The Libertarian Futurist Imaginary

Since its earliest instantiations, libertarianism has been a forward-looking, if not utopian, philosophy intent on forging the world anew. This orientation towards the future produced a libertarian science fiction subculture in the postwar years, which blossomed around shared texts, such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), and later, Neal Stephenson’s The Cryptonomicon (1999). Science fiction was never merely a pastime or hobby, but rather an inherently political endeavor through its vision of new communities based on libertarian principles. This paper examines the origins of a libertarian futurist imaginary in the science fiction subculture of the libertarian movement, before tracing how this imaginary traveled into the heart of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and 2000s. Cyberlibertarians like the founder of the Electronic Freedom Frontier, John Perry Barlow, drew from libertarian political writings to argue that cyberspace should remain free from government intervention. Tech founders like Peter Thiel, moreover, traded in science fiction references—whether from Ayn Rand or J. R. R. Tolkien—and made science fiction books like The Cryptonomicon required reading for their employees. This paper concludes by examining how the libertarian futurist imaginary shaped national discourse around tech and the Internet in the 1990s.