7am Have the techno-libertarians taken over?
Jan 2, 2026
Elmo Keep, a writer for The Monthly, dives into the origins and impact of the cypherpunks, a group of Silicon Valley libertarians seeking to replace government with technology. They believed in a society governed by code, but their ideas have seeped into real-world politics. Keep discusses how figures like Assange, Thiel, and Musk embody this philosophy as they shape modern power dynamics. He critiques the notion that engineers can effectively redesign governance, while considering Australia's unlikely adoption of techno-libertarianism due to its egalitarian values.
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Encryption As Political Philosophy
- Cypherpunks believed strong encryption could protect privacy from governments and replace political controls with code.
- That technical utopianism later collided with surveillance capitalism built by their ideological descendants.
Elitist Culture Shaped Early Tech
- The cypherpunk scene valued mathematical brilliance and cultivated an outsider, elitist culture.
- That attracted people who distrusted mainstream norms and prized technical credentialing over broad participation.
Engineering Mindset Meets Governance
- Engineers translated rules-based thinking into a belief that society can be optimized like software.
- Libertarian efficiency logic led them to argue government should only prevent harm while markets and code solve everything else.