12 ms·

The Californian Ideology (1995)

55 points by jasonhansel 9y ago

Pica_soO 9y ago
Its not a ideology - a ideology can be questioned and challenged, but to question the absolute truth, that must be madness, heresy and regression. What i really miss, is a discussion about the "value" Californian culture creates, as these are quite different. Some are universal beneficial, and some are just plain redistribution of pre-existing wealth cycles with shock and awe. Ueber e.g. compared to actual, value creating innovations is one huge disappointment, its basically the recreation of the taxi-industry with new owners. And this kind of worthless pseudo-innovations, who antagonize the rest of societys world-wide to Californian culture have become a rather large percentage of the created "value" over the years. We already can see the toxic outpoor created by these well disguised redistribution hacks on societys structure, as hatred is shoveled towards societys outliers- and once we are Peak Scapegoat, the attacked party, will turn on us. All those counter-culture propagandists will do, what they always did, when the water gets hot and turn on a dime on us. As all revolutions in history, this one will eat its children. So one should buy a bathtub and seasoning for the occasion. At least we saw it coming, years ahead- although we couldn't prevent it. 'It was late night, when the Primepurge reached its peak.One by one in the highrise nearby, the lights had flickered out, and now the carnage could be heard in the floors below. Or was it just techno with a bad vocal? Maybe everything was good and under control again, maybe the spiral of insanity had stopped turning. Then the cellphone chimed. 'Your package has arrived' the device exclaimed happily, while the videofeed showed, several hooded figures with guns and knifes drawn from there delivery packages, slipped in through the door. For a moment, the disconnected cables, a protection symbol against the bad spirit of the Aglos shimered, then the lights went out and the lifesign trackers at the inhabitants wrist, one by one started yelling for help.'
malvosenior 9y ago
As someone who's part of the culture being attacked here, it's interesting to note the stylistic differences between this article from 1995 and more current smear pieces from the likes of the NYT. This reads like a conspiracy theory pamphlet although it brings up most of the same points we see in more modern attacks. What changed in the last ~20 years where arguments like this have hit the mainstream? Well for one, tech is even more powerful now and old media is on its deathbed. That leads to a certain amount of sour grapes and irrational defense of non-functional business models. Secondly I think millennials had a large part in moving away from techno libertarian ideals. Philosophy-wise they're basically baby boomers 2.0. I don't think they had enough direct exposure to that culture to understand the failings, thus are doomed to repeat them. Obviously this isn't true for everyone in that generation, just a generalization.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  Millennials' ideals don't originate from their lack of exposure to the failings of the baby boomers, their ideals originate from their actual lived experience. To believe otherwise would be to dismiss the relevance of the things that have actually happened in their lifetimes and the economic situation they currently face. They saw their future prospects destroyed by a deregulated financial market, and now they're seeing the economic restoration that follows skipping them entirely and consolidating global wealth in the hands of a few while they struggle with basic necessities. All the while they're being perpetually maligned because prior generations lack the ability to relate to their day-to-day reality on a basic level and the fear of something different is a great driver of ad revenue. Millennials are moving away from techno-libertarian ideals because laissez faire attitudes towards the application of technology have placed fundamental aspects of their lives in the iron grasp of private corporations who regularly harvest their data for the explicit purpose of manipulating their behavior without their knowledge. http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/ http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenni... EDIT: As an aside, I find it kind of amazing that the myth of personal responsibility for outcomes is so prevalent among the very people who take the mass-scale manipulation of user behavior for granted. How can these people who spend massive amounts of money and resources studying how to best psychologically exploit their users and who can see directly how the most minute aspects of outside influence can reliably change behavior find it so easy to then turn around and claim that people are fundamentally responsible for their own situation? Do tech libertarians really believe that they're immune to the forces they use to manipulate others on a daily basis?
  - spamizbad 9y ago
    I agree completely. And what's sad is that, for many millennials, they're stuck in a financial tar pit in large part by following the advice of their elders. As an older millennial, my generation had two pieces of advice drilled into our skulls by boomers: * What degree you get in college isn't that important, a B.A. will let an employer know your teachable * Student loan debt is the best debt you can have: better than mortgage debt even * (post dot-com crash) Don't bother trying to come a professional software developer -- it's the new textile industry: it's going overseas. This created a generation that didn't factor in their professional or economic trajectory when choosing schools, deciding loans, etc. I had peers that walked away from free rides to college to go to their school of choice because student loans were "no big deal" -- and their parents encouraged this! Boomers should have looked at their own jobs and paid attention how their own companies were hiring in the new economy: that new junior analyst? Makes less than the median income, despite an econ degree from top-tier school. Why did they think their kids, with a middling academics, could land the same job with a degree in english lit? The writing was on the wall even in the 90s that this wasn't a good idea: The world was more globalized and competitive. Labor's power was greatly diminished.
jopsen 9y ago
> Americans have always had state planning, but they prefer to call it the defence budget So true, sad and hilarious all at once.
- lifeisawesme 9y ago
  I agree with the sad/funny feeling but what would the world look like without a US military providing defense for the majority of nations?
  - jopsen 9y ago
    Who knows ... maybe the British empire would rule, lol :) Who knows if the cold war could have been avoided if we had attempted to do conflict resolution rather than take a hard threatening stance. How would the world look if those resources had been spent solving poverty? Regardless, the US could probably spend a little less, without destabilizing anything.
jopsen 9y ago
> we also must recognise that the potentiality of hypermedia can never solely be realised through market forces Indeed the web needs a lot of infrastructure like: identity, authentication, payment, search, etc. I don't believe that private enterprise so solve these efficiently or fast without government intervention. I don't pretend to have the answers... But I imagine that identity and payment could be more secure and cost efficient, if not in the hands of private enterprises.
- jejones3141 9y ago
  Yes, that was a hoot to read in the article, given the system the authors set forth as an example of the glories of government intervention: Minitel, which hung on long past its obsolescence. Another example is what the Deaf had to deal with for a long time for communication (I hope that past tense is correct): the "TTY" aka "TDD", a horrid device with a built-in acoustic coupler (remember 300 baud?) using 5-bit Baudot code (no lower case, and shift characters to switch between letters and digits) with a cheesy seven-segment green LED display that could show a whole (short) line of text at a time.
nanna 9y ago
Franco "Bifo" Beradi published a crushing critique of this, also in Mute. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/proliferating-futures-re-californian-ideology http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/proliferating-fut...
- Barrin92 9y ago
  Well he does not seem to disagree with the diagnosis but rather with the advocated solution which he considers to be anachronistic. Reading this reminded me very strongly of Zizek. I'm pretty sure I've read this argument almost word for word in one of his books.
lindner 9y ago
If you want some more depth to the Californian Ideology critique consider watching the Adam Curtis documentary "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o... Hypernormalisation also covers some of the same ideas and is more recent. https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation
- sxp 9y ago
  The episodes are on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799353 https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799353 It's definitely worth watching for anyone interesting in the history of early Silicon Valley.
ivm 9y ago
"We need to find ways to think socially and politically about the machines we develop." ...say some folks every decade, only to watch another wave of suffering to arise because of the technological progress going far ahead of the ethical progress.
benbenolson 9y ago
The article uses the word "libertarian" many times to describe the "Californian ideology." However, California has some of the strictest gun laws in the country and one of the highest state taxes in the U.S. I'm from Tennessee, can someone explain to me how this makes sense?
- jayd16 9y ago
  Well they explain that they mean it differently throughout the article. Sometimes its used as freedom for the little guy from existing big business interests and other times its laissez-faire economics. I think part of the point is that "The Californian Ideology" uses bits and pieces from other political thought, and is not as classically liberal as it might appear at first glance.
  - benbenolson 9y ago
    Oh, okay, thanks! Great explanation.
- Barrin92 9y ago
  'libertarianism', is a little more broad of a term than 'gun rights' and spans from left-wing libertarianism of the Paris commune sort to right-wing libertarianism in conservative regions of the US. The author is talking about a form of libertarianism that emerged out of a mix of cultures. Combining an anti-statist attitude with progressive social values out of the hippie movement and the counter-culture, fused together with arch-conservative capitalism.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  California is not in any way an ideologically homogeneous population. The Californian ideology here seems to generalize about the wealthy in California, who traditionally tend toward socially liberal and fiscally conservative.

55 points by jasonhansel 9y ago

Its not a ideology - a ideology can be questioned and challenged, but to question the absolute truth, that must be madness, heresy and regression. What i really miss, is a discussion about the "value" Californian culture creates, as these are quite different. Some are universal beneficial, and some are just plain redistribution of pre-existing wealth cycles with shock and awe. Ueber e.g. compared to actual, value creating innovations is one huge disappointment, its basically the recreation of the taxi-industry with new owners. And this kind of worthless pseudo-innovations, who antagonize the rest of societys world-wide to Californian culture have become a rather large percentage of the created "value" over the years. We already can see the toxic outpoor created by these well disguised redistribution hacks on societys structure, as hatred is shoveled towards societys outliers- and once we are Peak Scapegoat, the attacked party, will turn on us. All those counter-culture propagandists will do, what they always did, when the water gets hot and turn on a dime on us. As all revolutions in history, this one will eat its children. So one should buy a bathtub and seasoning for the occasion. At least we saw it coming, years ahead- although we couldn't prevent it. 'It was late night, when the Primepurge reached its peak.One by one in the highrise nearby, the lights had flickered out, and now the carnage could be heard in the floors below. Or was it just techno with a bad vocal? Maybe everything was good and under control again, maybe the spiral of insanity had stopped turning. Then the cellphone chimed. 'Your package has arrived' the device exclaimed happily, while the videofeed showed, several hooded figures with guns and knifes drawn from there delivery packages, slipped in through the door. For a moment, the disconnected cables, a protection symbol against the bad spirit of the Aglos shimered, then the lights went out and the lifesign trackers at the inhabitants wrist, one by one started yelling for help.'

malvosenior 9y ago

As someone who's part of the culture being attacked here, it's interesting to note the stylistic differences between this article from 1995 and more current smear pieces from the likes of the NYT. This reads like a conspiracy theory pamphlet although it brings up most of the same points we see in more modern attacks. What changed in the last ~20 years where arguments like this have hit the mainstream? Well for one, tech is even more powerful now and old media is on its deathbed. That leads to a certain amount of sour grapes and irrational defense of non-functional business models. Secondly I think millennials had a large part in moving away from techno libertarian ideals. Philosophy-wise they're basically baby boomers 2.0. I don't think they had enough direct exposure to that culture to understand the failings, thus are doomed to repeat them. Obviously this isn't true for everyone in that generation, just a generalization.

aalleavitch 9y ago
Millennials' ideals don't originate from their lack of exposure to the failings of the baby boomers, their ideals originate from their actual lived experience. To believe otherwise would be to dismiss the relevance of the things that have actually happened in their lifetimes and the economic situation they currently face. They saw their future prospects destroyed by a deregulated financial market, and now they're seeing the economic restoration that follows skipping them entirely and consolidating global wealth in the hands of a few while they struggle with basic necessities. All the while they're being perpetually maligned because prior generations lack the ability to relate to their day-to-day reality on a basic level and the fear of something different is a great driver of ad revenue. Millennials are moving away from techno-libertarian ideals because laissez faire attitudes towards the application of technology have placed fundamental aspects of their lives in the iron grasp of private corporations who regularly harvest their data for the explicit purpose of manipulating their behavior without their knowledge. http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/ http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenni... EDIT: As an aside, I find it kind of amazing that the myth of personal responsibility for outcomes is so prevalent among the very people who take the mass-scale manipulation of user behavior for granted. How can these people who spend massive amounts of money and resources studying how to best psychologically exploit their users and who can see directly how the most minute aspects of outside influence can reliably change behavior find it so easy to then turn around and claim that people are fundamentally responsible for their own situation? Do tech libertarians really believe that they're immune to the forces they use to manipulate others on a daily basis?
- spamizbad 9y ago
  I agree completely. And what's sad is that, for many millennials, they're stuck in a financial tar pit in large part by following the advice of their elders. As an older millennial, my generation had two pieces of advice drilled into our skulls by boomers: * What degree you get in college isn't that important, a B.A. will let an employer know your teachable * Student loan debt is the best debt you can have: better than mortgage debt even * (post dot-com crash) Don't bother trying to come a professional software developer -- it's the new textile industry: it's going overseas. This created a generation that didn't factor in their professional or economic trajectory when choosing schools, deciding loans, etc. I had peers that walked away from free rides to college to go to their school of choice because student loans were "no big deal" -- and their parents encouraged this! Boomers should have looked at their own jobs and paid attention how their own companies were hiring in the new economy: that new junior analyst? Makes less than the median income, despite an econ degree from top-tier school. Why did they think their kids, with a middling academics, could land the same job with a degree in english lit? The writing was on the wall even in the 90s that this wasn't a good idea: The world was more globalized and competitive. Labor's power was greatly diminished.

jopsen 9y ago

> Americans have always had state planning, but they prefer to call it the defence budget So true, sad and hilarious all at once.

lifeisawesme 9y ago
I agree with the sad/funny feeling but what would the world look like without a US military providing defense for the majority of nations?
- jopsen 9y ago
  Who knows ... maybe the British empire would rule, lol :) Who knows if the cold war could have been avoided if we had attempted to do conflict resolution rather than take a hard threatening stance. How would the world look if those resources had been spent solving poverty? Regardless, the US could probably spend a little less, without destabilizing anything.

jopsen 9y ago

> we also must recognise that the potentiality of hypermedia can never solely be realised through market forces Indeed the web needs a lot of infrastructure like: identity, authentication, payment, search, etc. I don't believe that private enterprise so solve these efficiently or fast without government intervention. I don't pretend to have the answers... But I imagine that identity and payment could be more secure and cost efficient, if not in the hands of private enterprises.

jejones3141 9y ago
Yes, that was a hoot to read in the article, given the system the authors set forth as an example of the glories of government intervention: Minitel, which hung on long past its obsolescence. Another example is what the Deaf had to deal with for a long time for communication (I hope that past tense is correct): the "TTY" aka "TDD", a horrid device with a built-in acoustic coupler (remember 300 baud?) using 5-bit Baudot code (no lower case, and shift characters to switch between letters and digits) with a cheesy seven-segment green LED display that could show a whole (short) line of text at a time.

nanna 9y ago

Franco "Bifo" Beradi published a crushing critique of this, also in Mute. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/proliferating-futures-re-californian-ideology http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/proliferating-fut...

Barrin92 9y ago
Well he does not seem to disagree with the diagnosis but rather with the advocated solution which he considers to be anachronistic. Reading this reminded me very strongly of Zizek. I'm pretty sure I've read this argument almost word for word in one of his books.

lindner 9y ago

If you want some more depth to the Californian Ideology critique consider watching the Adam Curtis documentary "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o... Hypernormalisation also covers some of the same ideas and is more recent. https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation

sxp 9y ago
The episodes are on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799353 https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799353 It's definitely worth watching for anyone interesting in the history of early Silicon Valley.

ivm 9y ago

"We need to find ways to think socially and politically about the machines we develop." ...say some folks every decade, only to watch another wave of suffering to arise because of the technological progress going far ahead of the ethical progress.

benbenolson 9y ago

The article uses the word "libertarian" many times to describe the "Californian ideology." However, California has some of the strictest gun laws in the country and one of the highest state taxes in the U.S. I'm from Tennessee, can someone explain to me how this makes sense?

jayd16 9y ago
Well they explain that they mean it differently throughout the article. Sometimes its used as freedom for the little guy from existing big business interests and other times its laissez-faire economics. I think part of the point is that "The Californian Ideology" uses bits and pieces from other political thought, and is not as classically liberal as it might appear at first glance.
- benbenolson 9y ago
  Oh, okay, thanks! Great explanation.
Barrin92 9y ago
'libertarianism', is a little more broad of a term than 'gun rights' and spans from left-wing libertarianism of the Paris commune sort to right-wing libertarianism in conservative regions of the US. The author is talking about a form of libertarianism that emerged out of a mix of cultures. Combining an anti-statist attitude with progressive social values out of the hippie movement and the counter-culture, fused together with arch-conservative capitalism.
aalleavitch 9y ago
California is not in any way an ideologically homogeneous population. The Californian ideology here seems to generalize about the wealthy in California, who traditionally tend toward socially liberal and fiscally conservative.