Valvepunk Liberalism

There's a type of classical liberalism which amounts to "do whatever John Stuart Mill would do, unless there exist transistors, in which case do what Carl Schmitt and Friedrich Nietzsche would do". Basically, the availability of transistors, and their downstream consequences, tacitly licenses extreme authoritarianism for some people.

I've decided to dub this "valvepunk liberalism". Maybe "hydraulic liberalism" would also work.

Valvepunk liberals are not in the business of actually *denying* mainstream economics, merely of selectively *ignoring* it. The widespread availability of programmable computers and internetworking means that, without intervention, pretty much everyone's lives will be interfered with by digital technologies that they have little control over, due to economies of scale and extreme network externalities. These computer systems will crash from one first-mover-advantage near-monopoly to another, with very little possibility for individuals to resist. Think Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Android, "install the app to search this database", "to search this database, let us send you SMS messages in perpetuity", etc.

What really grates is that any attempt to resist this, e.g., by private, non-coercive, collective action ("why not try Linux?", "why not try Gemini?", etc) is labelled low-status and basically as tantamount to reducing economic rents.

It's clear *how*, when you think about it, "your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins" degenerates into "you will not be allowed to work or access the financial system unless you submit to having your every utterance and keystroke ingested into a database that can be used to maximise the extraction of economic rents", but it would be nice if there were less pretence about *why*.