The Californian Ideology derives its popularity from the very ambiguity of its precepts. Over the last few decades, the pioneering work of the community media activists has been largely recuperated by the hi-tech and media industries. Although companies in these sectors can mechanise and sub-contract much of their labour needs, they remain dependent on key people who can research and create original products, from software programs and computer chips to books and tv programmes. Along with some hi-tech entrepreneurs, these skilled workers form the so-called ‘virtual class’: ‘…the techno-intelligentsia of cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, video-game developers, and all the other communications specialists…’ Unable to subject them to the discipline of the assembly-line or replace them by machines, managers have organised such intellectual workers through fixed-term contracts. Like the ‘labour aristocracy’ of the last century, core personnel in the media, computing and telecoms industries experience the rewards and insecurities of the marketplace. On the one hand, these hi-tech artisans not only tend to be well-paid, but also have considerable autonomy over their pace of work and place of employment. As a result, the cultural divide between the hippie and the organisation man has now become rather fuzzy. Yet, on the other hand, these workers are tied by the terms of their contracts and have no guarantee of continued employment. Lacking the free time of the hippies, work itself has become the main route to self-fulfillment for much of the ‘virtual class’.

The Californian Ideology offers a way of understanding the lived reality of these hi-tech artisans. On the one hand, these core workers are a privileged part of the labour force. On the other hand, they are the heirs of the radical ideas of the community media activists. 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. Ever since the ’60s, liberals - in the social sense of the word - have hoped that the new information technologies would realise their ideals. Responding to the challenge of the New Left, the New Right has resurrected an older form of liberalism: economic liberalism. In place of the collective freedom sought by the hippie radicals, they have championed the liberty of individuals within the marketplace. Yet even these conservatives couldn’t resist the romance of the new information technologies. Back in the ’60s, McLuhan’s predictions were reinterpreted as an advertisement for new forms of media, computers and telecommunications being developed by the private sector. From the ’70s onwards, Toffler, de Sola Pool and other gurus attempted to prove that the advent of hypermedia would paradoxically involve a return to the economic liberalism of the past. This retro-utopia echoed the predictions of Asimov, Heinlein and other macho sci-fi novelists whose future worlds were always filled with space traders, superslick salesmen, genius scientists, pirate captains and other rugged individualists. The path of technological progress didn’t always lead to ‘ecotopia’ - it could instead lead back to the America of the Founding Fathers.

Freedom is Slavery

If its holy precepts are refuted by profane history, why have the myths of the ‘free market’ so influenced the proponents of the Californian Ideology? Living within a contract culture, the hi-tech artisans lead a schizophrenic existence. On the one hand, they cannot challenge the primacy of the marketplace over their lives. On the other hand, they resent attempts by those in authority to encroach on their individual autonomy. By mixing New Left and New Right, the Californian Ideology provides a mystical resolution of the contradictory attitudes held by members of the ‘virtual class’. Crucially, anti-statism provides the means to reconcile radical and reactionary ideas about technological progress. While the New Left dislikes the government for funding the military-industrial complex, the New Right attacks the state for interfering with the spontaneous dissemination of new technologies by market competition. Despite the central role played by public intervention in developing hypermedia, the Californian ideologues preach an anti-statist gospel of hi-tech libertarianism: a bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism. Rather than comprehend really existing capitalism, gurus from both New Left and New Right much prefer to advocate rival versions of a digital ‘Jeffersonian democracy’. For instance, Howard Rheingold on the New Left believes that the electronic agora will allow individuals to exercise the sort of media freedom advocated by the Founding Fathers. Similarly, the New Right claim that the removal of all regulatory curbs on the private enterprise will create media freedom worthy of a ‘Jefferson democracy’. [28]

[...]

Across the world, the Californian Ideology has been embraced as an optimistic and emancipatory form of technological determinism. Yet, this utopian fantasy of the West Coast depends upon its blindness towards - and dependence on - the social and racial polarisation of the society from which it was born. Despite its radical rhetoric, the Californian Ideology is ultimately pessimistic about real social change. Unlike the hippies, its advocates are not struggling to build ‘ecotopia’ or even to help revive the New Deal. Instead, the social liberalism of New Left and the economic liberalism of New Right have converged into an ambiguous dream of a hi-tech ‘Jeffersonian democracy’. Interpreted generously, this retro-futurism could be a vision of a cybernetic frontier where hi-tech artisans discover their individual self-fulfillment in either the electronic agora or the electronic marketplace. However, as the zeitgeist of the ‘virtual class’, the Californian Ideology is at the same time an exclusive faith. If only some people have access to the new information technologies, ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ can become a hi-tech version of the plantation economy of the Old South. Reflecting its deep ambiguity, the Californian Ideology’s technological determinism is not simply optimistic and emancipatory. It is simultaneously a deeply pessimistic and repressive vision of the future.

From the response by Louis Rossetto, Editor & Publisher, Wired Magazine:

A descent into the kind of completely stupid comments on race in America that only smug Europeans can even attempt. (Any country which prohibits its own passport holders from residing within its borders, or any people who are currently allowing genocidal war to be waged in their own backyard after the stupefying genocide of WWII, shouldn't be lecturing Americans about anything having to do with race, much less events which occurred 200 years ago.) The charge of technological apartheid is just plain stupid: "Already 'red-lined' by profit-hungry telcos [isn't every company, by definition, "profit hungry?", although that description in this context is also stupid since telcos are regulated monopolies with government enforced rates of return], the inhabitants of poor inner city areas are prevented from accessing the new on-line services through lack of money." Oh really? Redlined? Universal telephone access is mandated in the US. And anyone with a telephone has access to online service. Lack of money? On-line is cheaper than cable television, and you can get a new computer for less than $1000, a used one less than $500.

The utterly laughable Marxist/Fabian kneejerk that there is such a thing as the info-haves and have-nots - this is equivalent to a 1948 Mute whining that there were TV-haves and have-nots because television penetration had yet to become universal, the logical conclusion being that, of course, the state had to step in and create television entitlements. This whole line of thinking displays a profound ignorance of how technology actually diffuses through society. Namely, there has to be a leading edge, people who take a risk on new, unproven products - usually upper tenish types, who pay through the nose for the privilege of being beta testers, getting inferior technology at inflated prices with the very real possibility that they have invested in technological dead ends like eight track or betamax or Atari. Yet they are the ones who pay back development costs and pave the way for the mass market, which, let me assure you, is every technology company's wet dream (the biggest market today for the fastest personal computers is not business, but the home). Not haves and have-nots - have-laters.

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By the 1960s, the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse had revived much of the spirit of [Wilhelm] Reich—this time for an audience already dissatisfied with the spiritual vacuum offered by consumerism. He was the most vocal member of the Frankfurt School, and spoke frequrently at student and antiwar protests. Marcuse blamed the Freudians—as well as the government and corporate authorities who used their stultifying techniques—for creating a world in which people were reduced to expresssing their feelings and identities through mass-produced objects. He said the individual had been turned into a “one-dimensional man”—conformist and repressed.

Marcuse became a hero to the real counterculture movement, and his words inspired the Weathermen, Vietnam War protests and the Black Panthers. They saw consumerism as more than a way for corporations to make money; it was also a way to keep the masses docile while the government pursued an illegal war in Southeast Asia. So breaking free of consumption-defined self was a prerequisite to becoming a conscious protester. As Linda Evans of the Weathermen explained, “We want to live a life that isn’t based on materialistic  values, and yet the whole system of government and the economy is based on proit, on personal greed, and selfishness.” But as Stew Albert, a cofounder of the anti-Vietnam movement the Yippies, contended, the police state began in an individual person’s mind. People who sought to be engaged in political activism needed first to make themselves new and better people.

The counterculture and its psychologics again revised the spirit of Wilhem Reich in the hopes of freeing people from the control of their own minds. To this end, in 1962 the Esalen Institute was founded on 127 acres of California coastline. The Institute hosted a wide range of workshops and lectures in an atmosphere of massage, hot tubs and high quality sex and drugs, all in the name of freeing people from repression. The Human Potential Movement—Renaissance individualistic humanism updated for the twentieth century—began in an explosion of new therapies.

.…

Like Dorothy embarking down the yellow-brick road to self-fulfillment, thousands flocked to the hot tubs of Esalen to find themselves and self-actualize [as promulgated by Abraham Maslow as the top of his Hierarachy of Needs]. Instead of annihilating the illusion of a self, as Buddha suggested, the self-centered spirituality of Eslaen led to a celebration of self as the source of all experience. Change the way you see the world, and the world changes. Kind of. Instead of fueling people to do something about the world, as the Weathermen and Yippies had hoped, spirituality became a way of changing one’s own perspectives, one’s own experiences and one’s own self. By pushing through to the other side of personal liberation, the descendants of Reich once again found self-adjustment the surest path to happiness. Anna Freud would have been proud. You are the problem, after all.

A dozen pages later, the book picks back up at the pivotal 1960s and, just as Turner does so excellently, connects it towards the spread of free-market economic liberalism that both the Left and Right embraced.

The young technocrats at Rand believed that John Nash’s equations presented a way to organize a society of self-interested individuals that promoted their personal freedom. By the 1960s, they had the backing of a counterculture equally obsessed with the personal needs of individuals and the corrupting influence of all institutions—even family. The Scottish psychologist R.D. Laing used game theory to model human interactions, and concluded that kindness and love were merely the tools through which people manipulated one another to get their selfish needs fulfilled. Mental illness was just a label created by the repressive state. So-called crazy people were really evidence of some greater societal problem—a “cry for help” against oppressive institutions. In fact, like the family, the state was just a means of social control that violated the most primal and fundamental urge of human beings to pursue their individual interests. Through Lain, the darkest aspects of game theory were extended to the culture at large and popularized as social truisms: your parents don’t really love you and the man is after your money. What look like social relationships are really just “the games people play.”

Hippies tool these assessments to the streets, but most of them were too distracted by self-actualization  for the movement to maintain any cohesion. Within a decade, the counterculture’s war against institutional control would become the rallying cry of the Right. The brilliance of Reagonomics was to marry the antiauthoritarian urge of what had once been the counterculture with the antigovernment bias of free-market conservatives. In Reagan’s persona as well as his politics, the independent, shoot-from-the-hip individualism of the Marlboro man became compatible—even synergistic—with the economics and culture of self-interest. No-blink brinksmanship with the “evil” Soviet empire, the dismantling of domestic government institutions, the decertification of labor unions, and the promotion of unfettered corporate capitalism all came out of the same combination of Rand Corporation game theory and the 1960s antipsychiatry movement. Regulations designed to protect the environment, worker safety, and consumer rights were summarily decried as unnecessary government meddling in the marketplace. As if channeling Friedrich Hayek by way of R.D. Laing, Reagan shrank the social-welfare system by closing the public-psychiatric-hospital system.

…

Make no mistake about it: by the late Clinton-Blair year, both the Right and the mainstream Left had accepted the basic premise adopted from systems theory that the economy was a natural system whose stability depended on the government’s getting out of the way and allowing self-interested people to work toward a dynamic equilibrium. Gone were the “compassion” and “love” that Mario Cuomo had demanded of government back in his rousing “Tale of Two Cities” speech at the 1984 Democratic convention. In their place were small government and personal accountability. The last heroes of the political age, Reagan and Thatcher were long gone. In their place, the only rebels capable of dismantling the social-welfare hierarchy were the super-CEOs: Jack Welch, Richard Branson, and Ken Lay, as well as the new breed of free-market theorists advising them.

Thanks to the combined emergence of a computer culture capable of recognizing the power of emergent systems and a rising class of dot-com workers profiting off what appeared to them to be the exploitation of a free-market technology, libertarianism was in ascendance. In reality, the phenomena we were all celebrating in the mid-1990s had little to do with the free market; the Internet had been paid for by the government, and dynamical systems theory was much more applicable to the weather and plankton populations than it was to economics. But as profits and stock indexes rose, the stars themselves seemed to be aligning, and systems theory was a good a way as any of justifying the same options packages that young programmers would have been embarrassed by just a few years before, when they were antiestablishment hackers.

…

Ironically, while the intelligentsia were using social evolution to confirm laissez fair capitalism to one another, the politicians promoting these policies to the masses were making the same sale through creationism. Right-wing conservatives turned to fundamentalist Christians to promote the free-market ethos, in return promising lip service to hot-button Christian issues such as abortion and gay marriage. It was now the godless Soviets who sought to thwart the maker’s plan to bestow the universal rights of happiness and property on mankind. America’s founders, on the other hand, had been divinely inspired to create a nation in God’s service, through which people could pursue their individual salvation and savings.

…

The same right wing think tanks writing white papers justifying game-theory economics through bottom-up social Darwinism were simultaneously advising conservatives on how to leverage Christian fundamentalists in support of the resultant ideals. What both PR efforts had in common were two falsely reasoned premises: that human beings are private, self-interested actors behaving in ways that consistently promote personal wealth, and that the laissez-faire free market is a natural and self-sustaining system through which scarce resources can be equitably distributed.

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“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine.… We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”

From a Michael Pollan article in the NY Times Magazine. Sounds very similar to these criticisms of a mobile workforce It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World release .

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I was having a hard time explaining exactly what Fred Turner means by the conclusion of his book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, I wrote about earlier. It really seems difficult to explain things without using informationalist rhetoric.

This makes me think of the About Wealth Bondage page:

Wealth Bondage is pervasive, the horizon within which postmodern life, in every aspect, appears to us as a Market.…

All interpretations of Wealth Bondage are themselves inside Wealth Bondage and as such are provisional, for there is not “outside” of Wealth Bondage.

I’m not entirely sure what the heck that means, but if I were to be all thinky, I could try to connect the idea of Bakhtin’s Dialogic:

everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response.

with the idea of memes and suppose that certain rhetorical “memes” (like peer-to-peer informationalism or market exchange) are able to, within the diologic, competitively displace other rhetorical memes.

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Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture has an amazingly pointed criticism of modern technocracy (my word) following what is an amazing outline of both Countercultural/Communal philosophy and modern cyberculture.

One book mentioned in this conclusion is Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine:

(page 258, paragraph breaks and emphasis mine)

[Ullman’s life is] flexible and mobile and it demands that she build small tribes around a shared mission and link them together with information and information technologies. To the extent that Ullman tries to change the world, she does so as Buckminster Fuller might suggest she should: by designing new technologies for the management of information and the transformation of society’s resources into knowledge on which others can act.

Yet Ullman’s turn toward technologies of consciousness and toward social and economic networks has hardly brought her into the community she seeks… Cut off from… membership in permanent corporate and civic communities… her power derives primarily from what knowledge of technological systems she can carry with her and secondarily from her networks of professional friends. Her personal links to her colleagues are tenuous and brief. She is lonely. And the situation is not likely to change anytime soon.

As Ullman’s example suggests, coupling one’s life to the technologies of consciousness does not necessarily amplify one’s intellectual or emotional abilities or help one create a more whole self. On the contrary, it may require individuals to deny their own bodies, the rhythms of the life cycle, and, to the extent that their jobs require them to collaborate with far-away colleagues, even the rhythms of day and night..

It may in fact result in every bit as thorough an integration of the individual into the economic machine as the one threatened by the military-industrial-academic bureaucracy forty years earlier.

And the pointed critique (page 260):

The rhetoric of peer-to-peer informationalism, however, much like the rhetoric of consciousness out of which it grew, actively obscures the material and technical infrastructure on which both the Internet and the lives of the digital generation depend. Behind the fantasy of unimpeded information flow lies the reality of millions of plastic keyboards, silicon wafers, glass-faced monitors and endless miles of cable. All of these technologies depend on manual laborers, first to build them and later to tear them apart.

This is followed by a brief description of both environmental impact and that this physical burden falls upon those who lack social and financial resources.

Like the communards of the 1960s, the techno-utopians of the 1990s denied their dependency on any but themselves. At the same time, they developed a way of thinking and talking about digital technologies from which it was almost impossible to challenge their own elite status.… Even as they conjured up visions of a disembodied, peer-to-peer utopia, and even as they suggested that such a world would in fact represent a return to a more natural, more intimate state of being, writers such as Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, and John Perry Barlow deprived their many readers of a language with which to think a bout the complex ways in which embodiment shapes all of human life, about the natural and social infrastructures on which that life depends, and about the effects that digital technologies and the network mode of production might have on life and its essential infrastructures.

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…a term that refers to the process by which experts in one area draw on the authority of experts in another area to justify their activities.

and it follows interestingly with

As Bowker explains, “An isolated scientific worker making an outlandish claim could gain rhetorical legitimacy by pointing to support from another field–which in turn referenced the first worker’s field to support its claim. The language of cybernetics provided a site where this exchange could occur.“

The other term I took from the book is “network forum” in which individuals from different fields can meet and exchange legitimacy. Turner’s book gives the Whole Earth Catalog as a print example.

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