Freedom at the Electronic Frontier: Libertarianism and American Cyberculture, 1984-2001.

The project's objective is to complete the first historical study of American "cyberlibertarian" thought in relation to wider libertarian, neoliberal, and anarchist ideas. The project seeks to answer two research questions: to what extent was cyberlibertarianism a coherent ideology? And: what were the chief intellectual sources of cyberlibertarian thought?

In so doing, the project aims to place contemporary cyberlibertarian legacies, such as cryptocurrency, political hacking ("hacktivism"), and Silicon Valley firms' continued resistance to government access to personal data in historical context, tracing their origins to techno-utopian thought in the Internet's early years.

This project builds on existing research into the Internet's ideological history. Sociological accounts of cyberlibertarianism emerged contemporaneously in the 1990s, notably with Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron's 1995 article, 'The Californian Ideology,' which argued that America's technology world was governed by: 'hi-tech libertarianism: a bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism.' The first historical investigation in this area was Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), which traced the influence of hippie publisher Stewart Brand on Wired magazine.

This was followed in 2011 by sociologist Thomas Streeter's The Net Effect, which linked computer and Internet utopianism to a revival of neoliberalism in the 1990s, in the context of post-Cold War optimism. However, Turner's 2006 book remains the only study driven by primary sources.

This project expands on the existing scholarship by investigating three distinct strands of cyberlibertarianism: corporate, "cyberdelic" (former countercultural figures), and "cypherpunk" (cryptography enthusiasts). The role of corporate media commentators in popularising cyber-utopian and cyberlibertarian discourses, such as Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler, as well as academics like Ithiel de Sola Pool and Michael Rothschild, remains little studied.

The role of former countercultural figures in legitimating discourses of "Digital Revolution" was addressed partially by Turner, but the role of prominent Sixties figure Timothy Leary's conversion to libertarianism remains to be seen. Named after the hacker heroes of cyberpunk literature, "cypherpunks" have similarly been little studied by historians, despite their continued contemporary influence in the form of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which were first conceived in the 1980s as a way of 'Techno-thwarting the State.' Broadly speaking, corporate cyberlibertarians were affiliated to neoliberalism and traditional rightwing libertarianism, cyberdelic figures to Sixties personal liberation and consciousness expansion doctrines, and cypherpunks to anarcho-capitalism, anarchism, and not infrequently the progenitors of today's alt-right.

This project will map the evolving discourses associated with each strand, drawing attention to their tensions, commonalities, and distinctive features, paying particular attention to how these diverse cyberlibertarian discourses combined in the media to create the narrative of Digital Revolution.

This project will make use of physical and online sources. Much cyberlibertarian debate occurred on platforms like Usenet or the Cypherpunks Mailing List, which are archived online. This should enable enhanced mapping of evolving debate and discord among cyberlibertarians.

Alongside specialist publications like Wired, Mondo 2000, Phrack, and Reason; mainstream media publications; and the published works of Dyson et al; this project will also consult two physical archives, the Esther Dyson Papers at Harvard and the Timothy Leary papers at the New York Public Library. With this combination of sources, it is hoped that a much fuller picture of cyberlibertarianism's development will be attained than by using published sources alone.