The End of Something

Update: As sad as the decline of many of these libertarian institutions is, it makes me happy to hear from so many people who read my post and shared similar experiences from their formative years. I hope going down memory lane like this is of some value, if only to appreciate what was a unique coming-of-age experience for many of us.

I just launched this blog by the way - I will soon be writing more about ideas, entrepreneurship and my life. Feel free to subscribe to my blog here and follow me on X: emerald_springs.

As I sit here in Cyprus, having just moved to a new country for the fourth time in my adult life, I find myself thinking about who I was at 19 - a nerdy, scholarly girl in Germany reading Mises, Rothbard, Hayek. Until I was 17 or 18, I didn't know anyone else who cared about these ideas. I just knew they felt true, and important, and that somewhere out there were other people who thought so too.

Facebook was different then. People actually used it to connect with strangers, to share their favourite book quotes, to debate ideas in comment threads. Everyone seemed eager to socialize, to find their tribe. I stumbled into libertarian groups and suddenly there were others who had read the same obscure economists, who got excited about the same arguments. I miss that openness. Somewhere along the way, Facebook became a place you scroll passively, not a place you meet people.

And then the in-person world opened up. Conference halls in Maastricht and Cologne. Week-long summer seminars where someone paid for my flight across the Atlantic because they believed investing in young people who understood Austrian economics would pay off over decades. 3am conversations about spontaneous order and the knowledge problem, surrounded by people from twelve countries who had all somehow discovered the same books.

That world is mostly gone now, and I'm not sure anyone has written honestly about what it felt like from the inside - not the policy papers or the funding strategies, but the part that actually mattered: the belonging, the being taken seriously, the coming-of-age that happened to be wrapped in an intellectual framework.

For those who never encountered it, there was an entire ecosystem built on a simple Hayekian premise from his 1949 essay 'The Intellectuals and Socialism': ideas filter down from academics to intellectuals to journalists to politicians to the general public. Change the ideas, and you change the world, but over decades, not election cycles. The strategy was explicitly long-term - fund philosophy departments, create academic pipelines, support graduate students, host seminars where young people read Hayek and Mises and Nozick alongside professors who took them seriously.

I entered through European Students for Liberty. I became a local coordinator at 19 in 2013, then an executive board member from 2014 to 2016. We ran conferences across Europe, regional events that would gather hundreds of students who had somehow found their way to these ideas. From there, the pipeline continued - IHS summer seminars in the United States, week-long immersive programs where they flew you across the Atlantic and housed you and fed you and handed you reading lists. Then the annual US conferences. Then, for some, think tank jobs and academic careers.

Someone was paying for all of this, the Koch network primarily - Charles and David Koch, who had been funding libertarian infrastructure since the 1970s. They believed that patient investment in ideas would pay off. The conferences I attended weren't about winning the next election, but rather about forming people, about creating a generation who genuinely understood and could articulate classical liberal ideas.

The motto was "ideas matter more than politics."

But then I noticed a certain shift. The conferences got a little smaller, the emails came less frequently. The European board dissolved. IHS stopped running their week-long summer seminars and replaced them with shorter programs. SFL shifted to a leaner model, at least in Europe - one major European conference rather than a bunch of them across different countries, no more executive boards in every region. I am not sure how things changed in the US.

And then in 2020, Covid hit and everything moved online. Webinars replaced hotel bars and 3am arguments. And when the world reopened, the infrastructure never fully came back.

I think this was mostly because the Kochs shifted away from the whole theory of change, which thus crumbled the entire foundation of these libertarian organizations. The Koch network pivot happened in 2019 when they rebranded as "Stand Together" and moved away from libertarian movement-building toward criminal justice reform, poverty alleviation, bipartisan causes. David Koch died that same year, and he had been the more ideologically committed of the two brothers, the one who had actually run as the Libertarian Party's vice presidential candidate in 1980. The money didn't disappear, but it went elsewhere - electoral politics, measurable policy wins, things with shorter time horizons than "form young intellectuals and wait thirty years."

Tyler Cowen wrote about the "hollowing out" of libertarianism around this time. His diagnosis was that the movement had partly won - libertarian ideas had so thoroughly penetrated tech, finance, and mainstream attitudes toward markets that the distinctive identity weakened. Why attend a libertarian conference when you could go to a crypto conference or a tech founder meetup that shared most of the vibes?

The people who would have come through the pipeline in 2018 or 2020 ended up somewhere else - crypto, effective altruism, tech, or just politically homeless.

Nobody really admits this about intellectual movements: the ideas are partly pretext.

I don't mean they don't matter, they do. But when I think about what actually made those years formative, it wasn't that I learned the difference between Rothbard's natural rights approach and Hayek's evolved rules and spontaneous order. It was that I was 19 and someone flew me across the Atlantic because they thought my ideas mattered. It was finding a room full of people who had read the same obscure books and wanted to argue about them until 3am. It was belonging somewhere.

The conferences were about formation, not information - coming-of-age wrapped in an intellectual framework. The drunk conversations after the seminars, where people talked about their fears and ambitions, those mattered as much as the lectures. Maybe more.

This is true of every intellectual movement, and acknowledging it isn't cynical, it's just honest about how communities actually form. People come for the ideas and stay for each other. When the gathering stops, you lose both.

I was influential in that world, probably partly because I was one of the few women, but I was also still socially awkward and figuring out how to be a person. Those conferences taught me how to talk to strangers, how to hold my own in a room full of people, how to be taken seriously. I could have been better at keeping in touch with people afterward - I was too focused on the ideas and not enough on the relationships. By the time I realized the relationships were the point, much of that world had already scattered.

This isn't just a libertarian story.

The rationalist community that started with LessWrong and Slate Star Codex, all that earnest writing about epistemics and cognitive biases, now mostly absorbed into AI safety funding and Bay Area social scenes. That's just one example that comes to mind, I'm sure there are more. Everywhere you look, the same arc: intellectual communities that formed people, that gave young minds a place to belong and ideas to wrestle with, hollowed out or professionalized or captured by something more urgent.

Part of it is the internet, which rewards takes over treatises. A Twitter thread gets more engagement than a reading group. You can find your tribe online now, but it's thin - you scroll past each other rather than staying up arguing until 3am. The strong ties that form when you spend a week living together at a seminar don't form when you're liking each other's posts.

Part of it is philanthropy. The foundations that fund these things increasingly demand metrics, measurable outcomes, shorter time horizons. "Form thoughtful young people and wait thirty years" is a hard sell when you need to report impact to your board. Electoral wins are legible, policy changes are legible, but whether someone became a deeper thinker at 22 because of a week in Virginia is not.

And part of it is that we've lost faith in the premise. The idea that ideas matter over decades, that patient cultivation of intellectuals changes the world - who still believes that? Everything is urgent, everything is political. Who has time to read Hayek when there's an election to win, a crisis to address, a culture war to fight?

I'm 31 now, sitting in Cyprus, a long way from that 19-year-old in Germany who discovered Mises on her own and went looking for others who understood. I'm still a libertarian - the ideas haven't changed for me - but I'm building a business now instead of attending conferences. The activism faded, not the convictions. And the movement I knew doesn't really exist in the same form.

I got what I needed from it, though. The confidence that comes from being taken seriously young. The social skills from being thrown into rooms full of strangers and having to hold my own. The knowledge that such communities can exist - that it's possible to find people who care about ideas, who want to argue about them seriously, who will fly across continents to do so.

I caught the tail end of something. The people who came five years later missed it entirely, and the people who came five years earlier probably took it for granted.

There's a generation now that will never experience what I experienced. Maybe crypto conferences or indie hacker meetups fill some of that gap. Maybe nothing does. Maybe the era of patient, idea-driven movement-building is just over.

I don't have a proposal for what to do about this. I just wanted to write it down before I forget, and before everyone who was there moves on or becomes too embarrassed to admit that the belonging mattered more than the ideas.