The Californian Ideology (1995)
bruces.medium.com
bruces.medium.com
– Adam Curtis’ documentaries convering similar topics have been mentioned here alread, but not…
– …Fred Turner’s "From Cyberculture to Counterculture", als discussing politics and ideas about the future in tech-culture. If you do not want to read the book (which is excellently written imho), you might enjoy his shorter articles like Don’t be evil [1] and Burning Man at Google [2]
– The article has already been discussed several times here (not surprising) [3]
[1] https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turner-dont-be-evil/
[2] https://fredturner2022.sites.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiy...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The Californian Ideology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991057 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
The Californian Ideology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28376086 - Sept 2021 (3 comments)
The Californian Ideology (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18123754 - Oct 2018 (1 comment)
The Californian Ideology (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992151 - Dec 2017 (95 comments)
I watched it happen through the mid 20-teens and I am still puzzled about why and how this got such traction.
In any case one result of this was to cause the whole project of the “Californian ideology” to jump the rails. The original ideology was very libertarian about LGBT issues and generally not racist in the classical “race blindness” framing. This made it loosely an ally of the left at least on social issues, with the two agreeing to disagree on economics.
When the power of the technical aptitude of these folks met hard right reactionary ideology, you got high tech highly savvy movements like the whole 4chan-borne Pepe the frog… thing.
That in turn disgusted the left and turned off a bunch of the remaining adherents of the original ideology in its original libertarian form. Many of the latter were driven fully to the left, abandoning libertarian economics and certain less-lefty libertarian social positions.
Meanwhile the left got less liberal. I’m not sure how this happened either. Someone more familiar can tell that story. The time frame was the same though: the 20-teens.
This left us in the end with a techie community split between technocratic leftists who now believe in censorship and benevolent concentrated power and technocratic rightists who now believe in actual monarchy or even fascism or theocracy.
(I think this is a choice of two different awful dystopias.)
Some of us remain though. I feel like a baffled refugee after some kind of apocalypse. I continue to work on decentralized human centric tech designed to deliver both freedom and human dignity and empowerment like we thought we were doing in the 90s. I sometimes feel alone. I feel less alone on Mastodon where it seems some of us now hang.
Edit: or maybe what happened is just that the masks fell off. A lot of tankie reds and technocrats maybe once pretended to be more liberal while a lot of authoritarian rightists pretended to be libertarians. Maybe everyone stopped pretending, leaving those of us who actually believed in the fusion of liberty and humanism bewildered.
Also Californian ideology is a bit misleading. One did not have to be in California, though it did seem to be concentrated there.
I think overall this is a recurring and common mechanism of polarization that has the only people daring to speak chewing the scenery like something outta Warhammer 40k[1], and everyone in the middle just hunkering down to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.
> Emboldened by supposed advances in Artificial Intelligence and medical science, the Extropian cult fantasises of abandoning the ‘wetware’ of the human state altogether to become living machines.
to the strength and certainty of steel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIMZ0WyY88
[Edit: NB, there are countries with viable and functioning political centres. They're just not the countries which constitute the cultural centre of the 'net.]
Which are they? Every country I've got insight into has had a marked decline in the political dialogue post 2010-somewhere with a significant uptick in polarization and shit-flinging (I think coinciding with most of the political dialogue moving onto Twitter; where given the medium is the message; generalizations and zingers rule).
In particular, there was a brief period several years ago when the far right in my country ran political posters with candidates liberally draped in the national flag. They don't do that anymore.
Will conduct a survey of EEA parliaments tomorrow, if not later today.
left centre right
DE 39 613 79
FR 74 387 88
IT* 64 134 184
ES** 35 217 52
PL 3 212 240
RO - 279 32
NL*** 16 100 28
BE 12 94 25
CZ - 180 20
EL 21 265 10
* 5 star has been counted as left? they claim unaligned, but seem to be populists who are —at least currently?— in opposition to a centre-right/right-wing government.
** many small (and some not-so-small!) regional parties
*** The worker's party is only centre-left here, but not to worry, there's a "party for the animals" on the far left :-P
SE 24 252 73
but the current government (Moderata/Kristdemokraterna/Liberalerna) is solidly centre-right. (w/ Socialdemokraterna as centre-left opposition)
Is this close to reasonable?
* The response to the 9/11 that lead to multiple western military quagmires
* A financial crisis followed by a recession, with lots of rhetoric that placed blame on regular Americans
* Privatization of public services that did not bear meaningful fruit
Basically we ran head-first into some real limitations of Liberalism.
Edit: For what it’s worth I think 2022 showed the opposite with Russia’s own military quagmire, the unrest in Iran, and Xi’s China we are now seeing the limitations of authoritarian regimes.
You don't really see this on HN though. Economic illiteracy is rife here as is, more generally, social-science illiteracy about how politically-driven decision making works in large real-world organizations (Including but not limited to governments). These are the insights that the core of libertarianism is based on. Of course if you mean the rather more self-serving, "I'd rather not pay taxes" Sovereign Citizens' kind of libertarianism you may well be correct.
> You don't really see this on HN though.
Spot on!
I have a weird interest in the old-times, when geek were actually libertarian? (well, based on my readings and what people told me, they seemed to be different from now)
And it's not just the people: instead of "safe" languages like rust, people liked "unsafe" perl that let you do about everything!
I really wish there was some time travel, to get the chance to live and work in the 1990s-early 2000s where there seemed to be both optimism AND libertarianism in the tech world, instead of the current pro-big-government/social conformity trend.
But since tech is now mostly fueled by advertising $$, it is difficult to get techies to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
To me it seems to be a bit of both?
BTW having read a bit of your other comments, I find your analyses both insightful and introspective.
You seem to be from the EU and to have worked in tech during the 1990s.
Have you lived in the US too? Can you tell me more about how you saw things change in the US and the EU from then to know?
I have some weird interest in old tech: hardware like Thinkpads, software like Perl... but the culture is also very foreign and interesting.
I just watched a documentary about "Dinosaurs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs_(TV_series) and it seems so modern yet quaint?
I want to know more from the viewpoint of someone who lived in that era!
I was living in the US in the 80s and 90s (among which, both in Silicon Valley and in "flyover" country, with non-domicile tours in Boston, Seattle, and the DC Beltway)
Have you read Microserfs yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs
It's a pretty good capture of our Zeitgeist. In fact, I distinctly remember one day when I was at my desk, and two of my colleagues were enjoying the afternoon sun on the balcony of my office. We had started to discuss Microserfs, through the open window next to my desk, and one of them remarked: "it's pretty accurate ... except they're all dating within the company". One year or so later, the company had grown by a factor of two or three, and it turns out Coupland had indeed called it in advance: all three of us were then in intra-company relationships. (which was again, a topic of balcony discussion)
(sorry, no idea about Dinosaurs: we were working extreme hours [some days the company was comping us ~$2'000/day (in 2023 USD), which was considered very good money back then for "kids" not many years out of uni], and except for attending watch parties for Simpsons, Beavis & Butthead, and Spike & Mike's when it came through town, I was not getting much pop culture exposure during these years)
Another anecdote: our landlord once complained that the janitor had found porno mags in the restrooms, and as the other tenants were law firms, maybe they might have been from us, possibly one of our contractors? My boss, indignant, called them up and she asked them if they knew we were an internet company? With a T1 connection? How could they possibly think any of us would still be paying for porn on dead trees?
Not at all, please take your time! And if you have more insights, feel free to post them later! I'll check again the comments for the next few days, because all this is so intriguing to me!
> I was living in the US in the 80s and 90s
This begs many questions: where you born here? Where do you live now? (and ...why?)
> Have you read Microserfs yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs > It's a pretty good capture of our Zeitgeist
I haven't but if it's a good capture of the 1990s zeitgeist, I will!
> (any specific qs, go ahead and I'll do my best)
Besides the lack of optimism, what are the other differences between now and then that stand out to you?
> what are the other differences between now and then that stand out to you?
It may not be so fair to 'now', but: https://app.pressnt.net/post/77/
(thanks for making me think about it long enough to come up with a hypothesis; I think I do address both the things about current startup culture which I find off-putting, and —if you read between the lines a bit— why we might've preferred power to safety in our tools.)
Lagniappe: https://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html
Q for you: anything in particular that was modern yet quaint? CRTs? phones?
I mean following very genuinely: if everyone has to claim he is libertarian, then what you have is group thing.
But that's not the official narrative. So perhaps if you want to think about politically-driven decision making you might want to include the network of funded think-tanks and both covert and overt influencers in the media who invent and push these narratives. And maybe even consider why they're so dominant, and why their definitions of "freedom" and "economics" are so consistently and exclusively pro-oligarch.
Back in the day, people actually read Road to Serfdom or A People’s History and picked an ideology. College libertarians were middle or upper-class economic conservatives who were athiests, trekkies, gay or wanted to smoke weed. Now that that’s all fashionable and they’re not at risk of getting beat up or jailed they don’t have anything to get riled about except Corporate 1st Amendment reimaginings, digital privacy or why one of “those” people kept them from their slot at Stanford.
Yes, this handily explains how populist figures like Trump, AOC or MTG have managed to become so popular as of late. Twitter is a place where the most outrage-inducing and simplistic soundbites get all the attention. Subtlety and nuance are dead in that medium.
Lolwut?
Both the left and the right complain that libertarianism is a gateway drug to the other party. "We'd have won if it weren't for that obnoxious 2% that won't vote for anybody who's platform is all about controlling people" and all that jazz.
I think there's a separate complaint about the Libertarian candidates peeling voters away from conservative Republicans in close contests, resulting in a Democratic victory. The problem with this argument is that many of these Libertarian voters have zero interest in major-party politics, and may not be closely aligned with either party. So if you removed the Libertarian candidate from the ballot, many Libertarian voters would rather stay home than decide on the "lesser evil", and those that did choose a major party wouldn't support one party over another enough to matter.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/760511/10807095-the-new-leaders-o...
The left realized that most liberal democracies have laws against hate speech, technocratic power centers, extensive regulation, etc.
If Germany can outlaw hate speech, fringe political movements, and private ownership of firearms, why can’t we?
Notice how the Democrats focus on healthcare, even when it hurts them (they were killed at the polls over Obamacare in 2010). If every other country has state guaranteed affordable healthcare, why can’t we?
Because government meddling has already made healthcare unaffordable?
In the US the government is wholly captured by the oligarchy. There's a reason why health care is extortionate and the defence budget is a huge pork factory, and it's not because voters are content with that balance.
That's one of the points of the original article. The US pats itself on the back for being a market driven economy of freedom and opportunity, when in reality for most of the population it's a labour camp. It's true there are various levels of comfort, but they all demand time and labour and non-compliance is punished severely.
Genuine freedom requires at least an eight figure net worth. Without that the system treats you like a disposable NPC.
Independent opportunity is possible, but most people quite literally cannot afford the risks.
All large-enough organizations are captured by an oligarchy of some kind. It's an iron law of social organization. The term for a genuinely decentralized counterpart of organization that's immune to such capture is, well, a "market". (And yes, non-monetary markets can exist. HN itself is, in no small part, a market for upvotes.)
> ... when in reality for most of the population it's a labour camp. It's true there are various levels of comfort, but they all demand time and labour
People who have lived in a less-developed country will be well aware that this description is far more applicable to such places than the U.S. The U.S. is far from perfect, there's plenty of room for improvement. But the direction of improvement is for more involvement of a genuine free market, not less of it.
what a phrase
This does a better job:
https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2021/01/Jake1-1...
Photo caption: "That time 4chan influenced politics."
Somewhere along the line Progressives were able to take up the lead as if they were the continuation/inheritors of the hippie ideal, but they in no way were/are, they are the opposite. They take the 'hippies were trying to make the world better' then add 'and WE KNOW what rules will make it better, so we are therefor an extension of the hippie ideals'.
The only answer to the neoliberalism of the last 40 years is a course correction to socialism and big state government.
"I always knew that only the decent people should have rights, and the indecent ones should not. ... Personally, I've had enough. Some time ago we [dissidents] and the USA have used this concept as a ram against the USSR and communists. This concept has served its purpose, and we should stop lying about human rights and promoting their defenders, lest we undermine ourselves."
(http://www.newlookmedia.ru/?p=11889; many people still considered her liberal after this and worse, but that's beside the point)
Now, this is a different case in a sense that internal anti-Soviet opposition was generally somewhere to the right of the state ideology (although it still included socialists etc) - Novodvorskaya was never "left" in any meaningful sense. But, more broadly, this shows how people can be seemingly genuine about their political liberalism when they are fighting against long odds, and then when they win, you find out that they always saw it all as a tool to gain power to advance their agenda; a tool that's too dangerous to leave for the opposition to your rule. I wouldn't be surprised if similar attitudes existed on the American left back when it broadly supported freedom of speech etc.
Of all the bad predictions in this essay, this is most dead-wrong, deader than a doornail wrong.
The internet favors natural monopolies, despite its decentralized design. Or to be more accurate, people using the internet favor natural monopolies.
He's a little goofy, but I think Slavoj Zizek is right when he says information technology is communistic. Because it benefits from unified standards and data centralization and suffers from heterogeneity and data silos, it seems to be that information technology will progress from competitive markets, to monopolies, to utilities, to state control in some cases.
I'm sure there's some information theory which can express this better than I am, but it's weird that market forces, which are traditionally explained as the least bad way to handle low-info, distributed decision making, don't perform as well when it comes to the distribution and regulation of information itself.
The whole point of the Internet was to be a decentralized network with no single point of failure. Something that might look like a unified platform to users, but be implemented behind the scenes via self-interested coöperation among a huge number of involved actors. This is how markets work, and what communist central planning has never been able to replicate.
Content creators on the other hand end up with a really long tail. They obviously benefit from a vastly wider reach and the ability to thrive with tiny niche followings. But the then need to compete with everyone else in the world.
The remaining obstacles amount to things like IP regulation, that can prevent entry even by a more open competitor.
That’s what makes it a natural monopoly, you can’t have two business in stable compensation one of them will fail.
Anyway, any market created monopoly will weaken once it loses it’s competitive edge. The run down movie theater may get driven out by a new cinema just as De Beers fell to from 80+% to sub 30% market share, but the barriers to entry are real.
Yes it's a monopoly in that there's only one firm, but it won't behave much like one. Because the firm will be incented towards being a strong competitor towards any new entrants in the market, lest it be supplanted by them - even before those new entrants exist.
And the network effect case is one where you're actually creating value for your customer base - at least until an even more open competitor comes along. See how Compuserve, formerly a market-dominant walled garden benefiting from network effects, had to open themselves up to the Internet.
Instead monopolies are defined by having monopoly power in the marketplace.
Internet just happened to be the fertile ground (for all kinds of business) on which the present flock of monopolies grew after anti-trust has been severely curtailed under Reagan.
Looking at the "More from Medium" sidebar, we see suggestions for cyberspace activities that are neither rare nor (presumably) are well-done...
- 20 Entertaining Uses of ChatGPT You Never Knew Were Possible
- 5 Unique Passive Income Ideas — How I Make $4,580/Month
- Don’t Just Set Goals. Build Systems
====
[0] considering it hails from the country that brought us both Molière and Minitel Rose, https://www.journalduhacker.net is a bit disappointing. The revolution may not be televised, but it will probably —at least on this side of the GFW— be discussed online in (maternal or non-maternal) english.
[1] although I am here on Th' Continent now, despite having in 1995 been in California, so in the meantime I've apparently chosen my meatspace with my feet.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34231343
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress
> He sees that people do not drive cars or ride in elevators, but they run in the streets and climb the walls of empty elevator shafts, which explains why everyone in this new world is so out of breath. Robots whip people in the street and protect order. Through successive doses of more and more powerful types of up'n'at'm, Tichy sees increasingly horrible visions of the world, climaxing in a frozen horrorscape where people sleep blissfully in the snow, and the police robots are revealed to be people who are convinced that they are robots. The frozen state of the world explains why he has always found the new world to be so cold.
Otlet & La Fontaine came close when they tried to get Le Corbusier (quite the artist-engineer) to build a version of the Mundaneum. They intended it to be public and electric, even somewhat decentralized. The surviving bits of it is fully wheelchair accessible.
> ...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...
In some cases (eg The Space Merchants, Pandora's Planet, and arguably The Ayes of Texas) these rugged individualists were parodies.
Is the "Virtual Class" of this essay (symbolic analysts, according to Robert Reich) impacted by ChatGPT?
> Electronic Agora or Electronic Marketplace?
Do both of these possibilities seem a little quaint, in a world which also contains 防火长城, شورای عالی فضای مجازی, and Роскомнадзор?
> the question facing the emerging hypermedia industry isn’t whether or not it will be organised as a mixed economy, but what sort of mixed economy it will be.
Now, this holds up, even in hindsight.
> Freedom is Slavery
I once asked someone of that generation why the hippies thought they could change the world. "After the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, anything seemed possible" was the reply. From the standpoint of 2023, I'd say Reconstruction continues to have yet to be fully in the past, for the Old Country is still dealing with the aftermath of 1868 and the 14A.
> Forward Into the Past
Ah, yes, the twenty-first century, when I can see "flyover deplorables" in the Old Country forming their own separate but equal social networks, sharing memes in which the fine christian Donetsk and Lugansk forces are flying a starred St. Andrew's flag (as opposed to the what, non-christian? Ukrainian forces?) Now, these memes are nowhere to be found on RuNet, but my maximal entropy source attribution is that it's highly likely that's where they'd ideologically originated.
> Cyborg Masters and Robot Slaves
Recall: the Virginians were only carrying on in the traditions of the Athenians.
> There are Alternatives
The specific alternatives mentioned don't seem to have panned out; or at least they are not being publicised at the moment. I am, however, optimistic that other alernatives will eventually be adopted.
Americans will always do the right thing ... after they have tried everything else. — WC
> The Rebirth of the Modern
The EU is trying to assert itself here (and full props to balsam for the Mundaneum! chapeau !); I would just suggest to my former landspeople in the Old Country that it might be nice if the net were indeed a place "with Liberty, and Justice, for all"
the thing this article never mentions is californias hippies sold out, bought up all the real estate, became landed gentry and left their kids with the bill. apple replaces your itunes with drm tunes and the rights are to be a consumer, not to repair.
the hackers left a looooong time ago, and now most of them hack tractors lately. in fact the minute gig fiber showed up was when the virtual class ceased to be anything but an exodus for california. this is nostalgiabate.
> And who would have suspected that as technology and freedom were worshipped more and more, it would become less and less possible to say anything sensible about the society in which they were applied?
> One of the weirdest things about the rightwards drift of the Californian Ideology is that the West Coast itself is a creation of the mixed economy. Government dollars were used to build the irrigation systems, highways, schools, universities and other infrastructural projects which makes the good life possible in California. On top of these public subsidies, the West Coast hi tech industrial complex has been feasting off the fattest pork barrel in history for decades.
Bruce Sterling is not a fool or a shill.
I'm really not convinced you read this entire article.
tech worship isnt preventing free speech, its the tech companies this article ostensibly sings praise to.
reproduction of neoslavery isnt the biggest issue thats just late stage capitalism. its the persistent failure at any level of the californian ideology to do anything to correct it for the past forty years thats a damning indictment of its proposition
> However, by championing this seemingly admirable ideal, these techno-boosters are at the same time reproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery. Their utopian vision of California depends upon a wilful blindness towards the other — much less positive — features of life on the West Coast: racism, poverty and environmental degradation.[5] Ironically, in the not too distant past, the intellectuals and artists of the Bay Area were passionately concerned about these issues.
At the moment I write this, the title has a "(1995)" so it could explain the disconnect.
I read and loved this and propagated it around my friends when it came out in the mid 90s. It was a poignant criticism of the bullshit fake utopia being sold by Silicon Valley and the .com boom at the time.
I too know some great hackers who left California a long time ago to hack tractors, who are still outstanding in their field!
I'm curious how one goes from Reagan to US Progressive.
The common conservative critique of progressives is progressives say "affirmative action, affordable housing, wealth redistribution are all great, unless it affects me."
There are very good reasons you let markets choose with minimal government interference.
People are going to be greedy in either scenario. But one is government officials having power. The other is regular people.
High taxes, but it's much easier to start and run a business, there are numerous unicorns, housing is affordable, locales of all kinds tend to be more pleasant, especially in cities.
And no one is bankrupted by health care.
That’s the opposite of a Free market.
It's either bad bad regulations or... capitalism's evil drive for profit over life. So it costs more here where we don't have nationalized healthcare than anywhere else, and we don't live as long. Hmm...
1. Population growth. I would say this is the largest factor to making housing unaffordable. Unless your claim is that all growth if from local boomers kids (hint: it isn't).
2. Geography. San Francisco is surrounded by quite a bit of water if you haven't noticed. The Bay Area is fenced in with hills. I would argue that geography creates as much of the problem as zoning laws (because if there was easy room to expand people wouldn't be pushing to cancel long term planning and zoning laws and just force through high density housing).
But nice try trying to blame someone on the fact that you want something (to live in a certain area) and think it's fair to trample peoples property rights to get it, make them out to be villians and 'others' worthy of scorn, while ignoring the largest factors (population growth and geography).