(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 39 on December 7th, 2024)
What do you think of when you heard the word California? What do you think it’s “ideology” might be? If you work in or on high technology, that California ideology may be shaping the way that you work, the projects that you work on, and the business models that high technology pursues.
What does it all mean? The thinking that is driving the pursuit of certain developments in technology, such as robotics and artificial intelligence, and the rise of accelerationism need to be understood by looking at the underlying philosophies. Join us as we dig deep to find out what’s going on.
Let’s start with a question. What do you think of when you hear the word California? What’s the picture that comes into your head? If you had to hazard a guess, what would something called the California Ideology be? Take a moment and walk in your answer. We’re going to have a look during this episode of The ImplausiPod.
Welcome to The ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And what is the California Ideology? Let’s see. Well, if you pictured a mix of hippies and high tech, of new wave and new money, you’d be pretty close. But the California ideology is something that didn’t start in the 2020s or even the 2000s.
We have to go back even earlier. It’s something that came about in the 60s and 70s, that mix of new mysticism and new technology that was coming through, funded in part by a whole lot of U. S. Cold War defense spending. Writing in 2001, Mark Tribe described it as, quote, a deadly cocktail of naïve optimism, techno utopianism, and new libertarian politics popularized by Wired magazine, end quote.
And from the tone you can sense that there was a point of criticism there. Because the Californian ideology was being defined by European academics, media theorists, and thinkers, who might not have had a technological edge, but definitely had the upper hand when it came to theory. Mark Tribe wrote that definition in 2001, in the introduction to a book by one of those European thinkers, Russian émigré artist and media theorist Lev Manovich.
A few years earlier, in the mid 90s, Manovich had published a piece on Mark Tribe’s Rhizome mailing list, This is back before blogs were even a thing. We might call it a web ring or a web forum now. In that piece, called On Totalitarian Interactivity, which, in 2024, reads like it was written by a time traveler, in the way it absolutely nails our current situation, Manovich compared the two opposing schools of new media philosophy, the Eastern and the Western, and he was Critical of both, having seen both of them first hand.
For Manovich, the belief in the power and potential of a new technology is drawn from the experiences of the user, to which we wholeheartedly agree. Those beliefs are going to shape a lot of the way things try and get used, which we’ve talked about a lot before here. But those beliefs are also going to shape the types of things that try to be made.
The technologies that engineers will try and work on, that companies will try and bring to market, that governments will try and fund research in, and that users will eventually adopt. Or not. And this is why it all boils back down to ideology. As Manovich said, quote, Western media artists usually take technology absolutely seriously and despair when it does not work, end quote.
And the solution for the Western artists is often more technology. Manovich goes on further and states, quote, A Western artist sees the internet as a perfect tool to break down all hierarchies and bring the art to the people. Parentheses, while in reality more often than not using it as a super media to promote his or her name, end parenthesis, end quote.
And in 1996, if someone was going to try and describe influencer culture on social media, I think he kind of nailed it. Like I said, time traveler. But both these quotes kind of hint at what the California ideology is. Manovich would go on further to write a book in 2001 called The Language of New Media, which went much more in depth on some of the topics we’re discussing here, and we’ll return to that at a later point in time.
To really understand the Californian ideology, we need to look at where it originally came from. And the best place to do that is to look at the paper that originally identified it. A 1995 essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. And buckle up, this one might take a bit.
The Californian Ideology was originally published by the authors in 1995 in a British magazine titled Mute. It was a mix of online and print versions, so I can’t tell exactly which format the original came out in, and there’s been a couple different versions that have been published since. It’s still accessible online, so I’ll put the link in the notes.
You can go to the metamute. org website if you want to see their archives as well. The essay is typical of a lot of those mid 90s works on the internet, as everything’s starting to come on board, and people are really just feeling their way around it and trying to figure it out. Here, the authors describe the internet as hypermedia.
Drawing on very McLuhan esque terminology in order to situate it, but we can see where they’re going with it, and looking back with nearly 30 years of hindsight, it’s clear what they’re talking about. There’s very much a leftist, anti-capitalist view to much of their work, and we can see that in some of the terminology they use, even in the opening paragraph.
Quote Once again, capitalism’s relentless drive to diversify and intensify the creative powers of human labor is on the verge of qualitatively transforming the way in which we work, Play and live together. By integrating different technologies around common protocols, something is being created which is more than the sum of its parts.
When the ability to produce and receive unlimited amounts of information in any form is combined with the reach of the global telephone networks, Existing forms of work and leisure can be fundamentally transformed. End quote.
And they go on further to say that anyone who can offer a simple explanation of what’s going on will be listened to, and this has come about through a quote, “Loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists, and artists from the west coast of the USA”.
And what those people have come up with is the Californian ideology, which is quote, A heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age. The Californian ideology is this blend of hippies and high tech. It’s, as they say, an amalgamation of opposites, combining a freewheeling spirit and an entrepreneurial zeal where everyone will be both hip and rich.
And because it’s optimistic and positive and allows space for everybody, kind of like Clay Shirky said, it allows computer nerds, slackers, capitalists, social activists, academics, futuristic bureaucrats, and opportunistic politicians to say the least. To buy in, to get traction, to be seen as forward thinking if they hop on the early wave of this new technology.
And Barbrook and Cameron characterize this as an extropian cult, one that also sees buy in from various European artists and academics as well. In order to really understand the Californian ideology, Barbrook and Cameron go deep into the rise of the virtual class. who are, according to Arthur Croker and Michael Weinstein in their book Data Trash, the techno intelligentsia of cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, video game developers, and all the other communications specialists.
This echoes a lot of what Daniel Bell was talking about in 1973 in The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, and here, 20 years later, they’re starting to actually see it become reality. And we can see the roots in what all of these authors were talking about and what rose to become the gig economy. As they were discussing this already happening to the virtual class in the 1990s.
It’s important to remember that the gig economy did not first come for the taxi drivers, it came for the tech workers, and then they thought it was good enough for everybody else. But this is in part because the digital class, the virtual class, was incredibly myopic. They were a very privileged part of the labor force, and the benefits that they incurred did not necessarily apply to the population at large.
Barbrook and Cameron note that “the Californian ideology therefore simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship. This bizarre hybrid is only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism.” End quote. And this new technology allowed for the possibilities of the social liberalism that the hippies were looking for.
Along with the economic liberalism, or the libertarianism, really, that the new right was looking for. And what both of them were looking for, in a way to legitimize what they were talking about, is a link back to the founding fathers of the United States democracy. Quoting from Barbrook and Cameron again, “Above all, they are passionate advocates of what appears to be an impeccably libertarian form of politics.
They want information technologies to be used to create a new Jeffersonian democracy. Where all individuals would be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace.” And while that sounds like a great idea, looking back to the roots of American democracy, that’s not without its problems. Because Jeffersonian democracy, that popularized by the American founding father Thomas Jefferson, had very particular ideas of who counted when it came to that democracy.
Quote, their utopian vision of California depends on a willful blindness towards the other, much less positive, features of life on the west coast. Racism, poverty, and environmental degradation. End quote.
What the authors are saying is that there’s a deep history of exploitation that goes hand in hand with the development of that ideology. And that in order to bring it about, you have to hide or ignore some of the realities of that history.
At the core of the Californian ideology, there’s a lot of ambiguity as it’s bridging that gap between the left and the right, but the best way to understand it is probably to realize that it’s trying to have its cake and eat it too. It’s a hybrid faith that’s trying to cater to both the new left and the new right at the same time, and realize the utopian visions of both.
And regardless of whether it’s drawn from the left or the right, the Californian ideology is a capitalist ideology. As I said earlier, this was written in the mid 90s in the early days when people were figuring out what the internet would become, but for Barbrook and Cameron, they note that hypermedia, what they call the internet, would be a key component of the next stage of capitalism.
On the new left, the authors see the proponents of the virtual community with people like Howard Rheingold, where the internet could allow for the rise of a high tech gift economy based on the voluntary exchange of information and ideas and knowledge. On the new right, they note how there’s an embracer of the Laissez faire ideology, where tech culture publications like Wired would just uncritically reproduce works by Newt Gingrich, for example, buying into McLuhan esque technological determinism and thinking that the electronic telecommunications will give rise to an electronic marketplace.
For the authors writing in 1995, they weren’t sure what this would lead to. Quote, What is unknown is the social and cultural impact of allowing people to produce and exchange almost unlimited quantities of information on a global scale. End quote. And looking at the state of the internet 30 years later, we see the merger of both of those ideas of an electronic marketplace and a virtual community with the free exchange of ideas.
But that often can be deeply contested and there’s a lot of friction involved. The California ideology promises that each member of the virtual class can become a successful high tech entrepreneur, much like the way that many Americans consider themselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and that these people are quote, “Resourceful entrepreneurs who are the only people cool and courageous enough to take risks.”
The Californian ideology proposes a world where, quote, “visionary engineers are inventing the tools needed to create a free market within cyberspace, such as encryption, digital money, and verification procedures,” end quote. And if this sounds like it was ripped out of the pitch deck for any recently proposed crypto venture of the last five years, then I want to remind you, again, this is 1995 written by people that were critical of what was happening.
One of the things Barbrook and Cameron note about the Californian ideology is how much it ignores its own history of the government funding that went into the development of the technology, especially on the West Coast, and the rise of the mixed economy there. Much of this is covered by researcher Teng-Hui Hu in their book, A Prehistory of the Cloud, published in 2016, where they note how much of the infrastructure of the internet mirrors the physical surroundings, especially on the West Coast.
And my own take is that these particular visions of cyberspace were removed from the physical realm where it was thought that everything was formless and weightless and that anybody could be anything. We see the creation tales from many elder myths made manifest once again in the mythic visions of cyberspace and the new cyber religion, so it follows.
We talked about these mythic visions back in episode 26 titled Silicon Dreams, so I encourage you to go check that one out if you’d like. What those mythic visions were really good at was inspiring the DIY culture that really developed some of the innovative ideas that were extent within the burgeoning computer scene.
And while this includes technological developments, like the early personal computers that were developed in garages across California, it also includes social elements, like new agers, surfing, skateboarding, LGBTQ, liberation, health food, yoga, pop music, and a whole bunch of else besides. The fact you didn’t necessarily need to be a tech innovator helped get buy in from a lot more groups with respect to the California ideology, and the tech was definitely helped a whole lot by government spending.
And the contribution by all these groups, the community, the DIYers, the popular culture, and the government at large, is something that often gets ignored by the entrepreneurs and other supposed tech visionaries. As their authors state, all technological progress is cumulative. It depends on the results of a collective historical process and must be counted At least in part as a collective achievement.
But this idea of collective achievement goes against much of their narrative. But that narrative draws on many sources of inspiration, and given that we’re dealing with high technology, at least one of those is science fiction. Now, sci fi, whether it’s cyberpunk or otherwise, often has a very libertarian ethos.
The authors note how the utopian visions of the future on the right side of Californian ideology often echoed the predictions of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and other sci fi writers, quote, whose future worlds were always filled with space traders, super slick salesmen, genius scientists, Pirate captains and other rugged individualists, end quote.
This is the trail that led back to the Jeffersonian democracy and the Founding Fathers. In the 80s and 90s, that same character would show up, a hacker, a quote, lone individual fighting for survival within the virtual world of information. End quote. And this is where the California of that present connected with the California of the past, the ideology of the gold rush, of the self sufficient individual living out on the frontier.
It never really went away, it just became part and parcel of the underlying ideology of cyberspace, of the internet, of high technology, of California. And that ideology is what tech calls thinking.
What Tech Calls Thinking is a book published in 2020 by Adrian Daub, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford. And what he shows us is that despite being 25 years later, we’re still seeing a lot of the same old thinkers show up. Even though Silicon Valley itself has gone through some major changes since 1995, as the only players of note from back then are Microsoft and Apple, as Google was just in its infancy, and Amazon, Facebook, and the rest of social media didn’t exist at all, and the owners of some of those companies are now famous enough to be recognizable by only their last name.
We can call it the Madonna Zone, or Maybe even the Cher Zone, though these guys aren’t about sharing. They have names like Bezos, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and I guess we could add Altman to that list now, too. In Altman’s recent essay, The Intelligence Age, he outlines some of the philosophy driving his quest towards AGI.
But, regardless of the name or the company that they founded or own, not always the same thing, we need to point that out, these tech oligarchs express a strikingly similar ideology. We covered a little bit of that almost a year ago when we looked at the Tecto Optimist Manifesto published by Mark Anderson, formerly of Netscape, but Dow covers it sufficiently well.
In each of the seven chapters of the book, Daub covers one of the ideas that’s central to the philosophy behind Silicon Valley, usually characterized by a single author, perhaps two. These writers and philosophers include some familiar names like Marshall McLuhan, Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Girard, Joseph Schumpeter, Cass Phillips.
And if we’ve heard a bunch of those names already, it’s not by accident. Like I said, there’s a lot of consilience and overlap. In the course of my own studies in grad school, I covered a few of these names in depth, though I’ll admit not all, but what I see here overlaps a lot of what I’ve studied elsewhere.
The overarching aim of Daub’s work is to get behind the media’s focus on the tech industry’s thought leaders, the public intellectuals that get written up so often in media pieces, and trace the ideas and where they’ve come from. And the key point of inception for Daub is Stanford. This is the inflection point, or quilting point, where everything comes together.
This makes some sense for Daub. It was where he was located and viewing his surroundings. And there are other universities involved as well. When one thinks of big tech schools, MIT surely comes to mind, too, but for a Californian perspective, we need to look at Stanford. And the university is important, because a lot of tech’s ideas are quote, university adjacent, or quote, academic.
Big Tech seeks the legitimation of their ideas via the proximity to higher learning, as the people involved have often dropped out or not completed their education. Dropping out is the focus of Chapter One, as it allows founders to buy into the pre existing narrative, one that’s pre packaged and ready for them, and makes for easier work for the journalists covering the field.
There’s a visibility of being associated with the college, but only briefly. Don’t overstay your welcome if you want to be treated as a visionary. As Daub points out, What this means is that the education of these founders is often incomplete, missing the context that would come with more advanced study and absent from a general studies survey course.
Usually, I’ll admit to having been blessed with a couple great profs back in the day myself, but dropping out allows one to fit the role of a maverick, able to reject elite institutions and not constrained by conventional thinking. to really allow one to engage in the creative destruction that comes from disrupting the market.
And that Schumpeterian creative destruction features heavily, comprising much of Chapter 6. Joseph Schumpeter was an Austrian economist who worked at Harvard starting in the 1930s, and he coined the term as part of his observations of the nature of the business cycle. Much of what he was talking about was the instability of capitalism and the inevitability of socialism, but this was done through the lens of the role of the entrepreneur in the process of innovation.
a bringing something new to market. Quote, The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from new consumer goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. This is from Schumpeter, which Daub quotes at length in his work.
This shaking up is what keeps it afloat. If it wasn’t for the shakeup, the instability in the system would get too much, and it all falls apart. As Daub notes, quote, The concept of creative destruction sublimates the concept of revolution. End quote. Things continually get disrupted, and the only constant seems to be change.
Of course, the title of chapter six is disruption, that underlying ethos that impels so much change within Silicon Valley. Disruption is one of those totalizing terms that gets leveraged by Silicon Valley to suggest that this is the only way that change or innovation can happen. As Daub notes, quote, Disruption plays to our impatience with structures and situations that seem to coast on habit and inertia, and it plays to the press’s excitement about underdogs, rebels, and outsiders.
It’s that personal narrative that we talked about a few minutes ago that allows these multi billionaire founders to consider themselves still the plucky underdog from their favorite movies when they were young. And it allows them to deal with the cognitive dissonance of realizing that perhaps they’re on the other side.
Because once you’ve got a couple billion dollars behind you, you are the establishment, no matter how you might frame yourself. Narratives about disruption are ultimately narratives about change, but only in a certain constrained direction. As Daub notes, disruption is newness for people who are scared of genuine newness, revolution for people who don’t stand to gain anything from revolution.
And that idea that Silicon Valley is introducing something that’s genuinely new really needs to be looked at with a hard, critical eye. Daub notes, one ought to be skeptical of unsubstantiated claims of something being totally new and not following the hitherto unestablished rules of business, of politics, of common sense.
The amount of stuff that’s actually new or a radical innovation is incredibly tiny. For an example, one needs to look no further than a single episode of the show Connections, hosted by the British historian of science and technology, James Burke, where he traces the multiple contingencies and coincidences that have led through the path of history to our modern inventions and technologies.
And if we apply this kind of historiographic analysis through a critical To nearly anything that’s claimed to be disruptive, we can see the path through history that led up to that point. Genuine newness is very, very rare. And even the claims that the tech industry has, there’s dog quotes that they’re making fundamental transformations of how capitalism functions, can be looked at with a skeptical eye.
Because as Schumpeter was writing 100 years ago, and Marx decades before that, That’s just how capitalisms always work. Disruption is just faster and more far reaching, and as we suggested, it’s totalizing. As Daub quotes, Disruption seems to suggest that the rapids are all there is and can be. And we’ve talked about those rapids before, back in episode 27, The Old Man and the River, back in February.
But the speed is the thing. Quote, Disruption seems to lean in the direction of more capitalism, end quote. And this is not by accident. The disruptions want to go faster, and that theory of move fast and break things has a historical antecedent nearly a hundred years ago. That theory is accelerationism, and we need to talk about it.
Accelerationism is an ideology or set of philosophies that crosses between party lines. It kind of exists on both the left and the right, and what it calls for is the radical acceleration of everything that’s going on. An intensification of the capitalization of everything in order to get to some perceived next level of human growth or achievement.
There’s this idea that we’re not going fast enough, that the checks and balances that we put on society are holding us back from reaching that. And if we just go faster, harder, we’ll have enough technology or AI or whatever that’ll help solve those problems. And we can deal with it in whatever imagined future state where we have the technology.
And it should be noted that there’s left wing groups that believe in this accelerationism as well, who believe if you allow capitalism to put the pedal to the metal, it’ll be It’ll eventually go off the rails and then you can rebuild out of the ashes of whatever’s left. You know, once we get through that cool Mad Max stage and actually get around to rebuilding society.
But as you can tell from my tone, it’s an incredibly bad idea. First off is there’s this assumption that whoever is pushing the pedal to the metal that As their hand on the throttle will be there at the end to reap the rewards, once we get there. You know, that they’ll be among the survivors. And two, is that an incredibly large number of people will get hurt in the process of going faster and harder.
It’s just incredibly irresponsible, and there’s no guarantee that we get there either. It’s an assumption that they make that, hey, if we strap a rocket to our back like Wile E. Coyote, we’ll get to where we’re going faster. But it’s not necessarily borne out. It’s all in theory. We talked about it on one of our episodes of the podcast about a year ago, episode 17, called Not a Techno Optimist.
So, my apologies for recovering some old ground, but it’s worth mentioning again. Go check it out in the archives if you’d like. There’s more to talk about when it comes to accelerationism, but we’re going to have to get into that in a few episodes from now. The main thing is this idea of being a disruptor.
It isn’t a thing of science fiction, which inspires so much of Silicon Valley. It’s Fantasy. Daub also talks about the continued role of Ayn Rand and her influence on the libertarian elements that are so prevalent in technology. I think the best quote summarizing Ayn Rand can be attributed to John Rogers.
Quote, there are two novels that can transform a bookish 14 year kid’s life. The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel.
The other is a book about orcs. End quote. Of course, Maybe not skipping that English lit class in the college you dropped out of would help give a little context for understanding Rand. However, we’re not here to chase that particular rabbit. The big takeaway from Dobb’s work is a look at the tech industry’s philosophical roots and its focus on money.
As he notes, The tech industry we know today is what happens when certain received notions meet with a massive amount of cash with nowhere else to go. End quote. Absent an idea of what to do with all that money, tech looked around for legitimation. And, as Daub notes, quote, the ideas that tech call thinking were developed and refined in the making of money, end quote.
This is accomplished via a blend of state intervention and capitalist entrepreneurship that leverages DIY culture, relying on it for essential contributions by innovators and early adopters, to be sure. And much of tech has resulted in the development of, quote, mass markets for private companies to sell existing information commodities, end quote, things like films and music and television.
Stuff that we would normally call art has been transformed by the shift from representation to manipulation that occurs within the digital realm, according to Manovich. Further, he notes that Western artists appear to break down hierarchies as part of the process of building a personal brand for themselves, and coming out of the influencer decade of the 20 teens where catchphrases like the brand is you get tossed around, this seems self evident.
It’s a commodification of the self. But we’ll have to wait for a later date to do a deeper dive into this process of becoming which drives influencer culture. We’ll let you know when that episode is ready to go.
By contrast, for Manovich, the Eastern artists, quote, recognize that the nature of technology is that it does not work, it will always break down. It will never work as it is supposed to.
For the outside observer, we can see how this makes sense, where the failures of one technology provide the opportunity for the sale of another technology to solve the problems of the first one. And one thing tech likes is another sale, because tech is ultimately a capitalist enterprise.
And it is this focus on capitalism which underlies the Californian ideology as a whole. The connection point between Daub and the work 25 years previous is that those ideas never went away. The tech industry in 2020 is pretty much still the same industry it was that Barbrook and Cameron identified back then.
Witness that quote about the crypto pitch deck we made earlier. The big difference is that there is more of it, the increased focus on the money. We’re just later along in the late stage capitalism. We’re not so far along that we’ve reached the sci fi aspirations driving some of them forward, as mentioned earlier, but those aspirations exist in both works too.
Barbrook and Cameron note that there is a drive for the emergence of the post human that we can see in N. Katherine Hayle’s work, as well as various cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson and others. Post humanism is, after all, a quote, biotechnological manifestation of the social privileges of the virtual class, end quote.
This is why there is such a strong connection to the accelerationists mentioned earlier. The remaining virtual class are aging and looking to live longer. There is a fear of death motivating much of the virtual class, characterizing them as extropian, that sect of transhumanists seeking to extend their lifespans to the extent that they may one day live indefinitely.
They seek to advance technology faster, as that dark specter inexorably catches up with them. The third point in common between what Tech calls thinking and the Californian ideology, two works separated by 25 years, a continent, and an ocean, is the critique of the underlying ideology of the virtual class itself.
There’s other names for it floating around, of course, calling them Tech Bros, or TESCREAL, or whatever, but like Manovich pointed out earlier, it’s all of the same thread of Western critiques of Tech. And seeing as we mentioned Lev Manovich, let’s return to a bit of what he had to say on totalitarian interactivity.
There, from his position as a quote, post communist subject, he saw the internet as a communal apartment of the Stalin era where everybody spies on everybody else, or as a giant garbage site for the information society, with everybody dumping their used products of intellectual labor and nobody cleaning up.
As in the moment, we are witness to a mass migration from Twitter to BlueSky, with some people deleting their posts and accounts, and others not, just fleeing, as statements ring poignantly true. We are witnessing the migration of much of the virtual class in real time, as platforms shift and become unstable, and new platforms are found.
There’s a degree of insulation that comes with this, as if moving platforms is somehow enough of an action to take. There’s a blending of beliefs going on here. As Barbrook and Cameron note, quote, Many members of the virtual class want to be seduced by the libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm of the new right, end quote, a term that describes the newt gingrich era republicans in the U. S. in the mid 1990s.
That belief and enthusiasm affords them the opportunities to continue living much as they had previously. Not all internet users are so lucky. There are clear divides. Redlining by telephoning companies creates a very real gap in accessibility to the information superhighway.
As this was written around the same time as the U. S. Department of Commerce was warning of the digital divide in 1995, which would soon be picked up and championed as a term elsewhere by those advocating for more widespread internet adoption. We can see why.
The scholar Teng-hui Hu traces this very real phenomenon of the physical geography’s effect in shaping the rather ephemeral nature of cyberspace in their book, A Prehistory of the Cloud, 2015.
For those members outside the virtual class, the prospects are much more bleak. Quoting from Barbrook and Cameron, The deprived only participate in the information age by providing cheap, non unionized labor for the unhealthy factories of the Silicon Valley chip factories. End quote. Fifteen years later, this could still describe Foxconn making iPhones for Apple, or the warehouses at Amazon, or drivers for Uber.
The trend toward the gigged economy had a long arc that started well before the smartphone era. The digital artisans were, quote, living within a contract culture and, quote, gigged long before others, well paid in a manner that decentralized collective action. To quote the authors again, Although they enjoy cultural freedoms won by the hippies, most of them, that is the virtual class, are no longer actively involved in the struggle to build ecotopia.
End quote. The true believers of the new left involved in the building of cyberculture took their stock options and left the suburbs behind. This cybernetic libertarianism was very much in the whatever I’ve got mine mindset, never imagined that one day those cyber leopards might eat their faces. And this follows from the ideals of the Jeffersonian democracy that drives the Californian ideology.
In a section titled, Cyborg Masters and Robot Slaves, Barbrook and Cameron note that the fear of the rebellious underclass has now corrupted the most fundamental tenet of the Californian ideology, its belief in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. However, as they note, those technologies of freedom are turning into machines of dominance.
The crux of the Californian ideology is in Barbrook and Cameron’s description of the racial divide in California. “If human slaves are ultimately unreliable, then mechanical ones will have to be invented. The search for the holy grail of artificial intelligence reveals this desire for the golem. A strong and loyal slave whose skin is the color of earth and whose innards are made of sand.”
As we discussed back in episode 17, there is a utopian vision here, and Barbrook and Cameron note how these techno utopians, quote, imagine that it is possible to obtain slave like labor from inanimate machines. However, slave labor cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved, end quote. And this can be seen in very recent history, too.
Anyone wondering about the results of the voting for Proposition 6 in California during the recent national election in the United States on November 2024, for any future listeners, will find their answer here.
Proposition 6 was a proposed amendment to California’s constitution that would bar slavery in any form and repeal involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.
In it, Californians voted 53. 3 percent against.
The Californian ideology has a dark history, one that still has a hand in shaping the future.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Implausipod. I’m your host Dr. Implausible. Join us for the next few episodes as we continue our journey into exploring what the Californian ideology has left us. As we look into those Californian roads and car culture. And then what that utopic vision of the world would look like as we delve into the world model that we hinted at when we talked about Sam Altman’s intelligence age essay.
I hope we can explore these before the end of 2024 and then we’ll see what 2025 has in store.
You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license.
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Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes, and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time, so consider signing up, and I’ll leave a link in the show notes.
Until next time, take care, and have fun.
Bibliography
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Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1 edition). University Of Chicago Press.
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Tribe, M. (2001) “Introduction” in Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. MIT Press.
