It is the fantasy of some libertarians that technology could mobilize a more friction-free, minimized, administrative state, even while some of the same characters fantasize the existence of a maximal, yet ubiquitously opaque “Deep State”. It remains an insurgent fantasy that such a state could be realistically resisted.

The real instrument of power becomes the regulatory effects of administrative laws especially in the post WWII period, which we see mocked in the stupidity of the Trump regime.

At a more prosaic level, Gamergate teaches us that claims of protecting individual rights was only about the sexist privilege of white male speech rights, especially when incel-challenged. The terms of conflict were over intellectual property, and mediated within a technocracy with implications for social justice.

Robert Nozick, who publicized the idea of a minimal state in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, argued that a night-watchman state provides a framework that allows for any political system that respects fundamental individual rights, and therefore morally justifies the existence of a state.^[13][14]

en.wikipedia.org/…

Some pundits have asserted such a cyber-libertarianism against those who advocate digital networks as democratizing, (particularly those in tech hubs like Silicon Valley). A technolibertarian state philosophy would facilitate the formation of a minimal state against a notion that “digital networks cannot stand in for the genuine arts of government and democracy”.

The 2016 election suggests that digital networks and their manipulation did replace democracy at the swing-state margins, giving us our current state of governance deconstruction. That antidemocratic illusion has been fostered by neoliberal capitalism’s latest chaos agents as outlined by Shoshana Zuboff.

Shoshana Zuboff’s fierce indictment of the big internet firms goes beyond the usual condemnations of privacy violations and monopolistic practices. To her, such criticisms are sideshows, distractions that blind us to a graver danger: By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Capitalism has always been a fraught system. Capable of both tempering and magnifying human flaws, particularly the lust for power, it can expand human possibility or constrain it, liberate people or oppress them. (The same can be said of technology.) Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the 20th century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers. But, as Zuboff makes clear, this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders. Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.

lareviewofbooks.org/…

The chaos of capital is like the anonymity of gamergaters, and discussions of what Bannon called “economic nationalism”, were excuses for the same racism evident in a Founder’s republic that could rationalize slavery.

Likewise, Rosa Luxemberg was not commenting on anarchism as an ideology as much as the chaos of what some might privilege as the “creative destruction” of capitalist chaos.

To recognize and to acknowledge that anarchy is the vital motive force of the rule of capital is to pronounce its death sentence in the same breath, to assert that its days are numbered. It becomes clear why the official scientific defenders of capital’s rule attempt to obscure the entire matter with all kinds of semantic artifices, try to direct the investigation away from the core of the subject, take up mere external appearances and discuss “national economy” instead of the world economy.

“To acknowledge that anarchy is the vital motive force of the rule of capital is to pronounce its death sentence [..] It becomes clear why the official scientific defenders of capital’s rule attempt to obscure the entire matter”

– Economist #RosaLuxemburghttps://t.co/fCdKfCLSnw

— Socialist Economist (@SocialistEconom) January 15, 2019

Today, we know no masters, no slaves, no feudal lords, no bondsmen. Liberty and equality before the law have removed all despotic relations, at least in the older bourgeois states; in the colonies – as is commonly known – slavery and bondage are introduced, frequently enough for the first time, by these same states. But where the bourgeoisie is at home, free competition rules as the sole law of economic relations and any plan, any organization has disappeared from the economy. Of course, if we look into separate private enterprises, into a modern factory or a large complex of factories and workshops, like Krupp or a large-scale capitalist farm enterprise in North America, then we shall find the strictest organization, the most detailed division of labor, the most cunning planfulness based on the latest scientific information. Here, everything flows smoothly, as if arranged by magic, managed by one will, by one consciousness. But no sooner do we leave the factory or the large farm behind, when chaos surrounds us. While the innumerable units – and today a private enterprise, even the most gigantic, is only a fragment of the great economic structure which embraces the entire globe – while these units are disciplined to the utmost, the entity of all the so-called national economies, i.e., world economy, is completely unorganized. In the entity which embraces oceans and continents, there is no planning, no consciousness, no regulation, only the blind clash of unknown, unrestrained forces playing a capricious game with the economic destiny of man. Of course, even today, an all-powerful ruler dominates all working men, and women: capital. But the form which this sovereignty of capital takes is not despotism but anarchy.

And it is precisely this anarchy which is responsible for the fact that the economy of human society produces results which are mysterious and unpredictable to the people involved. Its anarchy is what makes the economic life of mankind something unknown, alien, uncontrollable – the laws of which we must find in the same manner in which we analyze the phenomena of external nature – the same manner in which we have to attempt to comprehend the laws governing the life of the plant and animal kingdom, the geologic formations on the earth’s surface, and the movements of the heavenly bodies. Scientific analysis must discover ex post facto that purposefulness and those rules governing human economic life which conscious planfulness did not impose on it beforehand.

www.socialisteconomist.com/…

Another way of looking at it comes from McKenzie Wark, however fanciful and recoding, he still identifies some basic elemental and dialectic conflicts that are still about “planfulness” and the means, relations, and forces of production, even if “we are all hackers”.

In 2004 Wark published his best known work, A Hacker Manifesto . Here Wark argues that the rise of intellectual property creates a new class division, between those who produce it, whom he calls the hacker class, and those who come to own it, the vectoralist class. Wark argues that these vectoralists have imposed the concept of property on all physical fields (thus having scarcity), but now the new vectoralists lay claim to intellectual property, a field that is not bound by scarcity. ^[20] By the concept of intellectual property these vectoralists attempt to institute an imposed scarcity in an immaterial field. Wark argues that the vectoral class cannot control the intellectual (property) world itself, but only in its commodified form—not its overall application or use. ^[21]

^[…]

In Gamer Theory Wark argues that in a world that is increasingly competitive and game-like, computer games are a utopian version of the world (itself an imperfect game), because they actually realise the principles of the level playing field and reward based on merit that is elsewhere promised but not actually delivered.

everipedia.org/…

Yet Individual-1 is more of a hacker than “vectoralist”, however technocratically ignorant, and albeit with far too much executive power in an administrative state, projecting stupidity via Twitter. He is that primate in a troop trapped in a room of typewriters.

Destructive rather than deconstructive, the decentering of Liberalism with Capital can only thrust democracy back into the asymmetry of absolutist tyranny.

This is now manifested when a fictive increase in domestic crime is posited as requiring racist policies masquerading as a national security emergency. All in the service of obstructing justice.