Have Cyberlibertarians digitally deleted the Left?

I hoped to find a discussion of the tension between the formulations of freedom in the "Cyberlibertarian" and "Left" viewpoints. But this article just asserts that because cyberlibertarianism doesn't agree with the Left it must be part of the Right Wing Conspiracy, knocking down a few straw men along the way.

Sorry but they lost me when they disparaged anti-SOPA efforts as being "information exceptionalism".

There's a very big difference between information property and "real" property. Until we can make perfect copies of land and houses at the click of a button, the two are not at all the same.

The Libertarians were pretty dominant online in the age of Usenet but the Left seems pretty dominant on Tumblr and Wikipedia among others. I find this part of the intro puzzling:

> If digital communication technology promotes leftist values, why has its spread coincided with such a stark decline in the Left’s political fortunes?

Um, WHAT stark decline? Can you give some metric that shows this "decline" as a tangible, measurable thing, or is this just a vague sense of nostalgia for a mythic past when the Left seemed actually radical, when it was fighting the establishment, before it became the establishment?

Various flavors of "the Left" currently control the presidency, most of the newspapers and television networks and universities and most of congress. Mandatory "universal health care" is now being inflicted upon the populace, which means we're finally at a point where every plank on the socialist party platform of 1928 has become law. So if there IS a decline, perhaps it's just that diminishing returns have set in on the whole project. But I'd still like to see the evidence.

( http://libertarianmajority.net/socialist-party-of-america-19... )

As a side note, it's amusing the author doesn't realize "self-described entrepreneur" is Silicon-Valley-speak for "unemployed". :-)

What is the left?

30 years ago you had a number of credible single issue groups on the environment and such and also various sorts of socialist and revolutionary organizations.

Today you have 'people who vote democrat' and 'professional democrats', a few bizzare singular cases (nyt editorial page) and a few marginal groups, often super single cause (don't track in my back yard.)

Professional leftists know where their bread is buttered on and they are unyielding advocates of yellow cabs, teacher's unions, phone companies, big content, rent control, anything that gives somebody a legal advantage over somebody else to create an alternative status hiearchy.

They have nothing for cyber libertarians since once the former graduate from the uni they are no longer a protected group.

People like Stallman refused to take the opportunity to talk about the influence of the military on computing because they too know where the gravy train is. Again no connect to the left.

And none of the race class gender people know enough to complain that female and non WASP voices get distorted by cell phone codecs...

It's strange to hear a person referring to a monolithic "Left". Makes me think of a bunch of aging red diaper babies, with beards and long braids, singing dreary protest songs over a bland vegan potluck ...

Not that there's anything wrong with that - just sounds very 1930s-1960s. What is "The Left (tm)" now? Occupy? The Green Party? Unions? University student groups?

The entire history of 20th century should have deleted "the Left" forever, and yet, somehow, they are still around. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different result, indeed.

So, the spell checker recognised English languages words, but that's as far as parsing the article got. What a lot of nonsense. Cyberlibertarians? We can just make up words now? And hope they sound impressive enough, and perhaps cromulent enough that the author of the so-called article can huff and bluff their way through? Is this is the kind of tripe the left want to publish, then yes, maybe it is best deleted!