François Zammit

Cyberpunk offers a vision into the consequences of neoliberal economic and social policies implemented since the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. The economic inequalities, lack of social safety nets, and restricted presence of state institutions reflect a neoliberal socio-economic order. In a cyberpunk reality, we also encounter cyberspace as a market order. It emerges from the proliferation of a ubiquitous cybereconomy that operates as a market economy, free from government intervention. The cyberpunk imaginary depicts cyberspace as a psychogeography in which individuals pursue their own goals and act in their self-interest. In cyberspace, individuals and corporations have dealings, interactions, and business relationships that follow the rules and norms that have emerged as part of the self-organising process of cyberspace. Therefore, cyberspace is a form of spontaneous order that entails complex self-organising systems and mechanisms that arise from the multitude of interactions that happen within it. This paper aims to use the imagery of cyberspace to show how cyberpunk literature formulates in tangible ways the realities of a market order as envisioned and proposed by neoliberal thinkers like Hayek, thus providing the public with a critique of the neoliberal dream of an unregulated market order.

In formulating their political project, neoliberal authors have proposed a clear formulation of what they deem to be the role of the neoliberal state. The point of departure adopted by these authors is to identify what the state should not be if it were to follow the auspices of neoliberal thinking as proposed by the Mont Pelerin Society. This study focuses on Walter Lippmann’s, and Friedrich August Hayek’s concept of the free market and their opposition to planned economies. Lippmann and Hayek both argue that the state should not have the authority and does not have sovereign power over the market order. The premises that they establish are that the market order is a natural order that is beyond human control, and there is an epistemological gap between human knowledge, and its capacity and potential, and full knowledge of the market. This means that it is an epistemological error to attempt to know, understand, or predict the market, and therefore to try and control it. Therefore, they argue that human society, and the state, must submit to the natural law of the market in the same way they submit to the rule of law.