California Ideology

"The Californian Ideology" is a 1995 essay by English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron of the University of Westminster. Barbrook calls it a "critique of dotcom neoliberalism".[1] In the essay, Barbrook and Cameron argue that the rise of networking technologies in Silicon Valley in the 1990s was linked to American neoliberalism and a paradoxical hybridization of beliefs from the political left and right in the form of hopeful technological determinism... Andrew Leonard of Salon called the essay "one of the most penetrating critiques of neo-conservative digital hypesterism yet published".[3] In contrast, Wired magazine publisher Louis Rossetto wrote that the essay showed "profound ignorance of economics"... Barbrook argues that members of the digerati who adhere to the Californian Ideology embrace a form of reactionary modernism. According to him, "American neo-liberalism seems to have successfully achieved the contradictory aims of reactionary modernism: economic progress and social immobility. Because the long-term goal of liberating everyone will never be reached, the short-term rule of the digerati can last forever."... Sociologist Thomas Streeter of the University of Vermont has said that the Californian Ideology appeared as part of a pattern of Romantic individualism with Stewart Brand as a key influence.[9] Adam Curtis connects the Californian Ideology's origins to Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism... In the 2011 documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Curtis concludes that the Californian Ideology failed to live up to its claims: The original promise of the Californian Ideology, was that the computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes, in control of our own destiny. Instead, today, we feel the opposite—that we are helpless components in a global system—a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change. (accountability sink) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

original essay

2023 "Special Issue: Afterlives of the Californian Ideology", By Andreas Hepp, Anne Schmitz, Nathan Schneider