeply humane, deeply focused on human beings coming together to to build, judgment. So I that rings so so true to me, about things. I wanna talk about, copyright. And David does a great job of exposing, in terms of the printing press. And without the printing press, we wouldn't have the notion of copyright that we have now.
George Justice:
The way that, cyber libertarians misunderstand even scholars of, the history of print, and try to turn them all into technological determinists. But the notion of copyright. And even in the history of the way writers have thought about copyright, there is this tension between absolute copyright, an author owns her or his words for all time and to every extent. And the actual laws begun in England in the eighteenth century that limit copyright initially to one seven year term and then a subsequent seven year term. Cyber libertarians also take an absolutist view of copyright by, suggesting it shouldn't exist.
George Justice:
David seems to defend copyright. How do you see copyright as, an element that that plays centrally into the book and into ideas we have about what the Internet is and should be?
Frank Pasquale:
Yeah. This is a really fascinating area where I think David was ahead of his time. And I should note that, you know, like, the we mentioned earlier about net neutrality there. I'm I have always been a net neutrality fan, and I still am. You know, David and I sort of, like, beg to differ on that.
Frank Pasquale:
Yeah. And and, actually, what's kind of funny is early in my career, I was also I took a pretty skeptical copyright position. I've written article. I wrote articles in the early two thousands, mid '2 thousands that were about sort of saying, wow. Copyright seems that it's it's gone too far, and we need to create more breathing space for creativity with fair use, things like that.
Frank Pasquale:
Yeah. But then as I, you know, was talking with David and then as I I've I've been observing different things have been happening. What's fascinating to me is that particularly with the rise of generative AI, there's been a raising of consciousness among creators who see themselves as being exploited by free appropriation of their works. Right? And so this is a this is a fascinating issue because I think for a lot of people that are that write about copyright, they began with it, serve with the battles of the recording industry against individual downloaders, which were very troubling.
Frank Pasquale:
Right? I mean, they're sort of watching someone being sued for a hundred thousand dollars for, you know, downloading 10 songs. That's really troubling to sort of see if that could happen. But then, you know, if we were to think that, like, we've gotta complement that with a current situation where you have companies that are worth billions of dollars who have three ingredients for the generative AI. They have engineers who are brilliant.
Frank Pasquale:
They have important computing machinery from companies like NVIDIA, the chips, etcetera. And they have the data, which is often books, texts, music, art, etcetera. They wanna they pay the for their computing equipment a ton. They pay their engineers quite well, but they wanna get all the data, all the books, all the rest for free. Right?
Frank Pasquale:
And and that strikes a lot of people. It rubs a lot of people the wrong way. And and so that's where David, I think, had this skepticism brewing even in the in the twenty tens about the relationship between a project like Google Books and those who, you know, are are selling books or publishing books and writing books. And that has now become a movement of people like there's a movement now called hashtag create don't scrape, which basically the idea of this is it's artists who are saying, don't use generative AI. You should be paying artists for the images you wanna use because our work is what trained the AI.
Frank Pasquale:
We are not getting anything from it, and that's an injustice. Right? And and that, I think, is is something that rang really that that you it's it's and then David, by going deep into the movement, I think what David would say is that the original, say, open access movement always had within it the seeds of this possibility of a deep asymmetry that has now become a very hot political issue. And and I I think I I I think I might be a little gentler with them. I mean, I think that particularly if you connect some of the IP open access IP to some of the fights for, say, access access to drugs, especially for the developing world, you know, that was those were clear social justice movements.
Frank Pasquale:
Right? But I think that, you know, we've got to complicate it, as David does, by the current scenario of really wealthy tech firms sort of, assuming that they should have free and open ability to train their models that and this is where it's also a game changer. These models are poised to take on the role of writers and of, artists and of others. Right? And that's that's what's very different against versus piracy.
Frank Pasquale:
Piracy, you've got to at least have somebody who creates the original book. With generative AI, you could imagine a future where the generative AI is just writing books, novels, books of theory, the you know, all these sorts of things. And that is troubling if there's no, sort of way of, of making sure that there's a body of work that it can train on. And the last point I'll make is that what's even more remarkable, I think, in terms of the the overarching normative impact of David's critique of, a cyber libertarian approach to copyright is that now even the developers of generative AI are saying if we were to create a world where our stuff, the stuff created by generative AI, is all of the data out there or majority of it, that would lead to model collapse because the the human data is what's really of great value here. And that and and and its own data, you couldn't train future models on what past models have done.
Frank Pasquale:
You need the original human stuff. And so that, I think, is is really an interesting sort of idea as well. But sorry to get a bit carried away there, but I just think there's such exciting ideas about seeing these shifts, in ideological valence of things like copyright.
George Justice:
I mean, that's crazy stuff. Let me just ask you. Per on a personal level, do you mind your own written works being mined for, generative AI? Would you assert your copyright against the use of those pieces to train AI? Are you okay with it?
Frank Pasquale:
You know, it's a I think I acquiesce to it because I think that it's possible that these chatbots will become as important as search engines are now to the organization and prioritization of knowledge. And particularly, it's not that I necessarily think that my own work is so important that it needs to be included, but I grapple with and try to advance the thought of people like Charles Taylor, Hannah Arendt, Hubert Dreyfus, some of these, like, really, I think, very deeply important thinkers in philosophy of technology and philosophy of democracy in my own work. And I worry that if I withhold my work from the database, that in turn impoverishes what may become an information tool for many people. And so that's where, you know, you need, like and this gets even to another Colombian point if I could make it. You know, David Colombian point, which would be that you need to have because these sorts of hyperobjects even, these sort of, like, very massive socio technical apparatuses of knowledge production have the potential of playing such an important role in our lives, that leaves you with if if it's just about individuals, that leaves me with the Hobson's choice.
Frank Pasquale:
Right? Either I withhold and probably don't get included, and then I don't influence what the database says, or I give my work to it and I help increase the power of something that's ultimately alienating to Mimi, but at least I get to influence it in some small way. Right? And so without governance and and I've actually coauthored an article on governance of generative AI copyright, that was just it's just published in the University of the Indian Law Review online. That is I think we need to have governmental agencies saying, okay.
Frank Pasquale:
You can use it, but there's gonna be a levy, and 20% of your profits are gonna go to the authors or something like that. Right? You know, that's the sort of thing that I think would need to be done or and and create possibly, tools whereby people can opt out individually if despite getting that sums of funding from it, they still, as a matter of conscious, don't wanna be included.
George Justice:
So with compensation, I can see, that many authors, myself included, might be happy, both because we're getting recognized for, our property. And also as you point out, the ability to influence these large datasets that otherwise are pretty impervious to an outside understanding. And I'm not an expert in this at all, but I get terrified when I think that, generative artificial intelligence is going to spit out answers that are fully dependent on a limited amount of information that goes into their databases and may may reflect racism, sexism, nationalism, other aspects that that I may not personally believe in myself. Is there a way and this gets back to openness and transparency versus a closed approach to things. Is there gonna be a way for society to regulate whether it is the set of information from which generative AI creates things or the act of creating those things?
George Justice:
Is is regulation gonna be possible? And how does that issue of regulation relate to the notions of liberty that many of us, hold dear, if not to the extent that the cyber libertarians David discusses hold them dear? It's
Frank Pasquale:
yeah. I I I think that the deregulation is definitely possible, and I think you're gonna see Europe and China taking the lead there. I think The US is probably gonna have a tougher time because of the way that the First Amendment has been interpreted. And I think you're exactly right to make this mark this spectrum between, say, a cyber libertarian perspective, a wholly libertarian perspective, and, say, a civil libertarian or a more liberty respecting perspective that that sort of sees other values out there. But I think what's what's interesting is to think about, like, very concrete or one of one thing that's interesting about this is to think very concretely about what might the regulation entail to avoid the problems you're mentioning.
Frank Pasquale:
For example, racist materials in the corpus. Right? Like, for example, The Washington Post did a expose of one generative AI dataset that included material from what is clearly a nativist racist website. Right, and and and others that, you know, are are highly questionable. And I think that, unfortunately, most of these datasets are completely trade secret protected.
Frank Pasquale:
They're not released to the public. So a very first step would be to say it's not covered by trade secrecy, and if you wanna use it in certain areas, you have to reveal everything that's in the dataset. And that's something that I've written an article about with, Jean Claudio Magerre about that licensing AI, and I think it's something that David would certainly endorse, a rule like that. You know? And so that is a a a first step.
Frank Pasquale:
There are other steps that can be taken that would make certain, things, you know, not you you could ban the use of certain texts in these sort of models that might be particularly, in sensitive context or or maybe even general generally. You know, so I I think of a of a book like the Turner diaries as something that I think David has discussed in past work as being particularly execrable. You know? And you may wanna just say, don't have it in there. And and I think that that is, so so with respect to all of these types of questions, you're right to say there can be overreach.
Frank Pasquale:
Right? I'm certain that, there are authoritarian regimes that will overreach and will limit access to what could be very valuable technology. And but I think that there has to be that balance, especially given the stakes and how easily these types of, technologies take on a big role in people's lives.
George Justice:
And so David does seem to point, and I'll get back to this, the issue of democratic governance and regulation. I would say that on the whole, David is optimistic about the, the possibility that our democratic government can create structures through which appropriate regulation in the interests of the citizens who are electing our representatives. And he points to Europe, which has slightly different ways of doing regulation and different concrete aspects of regulation, but he links those to the will of the people in those particular democratic regimes. Are you optimistic that you are optimistic that our current governmental structure might be able to give rise to appropriate regulatory, apparatus?
Frank Pasquale:
I think that in The US, it's a very difficult question. I think that the Biden administration certainly had some very good leaders advising us on AI governance and that, you know, you have people like Lina Khan, who is the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who has done extraordinary work in trying to get a grip on the new data economy, understanding it both from a competition and antitrust policy perspective and also a privacy and data data protection perspective. And so those are all very encouraging. But I also think that what you're seeing simultaneously is a movement by the Supreme Court to police administrative action so extensively that anything that's done that is bold, any bold new leadership by an agency revivifying or, to my mind, just properly applying old statutes is going to get challenged by a a lot of folks. And then even more troublingly, that you're gonna see a situation where these challenges are gonna be brought to certain judges who are the most conservative judges who can then, if the current structure of legal, if the current sort of civil procedure of, appeals is is is sort of being followed, may set the agency action aside or freeze it for such a long time while higher courts are waiting to review it that you have a different administration get into place and just stops the regulatory action altogether.
Frank Pasquale:
So so so this is a way in which, you know, you but, again, it's it's really interesting to think about, like, the problem of an active judiciary in The United States and then to also say be careful what you wish for. Because when I look at what's happening now in Mexico with respect to popular election of judges, you know, I would not wanna go in that direction. Right? And so, you know, so we really have to it's difficult. I think that you have a judiciary now that is quite, in many respects, going in a cyber libertarian direction.
Frank Pasquale:
And David definitely recognizes that and has recognized that in the book and was troubled by it. But also, you know, we have certain alternatives that I think David was also sensitive to sort of this potential red brown alliance or horseshoe theory of an authoritarian populism that, you know, in the guise of solving the problems we've been discussing could actually exacerbate it.
George Justice:
So maybe we can end, on I I wanna ask you a broad question both about your your analysis of the book and your own views, whether you're pessimistic or optimistic. But, in the context of the last part of the conversation we've had, I draw listeners' attention to one of the last pieces David wrote, which was a medium blog post that he titled chat GPT should not exist. And David's point in that piece is that a lot of the things that people are infatuated with generative AI about and things they then things that they've been playing around with, whether it's making music or making a piece of art or writing a short story, that these are things that we typically associate with human thriving and with human well-being and with human creativity. He titled the piece, Chat GPT should not exist, well knowing that Chat GP does exist and that it's not going away. So there's a kind of elegiac note to a piece like that and a fear that many of the things that he associated with human meaning in his own life are really being challenged by technology that we are beginning to take for granted.
George Justice:
Now that makes it seem like cyber libertarian is a pessimistic book railing against an almost inevitability of the triumph of this falsely inevitable, sense of how the world is going. I don't think it's an entirely pessimistic book, though. But let me ask you, is do you think David's book is optimistic or pessimistic? And are you optimistic or pessimistic about the challenges that David raises in cyber libertarianism?
Frank Pasquale:
Let me think first about this chat g p t should not exist argument and then then sort of ease into the the optimism and and pessimism. I do think well, perhaps, I think David was pessimistic, in many ways about the development of technology and about where the polity was heading. I think, though, that what was really remarkable about him was that despite his pessimism, despite and perhaps I shouldn't when when I think about pessimism, I I I don't know if it was a full on philosophical pessimism of the type that, you know, Joshua Ford Einstein talks about in his book on pessimism. But I but I do think it was a it was a sense that, like, things are going in the wrong direction and in a self reinforcing way. I think that was sort of a a a sense that I I got from David, and I think certainly there are places like x, like, you know, some of the aspects of our public discourse, where that seems to be a true diagnosis.
Frank Pasquale:
But despite all of that, David would continue to think about and contribute to public discourse in a way that was just meant to improve things. So in that way, however much he, from an intellectual perspective, worried and had a sense that there were there were problems that were becoming self reinforcing and larger and larger, he nevertheless kept thinking about them and contributing to them. Right? Because he could've, you know, he could've, just decided to write about the, you know, to to he could've gone in many different directions than he did. Right?
Frank Pasquale:
He had he had a lot of autonomy, and he had a he was a brilliant person who could have, you know, only written about things that he enjoyed thinking about. But I and I actually coauthored the article with him, you know, in in about a a book that we both greatly enjoyed, MT Anderson's Feed, which I would highly recommend to everyone to read as a as a compliment to cyber libertarianism because you can read in the book Feed sort of an incredibly vivid vision of what the world may look like if the problems that David addresses in the book are not are not ultimately solved. So that's where I am too. I mean, I think I I'm I'm there as well. And so now I wanna come back to the Chat2BT question.
Frank Pasquale:
I think what's interesting about David's rhetoric in that piece is I wanna talk away about a way in which it's deeply responsible but also needs to be qualified. It's deeply responsible in the sense that there are so many voices online that are saying that generative AI is the solution to all the world's problems and the the Royal World artificial general intelligence that will give us fully automated luxury communism, there's so many people saying that, that we need a skeptical voice to say not only is this often bad, but it's so bad it shouldn't exist. And there are more and more voices like this, like people like Dan McQuillan in some of his work in Deeply Critical AI, Jonathan Creary's book, Scorched Earth. There are other scholars that are working in this vein. It's useful because it creates a little bit of open space for people to say, rather than funding this, either having huge investors funding it or government funding it, maybe they should fund other technology.
Frank Pasquale:
Right? Maybe it's not the end of the world if we don't have that much funding of this particular technology and it goes by the wayside. However, one last caveat here is that I don't think you can say that without a deep examination of the potential ways in which large language model technology spills over into very practical applications for what, you know, Bacon called the relief of men's estate, relief of persons estate, which would be things like finding new drugs for cancer, finding new ways to arrange the electrical grid so that it's more efficient, you know, those sorts of things. And I'm presently trying to do some research on that, but I need, you know, some folks in computer science to join me on that. So if anyone's listening, please join me.
Frank Pasquale:
Please let me know because I wanna know about, you know, is the technology behind things like chatbots, image generating models, movie generating models, music generating models, which I think would have been particularly depressing to David because of his, you know, his his love of music and his musicianship. I think that those sorts of things, if they really are distractions from core technological advance that helps human well-being, then maybe they shouldn't exist, you know, or maybe we should be highly skeptical of them. On the other hand, if they are part of the broad computer science project that has all sorts of other great spillover effects, then, we have to value them, you know, much more than than David did in that in that piece. So it's it's tough.
George Justice:
And value them as human tools. They are things that if we regulate ourselves, if we use our ability to govern ourselves democratically, generative AI is just another tool like the Internet, like Wikipedia, like the printing press that human beings can use to, aid in their own course of thriving, not as not as something that's determining where we're going, but as something that we choose to use for human ends and human purposes. I love the reference to music, and I think of generative I I creating music sort of like in George Orwell's nineteen eighty four, where the government has this kind of machine that kinda spits out popular songs for the proles in, in the culture. And it's, you know, of course, you shouldn't think of 1984 as predicting things that are to come to be, but that's a weird little angle where we now do have machines that can pump out plausible pop songs. And you're right.
George Justice:
That is something that he would have hated with every ounce of his being because to him, the human creativity in making music, in the community around listening to music, that's something that he loved as much as anything else in the world. Any final thoughts, Frank? I've enjoyed this conversation immensely.
Frank Pasquale:
Oh, thank you so much, George. This has really been a pleasure and so edifying your your questions, your thoughtfulness about the book, your tremendous introduction, which I highly recommend to to those readers. And I think it was just such a wonderful appreciation of David, his thought, the book itself, and also, you know, deeply understood, the book and and and sort of challenged in certain ways, which we've also done in this podcast, which I think is David would want. I think he'd really enjoy this. And I think that, you know, your friendship with him and your engagement with this work is really a model for all of us in the academy, and and I really appreciate that.
Frank Pasquale:
So, no, that's I think we've covered a lot, and I really look forward to seeing how the book is received by the wider world. Thank you.
George Justice:
Me too. I hope we'll have another chance to talk and and maybe in a venue like this or somewhere else. I'm really grateful to David's book for, among other things, bringing you and me together today. So thank you to to Frank Pasquale. Thank you to the University of Minnesota Press.
George Justice:
This has been as awful as it has been for those of us who love David to have lost him prior to this book coming out. I am just grateful to friends and colleagues and the press and others who see value in his work as well as value in him as a human being. And and I'm, too, I'm excited to see the conversation that his book spurs. Frank, thank you so much for your thoughts. I've learned so much today.
George Justice:
Whether I'm an optimist or a pessimist, I I emerge optimistic that there are people who are thinking and are trying to make positive change in the world. So thank you.
Narrator:
This has been a University of Minnesota press production. The book Cyber libertarianism: The Right Wing Politics of Digital Technology by David Columbia is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.