I think you're conflating Ron Paul's brand of (populist) libertarianism, with its embrace of everything from abolishing most of the federal departments to returning to the gold standard, with the cyber-specific futurist hacker variety. The EFF and the Mozilla Foundation and other FOSS orgs are still there, but certainly there's been a lot of setbacks. Pirate Parties never caught on in the U.S., unlike in Europe where they're more of a presence for whatever reason.
The decline of pirate politics was underway by the time of the renewed culture wars in the 2010s, and I don't think the rise of social justice or identity politics was the cause of it. Those latter topics just were more popular because, well, they resonated with more people. (Feels like the defeat of SOPA/PIPA was the last time such issues had semi-mainstream appeal.) And more people were online, on social media, because tech went fully mainstream. (I suppose in your view you could claim that tech was a victim of its own success.)
Lessig is still around. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. His whole thing was campaign finance reform.
And, well, I'm pretty sure Rand is much more of a stock Republican than his father was. Justin Amash would be the libertarian standard-bearer these days.
> what could come of that but societal advancement, increased creative output, and a general world-improving fair and equal exchange of ideas?
On the flip side, we had the entire cyberpunk genre predicting that it'd be bought, sold, and owned by megacorps, and that's somewhat come to pass as well. Citizens United certainly guaranteed their right to free speech.
Re: pirate parties, there actually was such controversy surrounding the more prominent instances just as they acquired public attention in their respective countries. For example, AFAIU, the current gender-politics situation arrived in Germany slightly earlier than it did the US. And so in 2009-2010, there was much media scrutiny of the low female membership of the German pirate party.
Proposals for changing this resulted in lots of internal drama, culminating with a notorious debate over how a women-only mailing list was in opposition to the party's principles. Similar things happened with the Swedish party. There's hardly anything in English of this; you'll have to use your Google(-translate)-fu for more info: https://www.google.de/search?q=+piratinnen+piratenpartei+fem...
However, I don't think this was the (sole) cause of the parties' decline. The German party had increasing vote shares until 2013, around when internal conflict over members' stances on issues other than copyright, made evident by the parties' commitment to transparency, started being widely publicized, proving (to the public, at least) that its approach to direct democracy could not scale.
Aside: I have discovered the German version of ESR, who fulminates over his theory that the attacks on pirate politics and open source from gender studies perspectives are in collusion with American economic interests: https://www.danisch.de/blog/2015/11/04/feminismus-als-waffe-...
The decline of pirate politics was underway by the time of the renewed culture wars in the 2010s, and I don't think the rise of social justice or identity politics was the cause of it. Those latter topics just were more popular because, well, they resonated with more people. (Feels like the defeat of SOPA/PIPA was the last time such issues had semi-mainstream appeal.) And more people were online, on social media, because tech went fully mainstream. (I suppose in your view you could claim that tech was a victim of its own success.)
Lessig is still around. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. His whole thing was campaign finance reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig_2016_president...
And, well, I'm pretty sure Rand is much more of a stock Republican than his father was. Justin Amash would be the libertarian standard-bearer these days.
> what could come of that but societal advancement, increased creative output, and a general world-improving fair and equal exchange of ideas?
On the flip side, we had the entire cyberpunk genre predicting that it'd be bought, sold, and owned by megacorps, and that's somewhat come to pass as well. Citizens United certainly guaranteed their right to free speech.
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