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Rothbardian Property Rights in a Dangerous Digital World

Digital age
Tags: History of the Austrian School of Economics, Libertarianism, Property Rights
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This essay applies Rothbard’s theory of property rights, as articulated in For a New Liberty, to the technological conditions of the digital age. Drawing primarily on Rothbard’s framework and its systematic extensions by Kinsella, the essay advances two central claims. First, so-called “digital assets” cannot qualify as property in a strict Rothbardian sense, since information, code, and patterns are non-rivalrous and therefore incapable of generating ownership-relevant conflict. Second, rejecting digital property does not entail permissiveness toward all digital technologies, as certain systems, most notably indiscriminate digital weapons, constitute standing threats analogous to physical devices of mass destruction (DMDs).

The analysis begins by clarifying Rothbardian property theory, emphasizing self-ownership, original appropriation, and scarcity as necessary conditions for ownership. This framework decisively undermines intellectual property, free-speech absolutism, and labor-based theories of ownership. The essay then applies these principles to the digital domain, examining electromagnetic spectrum use, cryptocurrencies, online piracy, and domain names. While physical infrastructure remains ownable, digital patterns do not; bitcoin is best understood as possession beyond property, secured by cryptographic control rather than legal title.

The final section extends Rothbard’s treatment of indiscriminate weapons to the digital realm. Self-propagating malware and uncontrolled autonomous systems are evaluated as digital DMDs due to their foreseeable, non-discriminatory invasion of others’ property. Incorporating the problem of dual use, the essay proposes a libertarian framework as formalized in Article 8 of the Universal Principles of Liberty, under which dangerous technologies may be possessed or studied only when robust, verifiable safeguards eliminate substantial risk.

Introduction

Rothbard’s For a New Liberty remains distinctive for its relentless consistency. By applying libertarian principles without concession, Rothbard derives conclusions that appear radical only because their implications are rarely pursued to the end. The effect is often disarming: positions that initially provoke resistance quickly come to seem obvious, leaving the reader with the sense that they had long accepted the premises without ever having seen their full consequences made explicit.

Drawing primarily on For a New Liberty, this essay applies Rothbard’s theory of property rights to the technological conditions of the twenty-first century. Guided in part by Kinsella’s extensions of Rothbard’s framework, the argument advances two claims: first, that “digital assets” cannot qualify as property in a strict Rothbardian sense, since information and code are non-rivalrous patterns rather than scarce resources; and second, that this does not entail permissiveness toward all digital technologies, as some, most notably indiscriminate cyberweapons, constitute standing threats analogous to physical DMDs.

The essay proceeds as follows. Section II outlines the Rothbardian theory of property rights, exploring its foundations and applying it to the notions of “intellectual property” (IP) and “free speech.” Section III brings Rothbardian property rights to the digital age; it first examines Rothbard’s perspective on property in the electromagnetic spectrum and then moves to analyze examples that can appear as “digital property”: bitcoin, digital media subject to online piracy, and domain names. Section IV investigates devices of mass destruction (DMDs), extending Rothbard’s reasoning to novel forms of digital DMDs and proposing an answer to the question: can you own a DMD? The conclusion reflects on the prospects for liberty in an increasingly digital world.

Property Rights 

Rothbard is widely credited with synthesizing Lockean natural-rights property theory with Austrian economics, thereby laying the theoretical foundations of anarcho-capitalism. By pushing Misesian economics to its logical conclusions, he rejected the residual statism of classical liberalism and articulated a systematic case for a fully stateless social order. Central to this achievement is his theory of property rights, which must be clarified before examining its digital applications.

Property rights are normative-prescriptive rules governing legitimate control and use of scarce resources—who ought to control what. As Kinsella (2025a) emphasizes, this must be sharply distinguished from possession, which is merely descriptive—who does control what in fact. This distinction is not semantic hair-splitting: it explains why property rights can be violated (they are norms), whereas physical causal laws cannot. This difference becomes especially important later when analyzing bitcoin.

A foundational component of Rothbard’s framework is the self-ownership principle: the axiom that each person has inalienable jurisdiction over their own body. Rothbard defends this by exposing the incoherence of the alternatives: either some people own others (slavery), or everyone owns a fractional share of everyone else (universal communism), both of which collapse into contradiction (Rothbard 1973, 33-45). However, a crucial distinction must be maintained between self-ownership and ownership of external goods (Hoppe 1989, 24). While “self-ownership” is a useful shorthand for bodily autonomy, it is not analogous to owning a car or a house: one cannot meaningfully alienate or vacate one’s personhood (Kinsella 2003). By contrast, external property is acquired through original appropriation, i.e. Lockean homesteading, or voluntary transfer, i.e. exchange, gift, inheritance. Conflating these by claiming we “homestead” our bodies can result in the weird conclusion of “voluntary slavery”; while defended by Block (2015), an arguably truer Rothbardian interpretation insists the will is not a transferable, alienable commodity (Kinsella 2003).

Scarcity constitutes the second pillar of Rothbardian property theory. Only rivalrous goods, those whose use by one person necessarily excludes or diminishes use by others, can generate conflict and thus require ownership rules. Non-scarce goods, by definition, cannot be meaningfully owned. While Rothbard recognized this distinction, it was later fully systematized by Kinsella, who introduces the term conflictable for rivalrous goods (Kinsella 2022). The implications for intellectual property (IP) are devastating:

  • Physical goods (conflictable): if I take your meatballs, you no longer have them.
  • Ideas (non-conflictable): if I copy your recipe, you retain it entirely.

Rothbard himself expressed clear anti-IP intuitions, particularly in For a New Liberty, where he criticized libel laws for inventing a “property right” in reputation, an explicitly statist construction that predictably benefits political and economic elites (Rothbard 1973, 116-117). Kinsella extends this logic consistently, arguing that IP is a contradiction in terms: it relies on state force to impose artificial scarcity on naturally non-scarce informational patterns (Kinsella 2009).

Crucially, claiming ownership over information necessarily implies partial ownership over other people’s bodies and legitimately owned physical property. Enforcing IP requires restricting how others may arrange their own matter, energy, tools, machines, and mouths—what they may print, say, code, or assemble using resources they already own. Such enforcement is impossible without coercive exclusion backed by law. In Rothbard’s terminology, this constitutes a monopoly: not market dominance, but a state-granted privilege that overrides normal property rules (Rothbard 2011). IP therefore exists only as a legal monopoly in Rothbard’s strict sense, not as a natural extension of ownership.

Some libertarians nevertheless attempt to defend IP (Kinsella 2015).1 One prominent line of argument appeals to the Lockean claim that individuals own their labor and are therefore entitled to its fruits, an intuition famously dramatized in Ayn Rand’s fiction. Yet this reasoning collapses under scrutiny and, tellingly, mirrors the Marxist labor theory of value, which likewise treats labor itself as a value-conferring substance. Kinsella identifies the shared error: labor is an action, not a scarce resource. Actions are not ownable; they are neither tangible nor conflictable. Once performed, labor disappears, leaving behind physical goods that must be evaluated independently of the effort expended. Smuggling labor into property theory, whether Marxist or liberal, confuses causation with ownership.

Other pro-IP libertarians retreat to consequentialism, arguing that patents and copyrights produce superior utilitarian outcomes by incentivizing innovation and R&D. However, Kinsella (2001) questions the empirical veracity of this claim; more importantly, Rothbardians reject the argument on principled grounds. A deontological (rights-based) approach is preferred over utilitarian consequentialism. As Rothbard (1973, 49) writes:

It so happens that the free-market economy, and the specialization and division of labor it implies, is by far the most productive form of economy known to man, and has been responsible for industrialization and for the modern economy on which civilization has been built. This is a fortunate utilitarian result of the free market, but it is not, to the libertarian, the prime reason for his support of this system.

Ultimately, while IP may be embraced by statists and some libertarians, the scarcity-based logic of Rothbardian property theory remains decisive: only rivalrous, conflictable goods can be legitimately owned. IP fails this test categorically—and can survive only as a coercive monopoly imposed from outside the logic of property itself.

While we have dispelled the myths surrounding the ownership of ideas, we must also tackle the misrepresentations around the expression of ideas, namely the “free speech” fallacy. Many treat freedom of speech as a right, codified in the First Amendment. This fails to recognize that the right to speak is simply the right to use one’s own body and legitimately owned resources, or to contract with others who own them. As Rothbard emphasized, there are no “human rights” separable from property rights (Rothbard 1973, 52). Once this is understood, appeals to “free speech” as an independent moral category collapse.

The correct Rothbardian response is neither to criminalize tools nor to sanctify them under an absolutist notion of free speech, but to analyze concrete property boundaries and causal responsibility. Property rights, not abstract speech rights, determine where liability begins. This also explains why even classical liberals accept limits like prohibiting shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. Such acts are not protected expression, but an invasion of others’ property and bodily integrity, that is indiscriminate in its damage, akin to a device of mass destruction. The First Amendment, in contrast, is an imprecise proxy that often obscures these distinctions.

The proper Rothbardian approach is neither to criminalize communication tools nor to absolutize speech, but to examine concrete property boundaries and causal responsibility. Liability follows from invasions of property and person, not from abstract speech rights. This is why even classical liberals reject acts like falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater: such conduct is not expression, but a direct invasion of others’ property and bodily integrity.2 The First Amendment, by contrast, is a blunt proxy that often obscures these distinctions rather than clarifying them.

Can property be digital?

Now that we have defined Rothbardian property rights, let us turn to their application in the digital age, exploring if property can ever be digital. Firstly, let’s explore Rothbard’s analysis of the technological predecessor to the digital age: radio and television broadcasting (Rothbard 1973, 119-126).

These transmissions operate via electromagnetic waves, which require a specific bandwidth (range of frequencies) over a geographic area to function properly. If two geographically-proximate broadcasters transmit on the same bandwidth, their signals physically interfere, causing a “collision” that degrades or destroys intelligibility. In other words, one user’s successful transmission (over a specific bandwidth within an area) excludes another’s, i.e., it is conflictable. Exclusive use of a bandwidth over a geographic area can thus be legitimately homesteaded. Although electromagnetic waves cannot be “touched” in the ordinary sense, they are not abstract entities: they are physical phenomena governed by causal laws and perceptible through their effects, such as audible radio signals (Kinsella 2009).

The US government, however, explicitly rejected this homesteading logic. In its characteristic fashion, it was claimed that allowing private appropriation of bandwidths would result in chaos if left to “market anarchy” (Coase 1959). On this pretext, the electromagnetic spectrum was effectively nationalized “using alleged chaos as the excuse” (Rothbard 1973, 124). Through the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934, the airwaves were declared the property of “the public,” with private ownership and market exchange of frequencies prohibited (Mueller 1982). The result was not the elimination of exclusivity, but its bureaucratic reallocation. As Rothbard (1973, 125) notes, “the net result…was to establish equally valuable franchises anyway, but in a monopolistic fashion through the largesse of the Federal Radio Commission and later the FCC rather than through competitive homesteading.”

While the internet’s physical infrastructure relies on electromagnetic waves, applying property rights to the digital realm is difficult because the digital layer operates according to an entirely different logic. The digital realm is not a single, continuous, analog transmission occupying a defined portion of the spectrum, like electromagnetic waves; it is a networked web of discrete packets that are routed, copied, cached, and recombined across countless independent nodes. In other words, there is no identifiable “thing” being exclusively used in space and time (as with an electromagnetic bandwidth) but rather a constantly shifting coordination of privately owned hardware executing reproducible instructions, which makes any claim to exclusive control over the pattern itself conceptually incoherent. If surfing the web is still to be called “use” in the same sense as electromagnetic spectrum use, one must specify where the physical conflict occurs: which router, cable, or machine is being excluded by another’s copying of code. If no such conflict can be identified, then the fallacy of IP has been reintroduced.3 Therefore, while the physical infrastructure, such as seabed cables, routers, and servers, is ownable, a piece of code is not. Code is merely an idea, a pattern of information, and is thus non-rivalrous. For example, since websites consist largely of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) code, one cannot “own” a website in the strict property-rights sense (more on “owning” websites later). We thus conclude that “digital property” does not exist.

This conclusion has important implications, for example, what about cryptocurrencies? Isn’t bitcoin a “digital asset”? If “asset” is meant as property, then no. The key point here is that bitcoin is possession beyond property (recall that property ≠ possession) and that it is thus misguided to call it “property.” This is despite the fact that it is arguably more securely “ownable” than traditional property, due to its extreme salability across space and time (Ammous 2018). “Ownership” in this context does not consist of owning information as an ideal object, but rather in the exclusive control of private keys—a 256-bit string that is commonly represented as a 24-word mnemonic phrase—that allow for the alteration of entries in a distributed ledger. According to Kinsella (2021), Bitcoin is therefore not property in the strict sense because it remains an informational pattern—and patterns are non-rivalrous. Instead, it is a revolutionary socially recognized control protocol where exclusivity is enforced by the astonishing mathematical power of cryptography rather than state-granted titles. By replacing legal decree with cryptographic exclusion, Bitcoin functions as a technological workaround that transcends traditional property law to secure individual sovereignty. Because its security is rooted in the laws of mathematics rather than the whims of a legislature, we can view it as ultra-property: a system of contractual coordination over scarce physical resources—computing power and energy—that achieves the goals of property (the avoidance of conflict) without requiring the state’s recognition. However, using the term “ownership” often leads to conceptual confusion. In a strict Rothbardian sense, it is more accurate to describe the relationship between a user and their Bitcoin as possession, power, or control (Kinsella 2021). When Bitcoiners claim they “own” Bitcoin, they are speaking practically; they mean it is virtually impossible for the asset to be taken without their consent (as guessing the 256-bit string is nearly impossible). From a theoretical standpoint, we should maintain the distinction: one does not own the bits, but possesses the secret knowledge required to manifest control over them.

Slutskiy (2024) has countered this with his telescope example. If a neighbor uses a telescope to read your private keys through a window, he would call this “theft.” However, from the perspective of Rothbard and Kinsella, the observer has not committed a physical trespass. In a world of cryptographic control, the burden of security shifts: the individual is responsible for hiding their secrets. If you lose control of the information, you have effectively abandoned the ability to manifest control over that ledger entry. Moreover, Slutskiy’s position implies that an asset can be digital, which, again, would reintroduce the IP fallacy.

Moving on from bitcoin, another important implication of our claim that property cannot be digital, is that digital theft does not exist. Copying digital media is not theft but the non-invasive use of one’s own hardware to arrange informational patterns (Kinsella 2012). Since property rights only exist to resolve conflicts over rivalrous resources, “piracy” violates no property boundaries; it only breaches state-enforced artificial scarcity like the condemnable Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Klein 2020). These mechanisms mirror Rothbard’s critique of broadcast regulation by producing centralization and distorted incentives.

Paradoxically, piracy often emerges as a superior market service compared to legal streaming. While fragmented platforms (Netflix, HBO, Disney+) impose friction through price hikes, “enshittification,” and geo-locking, decentralized P2P protocols and IPTV offer a seamless, all-in-one experience (Hastings 2026). As Steam founder Gabe Newell famously argued, “piracy is a service problem.” Just as the MP3 revolutionized the CD era by prioritizing convenience over physical media, modern piracy demonstrates that when corporations use the state to impose friction, the market routes around it through unauthorized—but non-invasive—distribution. While the market’s tendency to circumvent centralized control has led to an arguably booming pirating industry, the strong grip of government over domain names, which is now addressed, has been harder to work around.

A third implication of our claim that digital property is fallacious is that we cannot “homestead” on the internet; for example, we cannot “homestead” domain names. The discussion around domain names, and how the government has taken control over them, is an interesting one as it mirrors the nationalization of radio waves analyzed by Rothbard. In both cases, the state claimed control under the pretext of technical “stability” to prevent “chaos.” However, the analogy has physical limits. Radio waves are naturally rivalrous and intrusive; internet scarcity, by contrast, is artificial, created by ICANN’s hierarchical naming system to establish administrative “choke points” (Mueller 2002). While often treated as ownable property, a domain name is merely a contractual allocation within a centralized registry. As Mueller (2002) notes, this registry was originally managed by a small, informal group of technologists, which was eventually absorbed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN functions as a state-sanctioned monopoly over the global root zone, allocating names administratively rather than through productive homesteading.4

As a quasi-governmental body, ICANN frequently acts at the behest of international panels like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This has led to what critics call “IP terrorism,” where administrative decrees—rather than market competition—determine asset value. A prime example is Tuvalu’s “.tv” domain, which became a lucrative asset solely through ICANN’s centralized authority. Unlike a private publisher who might legitimately terminate a contract, ICANN’s lack of competition or exit makes its control a matter of monopoly power rather than private contract.5

A libertarian alternative would replace this “permissioned” system with a competitive market of private registries and decentralized protocols. While volunteer-run alternatives like OpenNIC or blockchain-based systems like Namecoin and Handshake currently struggle with mass adoption, they prove that centralized naming is not a technical necessity. These examples show that in a truly free market, domain names have the possibility of escaping from the current control of a centralized authority, which views them as “digital property”; registries can possibly be built on cryptographic occupancies or service agreements managed by private keys.

Owning Devices of Mass Destruction

Technological progress forces libertarian theory to confront uncomfortable edge cases, such as whether DMDs can be considered legitimate property.6 This section explores the libertarian perspective on the ownership of DMDs, extending it to digital DMDs.

Abiding by the Universal Principles of Liberty (UPL), a DMD is: Any device, system, agent, instrument, or technology whose ordinary functioning cannot discriminate between aggressor and bystander and whose scope of damage is foreseeably mass-lethal.7 In other words, it is a device whose damage is inherently indiscriminate and egalitarian.8

On this question, Rothbard’s answer regarding traditional weapons is unambiguous. Nuclear weapons and similar weapons of mass destruction pose obvious threats to life and property precisely because they cannot be selectively targeted. Their normal operation guarantees widespread harm to innocents. Rothbard therefore argued not only for joint nuclear disarmament, but for the abolition of all weapons capable of mass, cross-border destruction, including bombers and missiles. Because such weapons “can never be pinpoint-targeted to avoid harming civilians,” their existence structurally incentivizes aggressive warfare (Rothbard 1973, 369). Eliminating them would, in Rothbard’s view, force states—especially powerful ones—to adopt isolation and peace, since offensive war would become materially infeasible.

The digital age introduces a less obvious but structurally analogous category: digital DMDs. To my knowledge, this represents the first explicitly libertarian analysis of such devices. Self-propagating malware—most notably network worms—can be indiscriminate in their effects. One could also make the argument that a highly capable artificial intelligence (AI), that is released without safeguards, is akin to a digital worm: self-propagating, difficult to contain, and capable of widespread disruption. Prominent examples include the Morris Worm (1988), one of the earliest computer worms; NotPetya (2017), which disrupted hospitals, logistics networks, and industrial infrastructure at a massive scale; and WannaCry (2017), a ransomware worm that exploited cryptographic extortion. These attacks propagate autonomously, cannot reliably discriminate between aggressors and innocents, and impose large, unpredictable costs on third parties. Although each outbreak was eventually contained, the damage they inflicted within affected systems was locally indiscriminate. Moreover, the possibility of a more resilient, effectively uncontainable computer worm is not insignificant, and legal theory that wishes to adapt to the modern age must be capable of addressing it.

Since digital code is non-rivalrous and therefore not property, cyberweapons are a different category from traditional DMDs. Nonetheless, despite not being property, this essay argues that they must be evaluated as DMDs based on their capacity for indiscriminate physical trespass against the hardware and infrastructure of innocent third parties. At first glance, this may appear paradoxical: if information is not property, how can deploying malware constitute aggression? The objection fails by conflating abstract patterns with their physical instantiations. Malware does not merely copy information; it commandeers rivalrous resources—computers, storage, electricity, processing power, and networks—without consent. In this respect, indiscriminate cyberweapons are functionally analogous to physical WMDs.

Kinsella’s anti-IP framework clarifies the issue further. Since patterns themselves are not ownable, malware authors cannot claim any right to control how their code propagates. Meanwhile, victims’ property rights remain fully intact. Self-propagating code that invades machines without consent constitutes trespass, vandalism, and direct aggression. Appeals to “free speech” are misplaced: expression always occurs through owned, rivalrous resources. Digital DMDs thus extend Rothbardian reasoning into cyberspace. They violate the non-aggression principle despite being merely code as they automatically invade and damage others’ property without consent.

From a Rothbardian perspective, banning code cannot be assessed in the abstract; context and causal involvement are decisive. Confusion arises because digital code is often reflexively treated as “free speech,” a category error already addressed earlier. More fundamentally, the First Amendment’s failure to ground rights in property has enabled arbitrary criminalization of programmers. The prosecution of developers of darknet marketplaces or privacy-preserving financial software—such as Ross Ulbricht or the Samurai Wallet developers—for merely writing code exposes the fiat character of this enforcement. By the government’s own logic, Apple executives would be criminally liable, since iPhones, like Silk Road or Samurai Wallet, are routinely used by criminals.

Returning to the broader question of DMDs, Rothbard was clear regarding tangible weapons, and we have shown why indiscriminate digital systems are likewise impermissible. However, a complication remains: dual use. As cyberneticists have emphasized, every powerful tool is also a potential weapon (Wiener 1950, 140). Understanding DMDs as dual-use underscores the libertarian challenge. Property rights and consent remain central. Tools cannot be treated as morally neutral once they foreseeably interact with others’ property. Potential benefits do not erase the aggression inherent in misuse. The question, then, is how such risks can be managed within a consistent Rothbardian framework.

It is conceivable for DMDs to have legitimate defensive or research applications. Nuclear weapons, for example, are sometimes proposed as tools for deflecting large asteroids. Biological DMDs, such as a hypothetical vial of bubonic plague, may be studied to develop potential cures. Their destructive capacity does not preclude all legitimate use. The digital realm mirrors this duality. Malware, network worms, and autonomous cyberweapons can be studied to improve defenses or identify vulnerabilities, just as dangerous pathogens are studied under controlled conditions. The critical distinction lies not in the existence of the code, but in its interaction with live systems. Writing code on paper, or isolating it from networks, poses no threat; broadcasting or unleashing it does.

So can DMDs be legitimate property? The strict libertarian answer is nuanced: ownership alone is not aggression, but possession that foreseeably endangers others transforms mere ownership into a presumptive threat. Article 8 of the UPL formalizes this insight:

Possessing, developing, or deploying a DMD constitutes a presumptive standing threat when it foreseeably endangers innocent parties through indiscriminate or catastrophic effects. This presumption may be rebutted only by proving, to the satisfaction of all affected parties or a neutral arbiter, that robust safeguards eliminate substantial risk of wrongful harm. Where unrebutted, proportionate action—preceded, where practicable, by notice, dialogue, and arbitration—to neutralize the danger is justified; exigent circumstances may warrant immediate intervention.

A brilliant feature of Principle 8 is its final exigency clause. Unlike vague “emergency powers” invoked by governments to justify crimes such as conscription, gold seizures, or lockdowns, this exception is narrowly bounded. It applies only where foreseeable, mass-lethal, and uncontrollable risk is present, not as a general license for state overreach.

Moreover, this UPL framework leaves room for decentralized law. In a Rothbardian society, legal norms are discovered rather than legislated, and edge cases are adjudicated by private judges or neutral arbitrators. Principle 8 establishes a clear standard against which property-use disputes can be evaluated, leaving discretion for careful, case-by-case judgment.

Conclusion

By grounding property rights in scarcity, conflict, and original appropriation, this essay has clarified the Rothbardian framework and dispelled persistent myths surrounding IP and free speech absolutism. Attempts to treat labor, creativity, or speech as property either covertly import Marxist reasoning or justify coercive monopolies over others’ bodies and resources. Applied consistently, Rothbard’s theory cleanly distinguishes ownable physical resources from non-rivalrous informational patterns. While Rothbard’s analysis of the electromagnetic spectrum shows that intangible phenomena can be scarce and homesteadable, the digital layer of the internet operates differently. Code, websites, digital media, and cryptocurrencies are not property in the strict sense. Bitcoin, in particular, exemplifies possession beyond property: a cryptographic control protocol that fulfills the conflict-avoidance function of property without transforming information into an ownable good. Likewise, piracy, domain names, and digital “theft” dissolve once artificial scarcity and administrative choke points are removed. Rather than weakening Rothbardian theory, the internet exposes how deeply statist modern intuitions about ownership remain.

The essay then confronted the most difficult case: devices of mass destruction. Rothbard’s categorical rejection of indiscriminate weapons extends coherently to the digital realm once physical trespass and foreseeability are properly analyzed. Self-propagating malware, autonomous cyberweapons, and uncontrolled AI systems are not objectionable because they are “information,” but because they commandeer rivalrous resources and impose mass risk on innocents. Here Wiener’s insight becomes unavoidable: every powerful tool is also a potential weapon. In the digital age, the boundary between tool and weapon collapses faster than ethical reflection unless safeguards, containment, and verifiable control are imposed. Principle 8 of the UPL captures this without abandoning libertarian commitments: ownership alone is not aggression, but possession that foreseeably endangers others justifies proportionate neutralization.

Rothbard was also strikingly prescient about technological surveillance. His condemnation of wiretapping already rejects the idea that new technical capacities generate new rights to intrude (Rothbard 1973, 133). One can only speculate how he would have judged the post-9/11 surveillance architecture—mass data collection, algorithmic profiling, financial monitoring, restrictions on encryption, and emerging digital identity regimes—which operationalize control at a scale he could scarcely have imagined.

Yet the outlook is not uniformly bleak. The same technologies enable decentralization, cryptographic coordination, peer-to-peer communication, and monetary systems beyond centralized authority. These tools expand the feasible frontier of liberty—but do not guarantee it. Increasingly, freedom risks becoming an option reserved for the technically literate rather than a general condition.

To conclude, modern technology makes Rothbard’s warnings more urgent. As a computer engineering student, For a New Liberty reads not as a relic of the analog past, but as a manual for resisting a future of digital surveillance and bureaucratic domination. We must not succumb to fatalism; we should follow Mises’s admonition to resist evils and draw inspiration from Rothbard’s enduring optimism:

Only liberty can achieve man’s prosperity, fulfillment, and happiness. In short, libertarianism will win because it is true, because it is the correct policy for mankind, and truth will eventually win out. (Rothbard 1973, 394)

The digital age requires no new principles, only the courage to apply the old ones consistently. Liberty remains the mother, not the daughter, of order.

References

  • 1

    Although Locke is the primary originator of homesteading, Kinsella (2024) criticizes his “sloppy” conflation of ownership and labor (Kinsella 2024). Additionally, Ayn Rand’s novels are strongly pro–IP, from the patent on Rearden Metal in Atlas Shrugged to the “IP terrorism” in The Fountainhead (Kinsella 2013).

  • 2

    Moreover it is indiscriminate in its damage, like a DMD.

  • 3

    For an early exploration of IP and the internet, see Barlow’s (1994) seminal article, and Kinsella’s (2009) discussion of it.

  • 4

    For further libertarian criticisms of ICANN, see: Terrell 2000 and Heinrich 2004.

  • 5

    Furthermore, ICANN’s risk of being a puppet of government bodies was outlined since its beginning; see Singleton 1999.

  • 6

    This essay prefers the term “DMD” over the more common “WMD” (Weapons of Mass Destruction) as it shifts the focus from an owner’s subjective intent to a technology’s objective indiscriminate, thereby categorizing any system—physical or digital—as a standing threat if its effects cannot be physically bounded to an aggressor.

  • 7

    The UPL is “a declaration — a recognition of the moral order that precedes and transcends states, parties, and rulers.” “Crafted through the collaboration of Stephan Kinsella, Freemax, Alessandro Fusillo, and David Dürr — and Hans-Hermann Hoppe as its godfather — this document expresses, in five simple principles, the foundational axioms of liberty.” To read or sign the UPL, see here.

  • 8

    Rothbard’s (1974) reminder to not treat equality as inherently virtuous comes to mind.

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