The California Ideology (1995)
alamut.com
alamut.com
The article was a bit long-winded and opaque, but the thesis is strong: Those developing technology often place too much uncritical faith in it. Technology is a means to bettering human life, not an end in itself. We shouldn't be blinded into thinking that there's virtue in progress for progress's sake. There's virtue in progress to the degree that such progress makes our lives more meaningful or better.
For example, for the sake of argument imagine that the "natural" endpoint of technological development is a super-powerful weapon that can be constructed by anyone with minimal resources. Then it would be the case that unfettered technological development would lead to the progress trap of the end of civilization.
So there's value in not deifying technological progress, and reflecting critically on its impact on humanity. Whatever drives current development of technology (massive defense spending, pressure to automate, academic incentives to first movers) need not lead to good outcomes for humanity in the long run. In particular, the current environment is for haphazard development of technology without questioning its effects.
The main idea is that we can and should question technology and technological development -- just as we do any other system of our society. Blind faith in any system is a bad thing, whether it's undue faith in the invisible hand of the market or over-rosy views about technological development.
The most important line for me is: "With no obvious rivals, the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete."
This line is more true than the author realizes. There are no better ideas.
I have this deep and all-encompassing sense that all political ideologies have failed, and that nobody in the realm of political or social ideology has had anything relevant to say about the human condition for a very long time.
Almost everything I read -- liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, green, doesn't matter -- sounds starkly "retro" to my ears... the endless rehashing of the same tired old arguments over and over again. It's as if nothing new has been thought about politics or society in 30+ years.
I also have this sense that everyone sounds reactionary. Everyone is arguing over what we should go "back" to -- back to the 50s, the 60s, pre-industrial hunter-gatherer societies, etc. Almost everyone, liberal or conservative, builds their arguments around the idea that there's some mythical golden age that we need to go back to. I think this is an admission of intellectual bankruptcy by the whole lot of them. Nobody talks about working toward anything because nobody's got the faintest clue about any systematic, coherent program that might make the world better.
That's why people aren't struggling for anything. They have no idea where to go.
Didn't Nietzsche predict this a hundred years ago -- that eventually we'd hit this time period when nothing seemed true and all ideas seemed spent?
Except for most conceptions of socialism/communism (talk of proto-communist hunter gatherer societies notwithstanding).
(Non-strawman) communists see communism as a future post-scarcity society, like Star Trek economics. To them, the path to get there must involve ownership models that (to them) are not exploitative.
From the very start the idea was to figure out how to arrange society in order that the incentives are maximized to bring about post-scarcity. (Let's not get into a discussion about how well anyone did in attempting to bring that about - that's a very complex topic by itself).
So I don't know what you're talking about when you say that socialists are looking to back to some golden past.
I read a lot of broad ideological writing as well, so when people make statements that go completely against what adherents of a particular ideology have been saying themselves for over 150 years, well, it's a little jarring.
Again, this isn't about any ideology being right or wrong, this is about accuraccy.
> There are no better ideas.
The biggest mistake you can make is thinking that history is over.
I've toyed around with a few radical thoughts recently, but political ideology isn't my bag so it's just private speculation.
One is that the problem with socialist schemes is that they don't really address the root of inequality. It's become kind of clear to me that the root is heritable inequality of both the genetic sort and the inherited-privilege sort.
So I've speculated a little about some sort of "transhumanist socialism" that would attempt to address inequality at the biological level by making both germ-line and postnatal enhancements universally available. The idea would be to transform humanity itself into a runaway self-improving AI by siphoning off some percentage of GDP and applying it to the artificial redistribution of beneficial adaptations and the augmentation of human intelligence across familial lines. By far the best thing to be taxed here would be inheritance, since the whole aim is to break heritable inequality.
It's the sort of idea that would make everyone's head explode. Most dogmatic libertarians would hate it since it contains the word "socialism" and involves some sort of wealth redistribution. Liberals are all greens now that worship the naturalistic fallacy, so they'd all scream "no GMO!" Conservatives would hate it since it's theologically sacrilegious and would disrupt the social order rather deeply.
Makes me think I'm on the right track. :)
Technically speaking, "anarcho-transhumanism" is an existing ideology, but...
PLEASE DO THIS. I'm freaking salivating. I mean, screw "runaway AI", but yes, hell yes, let's go ahead and slaughter inequality and injustice at their source, and unleash everything that people can be and aren't allowed to right now because their "betters" wouldn't get to feel a hierarchical status difference in their retarded ape-brains.
To do it right -- to propose something like that that isn't just an off the cuff manifesto -- you'd have to do a lot of research and work out all the economics and game theory everything out. You'd have to do a real scholarly treatment of it. It'd take at least someone deeply educated in economics with several years to dedicate.
Then you'd have to steel yourself against the howling, since if you actually put something like that out there you'd be a communist baby eating God hating liberal right winger Illuminati Satan worshipper who wants to poison us all with GMO from fracking wastewater and torture kittens and make us all take the mark of the beast, or something.
So, basically, you'd be me. Well, except for the Mark of the Beast thing: I think even wearing a logo on a T-shirt is a little too dehumanizing.
1) Be relentlessly practical. No "magic happens here" utopian vaporware bullshit.
2) Be historically practical. Don't presuppose the existence of a purely volitional state from which all initiation of force or fraud has been outlawed, or other such bits of moral futurism. We are simply nowhere near such things. Grapple with political realities. We still live in a world that is absolutely ruled by force and arbitrary authority. If we want to get beyond that, we have to chart a practical course toward the betterment of the human condition that begins where we are now and takes concrete understandable steps.
3) Put forward a vision, but also talk about baby steps -- about things we might do here and now to evolve toward a condition like this without requiring the whole kabang to be sold at once.
4) I'd suggest dealing with the critics -- and there will be shitloads of them from every quarter of the political landscape -- by turning sanctimonious moral arguments around. A conservative is implicitly advocating the maintenance of the present condition and its state of injustice and suffering, etc. A liberal is inconsistent -- claiming to advocate progress while opposing its concrete methods. Greens (of the "religious" sort) have simply made a god out of fate -- the naturalistic fallacy.
5) One specific thing you'll get is the Hitler comparison. Anyone who advocates going beyond the human condition in some deep or fundamental way gets compared to Hitler. In addition to pointing it out as dishonest hyperbole, it's important to point out that Hitlerian eugenics is the opposite of this. It's curing the disease by killing the patient... the very opposite of making the means of human betterment more universally available.
You can only pull off multiple exclamation points once in a lifetime.
(Real answer: I'm a computer scientist, not a geneticist :-(.)
While you could do what you say, you could also do a billion other things. I consider desire control to be one of the most subversive technologies possible. We are to a great extent enslaved through the manipulation of inborn and conditioned desire. If we can manipulate our own desires...
I'd expect the first applications to be essentially medicinal: helping people overcome persistent unwanted urges like addictions, pedophilia, or obsessive compulsive disorders. But think about where it could go from there.
Making yourself "want to work" for example could be either empowering or disempowering depending on the context. Making yourself not care about hierarchy could be both as well. For example: how much money could you save if you genuinely no longer cared about status symbols?
On the other hand, we hear almost nothing about such "desire/mind shaping" technologies, and in general people people show little interest in them. I wonder, why is that?
I may try one of these tDCS devices soon. If I do I will blog it.
And clearly you're an exception. And i'm not talking about buying - just general awareness about that tech and it's possibilities(which might be tied to more investment and faster development of the tech).
Everyone I see is not doing this. I'm not sure how to reconcile our completely different takes on CA. FWIW, I live in the East Bay Area.
I actually think the "California ideology" is probably the most progressive thing standing, but that's not saying much. I do agree with the article that it sort of wins by default for being the only worldview to advance any kind of optimism at all.
Imre Lakatos, a philosopher of science in the 60s/70s, had an idea to try to rescue science from the earlier attack on it by Kuhn (or, at least, his more radical misinterpreters). A body of science isn't so much defined as a particular set of facts, but by the core theoretical underpinnings behind it. And what's key: instead of the naive falsificationism of Popper, he recognized, like Kuhn, that scientists would come up with ad hoc elaborations or patches on the core theory to save it for the day.
Unlike Kuhn (or his misinterpreters), he believed that these ad hoc justifications weren't necessarily bad. They can be part of a progressive research program or a degenerative research program. The key difference being that ad hoc explanations in a progressive program enhance the explanatory power of the program--suggesting new experiments and new possible insights--while degenerative ones don't.
Now I come back to your main point about political ideas. I believe this scheme can be applied to many different fields, including state political philosophy. And the issue we are seeing is that all these existing approaches--from libertarianism to Rawlsian liberalism, state socialism to anarchism--are more or less spent forces. Which is to say, the various experiments and experiences we've run all point to the reality that the only stable state is one that's run on neoliberal principles (which is ideologically a rationalistic Rawlsian state and materially a state dominated by powerful, propertied interests). All others fail, from either internal or external competition.
Worse, we're unable to really run further experiments, so the ability to create alternative, progressive research programs is sharply circumscribed. Any failures of the neoliberal state are to be handled ad hoc in neoliberal frameworks. And that's as much a condemnation of all the previous attempts at state building and management as neoliberalism itself: in terms of politics, we're stuck using degenerative Newtonian mechanics despite obvious failures, and all of the critics of it are attacking it from programs that are not so much degenerative as dead.
I think for anything different, we need some kind of radically disruptive technology that would change the material terms we build our society on. But how we get from here to there--or if there's even a there, there--is an entirely different question.
What have been the experimental failures of social democracy and democratic socialism?
I'll take the societies of northern Europe that have established a large welfare state--at least relative to the Anglosphere--within a framework of capitalist economic institutions to be the (really only) representatives of social democracy. I don't really know anyplace that could be characterized as democratic socialism.
And... they're not bad off. If I could choose to be born anywhere under the veil of ignorance, they'd probably be my top choice. But I'd classify them as wholly neoliberal regimes. Even if you take issue with that characterization, at the very least, if you look at their governments over the past twenty years, they have moved sharply toward a more neoliberal program.
Which is the key point: at best, social democratic parties are mostly engaged in rearguard actions, trying to protect the best of what was built during the 20th century. Ideologically, however, they're adrift, having jettisoned pretty much everything they had, and their claim to governance always amounts to "we'll do neoliberalism better than the other parties!" Even then, more often than not they lose against opponents on the Right. Whatever you think of the ideology of social democracy, it's not offering anything new nowadays because it can't even imagine a world different from the neoliberal one we inhabit.
One thing I wonder, is whether the next new thing will be thought out first and then executed, or executed almost by mistake, in pieces, only being seen to take shape as a social trend once it has assembled itself, little link by little link, from the ground up. Two of my favorite social paradigms/ trends/ somethings (which I believe are almost, but not quite spent) -- Christianity, Capitalism -- have done just that. Sure there is theory that happens along the way (St. Paul, Milton Friedman), but it is actually in the thick of the action as people jockey for power (in the wide, Nietzschean sense). (Edit: FYI, this is almost straight Foucault, except he believed in some naive French justice and couldn't take the Nietzschean medicine full strength). (Edit, 2: If I remember, Uncle Fritz also predicted that God would give his last shudder and be finally dead about two centuries after the publishing of Genealogy of Morals about 1889... I love that guy... Just 75 more years...)
Another thing I wonder, is didn't Nietzsche also predict that only once we finally finish our utter boredom with empty ideologies that make us feel safe will we be free to start realizing our potential as human beings? And, he promised, there will be LOTS of good music....
I'm definitely very jaded about the prospect for political improvement. Politics seems like something that has to be hacked around and contemptuously ignored for the foreseeable future.
The feeling of "it's all exhausted" is at least partially a deliberate product of neoliberalism itself.
BTW... George Gilder is really an oddball character. He's a bit of a visionary, but also an ardent theocrat and believer in creationism... albeit of a less literalist more "deist" variety than Ken Ham. Peter Thiel strikes me as similar to Gilder in a few ways, but Thiel is less theocratic and more socially liberal.
I could interpret that a few different ways. Which one do you have in mind?
California companies, in my experience, have a superficial hatred for the East Coast business culture, with the dress codes and expectations of propriety. You wouldn't see people cracking open beers at 2:00 on a "Summer Friday" in a New York shop. So it seems that they're anti-Establishment. In reality, the VC-funded world has become a new Establishment that is making many of the mistakes of the old one. It claims that it is morally superior to all those "bankers and lawyers", but I don't find this to be valid. I've known a lot of bankers, lawyers, and tech executives and the ethics are worst in the third crowd.
Perhaps surprisingly, these supposedly stodgy East Coast companies are often more progressive in terms of actual behavior. For example, it's not weird or rare to see a female Managing Director at an investment bank, whereas female tech executives (excluding girlfriends and wives of other hotshots) are extremely uncommon. Or, for another example, take layoffs. Banks have layoffs and they really suck, but banks offer severance and usually give a good reference. VC-funded tech companies, on the other hand, have "low-performer initiatives" (read: witch hunts) so they can avoid the negative press of an honest layoff.
The East Coast stodginess, to me, has value because it's better to have documented and defined power relationships to start a discussion (and, one hopes, end it with doing the right thing regardless of who is in power) than having the creepy, undefined power relationships that you see in a VC-funded startup. Power seems to behave the worst when people feel compelled to ignore its existence.
Also, banks have a more robust profit-sharing system. Yeah, there's politics in the bonus system and tech is undervalued and traders are often overvalued, but top programmers are treated better by Wall Street than by VC-funded companies, unless they have the connections to make themselves founders. I'd rather be earning "only" $500,000, while traders make $20 million, then get 0.2% of something valuated on paper at $200M ("oh, but it's going to be $75 billion when we rape Google's shit for breakfast!") subject to vesting and dilution and the myriad hazards that can hit you when you're holding an illiquid penny-stock investment in your own employer.
Finally, the age discrimination is a lot worse in the VC-funded world. Your earning potential and promotability decline a little bit after 55 or so, but it's a softer landing (you become an consultant or advisor and still make good money) and it's nothing like the "CEO or out by 40" VC-funded culture.
The Cali culture has tossed aside the superficial negatives of East Coast stodgy culture, but the moral meat is how people actually treat each other on a day-to-day basis and, on that, the behavior by people in power is a lot worse. In the startup world, you see a lot of empire-building psychopaths who ruin peoples' careers over petty grudges; and, while the movies may tell otherwise, that's astonishingly rare on Wall Street (where people are too busy making money).
Wall Street has its flaws, too. There are many things about that culture that I don't like. And technical people are second-class citizens, which is a bit depressing. (That said, in the modern incarnation of the VC-funded world, it's no different; founders are mostly non-engineers and investors are the first-class citizens.) I just think that, on balance, the Silicon Valley world is a lot worse and one hell of lot more deluded about what it is, because it's not socially acceptable to say, "Yeah, I do this CTO thing so my kids can get into expensive, reputable schools."
And cracking beers at 2:00pm doesn't mean much if you are coding all day from home on Saturday, if you ask me.
The latter sounds like "open-allocation."
Startups can't afford full, unconstrained open allocation. They have to give people a high degree of trust and autonomy, but they've also got to be able to meld as a team and hit a target quickly. It's when you're past 20-40 people that the open vs. closed allocation really becomes critical. (VC is causing companies to grow rapidly beyond that 20-40 mark without developing a coherent culture, and if that phase happens poorly or wrongly, you're more likely to get a crappy closed-allocation company.) At 8 people when you're fighting for your life, you just need people to do the work that needs to get done.
These beasts fueled by VC aren't really "startups" in the classical sense. They don't offer meaningful, life-changing equity and, while clueless people go all-in, the smarter ones just treat employee positions at them as stepping stones. They're closed-allocation companies that are good at dressing themselves as startups. The true power relationships are intense and harsh, but not stated upfront.
Open-allocation companies are subject, of course, to many of the same political problems as closed-allocation firms. I think that they're less likely to fall into certain failure modes, and I think the evidence is strong that, while open allocation isn't a panacea, closed allocation is strictly worse. Let's say that you're running a school and one fistfight breaks out per week. That's not a good thing, and you'll have kids out for hospitalizations. But if you arm a randomly selected 10% of the population with handguns, now you're at risk people getting killed. Adding the guns to a fight-prone environment was a mistake. Similarly, closed allocation adds something that can only be harmful; but the absence of it doesn't guarantee a lack of harm.
In banks, the power relationships are more legible; however, there's more of a need for management to lead, perhaps in part because there isn't an army of clueless 22-year-olds (well, except in "analyst" programs; but even those are more selective than employee-level positions in the Valley.) Managers in finance are more likely to treat their positions as mutual and symbiotic than the "I know all of Sand Hill Road and you don't" founders who now run the Valley.
[1] http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/cyber-communism-h...
I definitely agree that it would have made sense for the original authors to have titled it "the California Ideology".