Libertarianism when applied to the social and political structure of technology and open source (Meritocracy) perpetuates inequality by failing to acknowledge the role of power and current state of inequality.
American libertarianism is uniquely American, unfortunately Silicon Valley happens to be in America. It is a political and social philosophy that believes individual ownership and power should supplant collective ownership of any kind. Most immediately the ownership and interventionist powers of government should be dismantled and the free market should be left with the responsibility of creating equality and individuals expected to protect their own interests.
Filtered through the lens of technology this becomes a more unified theory of Meritocracy. Being that we don't trade goods for currency we don't have a traditional market and libertarians must invent one. A strange mix of experience, social capital, and skill are a sort of currency in technology communities. Meritocracy is the social theory that allows that currency and its exchange to become power the way actually currency becomes power in a capitalist free market.
This is where techno-libertarians and people attempting to build a system of equality collide. To build a more equitable system you have to re-distribute power. If there is an imbalance of race and gender (there obviously is) then it means the under-represented are not engaged and have no power under the existing standards of "merit." To alter representation we must alter the process and culture of technology creation to subvert the value of "merit" so that people without it can engage.
Attempting to alter existing gender or race imbalance is always in conflict with libertarian meritocracy because being black or female has no currency in the system they've created. Such a system must be called out for what it is: a process of subjugation that perpetuates existing power structures. Existing power happens to be white male dominated. Libertarians would then argue that the fact that existing power is white male dominated does not mean the system itself is racist or sexist because the system doesn't value race or sex, only "merit."
To which advocates of equality must respond that any system which perpetuates historical racism and sexism inherits those traits by willful ignorance.
Libertarianism is the philosophy of non-intervention. That no system should exist which attempts to mitigate the private exchange of currency, goods and services in a free market. Any intervention, even intervention that would create gender or racial equality, cannot be tolerated without admitting that the free market is a poor arbiter of freedom.
In the birth of a new culture where a market and currency do not exist as they do elsewhere libertarianism invents the tyranny of meritocracy so that we might extend even further the domination of those who have inherited power over those who currently lack it. If we are to create a more equitable culture we must reject it.
I think that we should strive for a culture that values equality and empowers people. As we create various modes of organization, process, and governance in the creation of technology and expressions of our culture I'd like to expose the inherit inequality of meritocracy which, as it is practiced and preached today, has its roots in libertarianism.
You brought up one good example, conferences. Whenever a conference achieves a progressive speaker lineup, in other words the speakers represent more diversity than the community as it exists today, it is charged with violating the sacred principal of meritocracy and picking speakers just because of their sex. This is the tyranny of meritocracy, that it dismisses any process or governance that values anything other than "mertit" which means currently underrepresented groups will continue to be underrepresented since they lack it.
@programmarchy
My views on changing the existing world geopolitical system is a much longer conversations and, frankly, has people much smarter than me writing about it. I am, somewhat obviously, a follower of classical anarchist thought in the tradition of Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker and Noam Chomsky.
Your description of libertarianism is flawed. Very few social theories condone violence and coercion, even some fascist social theorists didn't condone it, and none of the current ruling parties in the United States openly condone coercion and violence. The differences between social theories have far more to do with what they believe will best bring about greater freedom and equality and end poverty and disease. Libertarianism believes the solution is private ownership and the market. The problem with this line of thought is that it ignores the existing imbalances of ownership and power, making it a system that perpetuates existing imbalance descendent from a brutal history of subjugation. Even worse, libertarianism is viewed less as a revolutionary or utopian ideology but as a social theory to be applied piecemeal in existing US policy which creates an even larger wealth divide since the policy is almost guaranteed to be implemented in a way that rewards those with power and punishes the poor.