6 ms·

The California Ideology (1995)

33 points by sbilstein 12y ago

api 12y ago
Yawn. 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?
- e40 12y ago
  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. 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.
  - api 12y ago
    My original post wasn't all that clear. I'm kind of scatterbrained at the moment. 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.
- anextio 12y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - api 12y ago
    I think you're misinterpreting me a little. I don't think history is over. I'm just saying that I get the sense that everyone else does. :) 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. :)
- codahale 12y ago
  The irony here is that your jaded insight is a retread of Fukuyama's 1992 framing of liberal democracy as a Hegelian end-state in _The End Of History_.
  - api 12y ago
    Maybe so, but I think it's worse than that. Liberal democracy has also failed in that it's regressing into extreme wealth inequality. 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.
- scarmig 12y ago
  This is going to be a bit discursive, but bear with me. 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.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    >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. What have been the experimental failures of social democracy and democratic socialism?
- forkandwait 12y ago
  I couldn't stomach reading the entire link, but I think your post is quite lovely. 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....
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-decl... The feeling of "it's all exhausted" is at least partially a deliberate product of neoliberalism itself.
  - api 12y ago
    I've read that before, and I think it makes some great points. I do get the impression that paralysis is an intended endpoint for some people. 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.
michaelchisari 12y ago
Coming out to California for the second time (last time was in 1997), I'm once again amazed at how economically and socially different the tech side of California believes itself to be, and yet, how regressive it all feels despite this.
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
  > and yet, how regressive it all feels despite this I could interpret that a few different ways. Which one do you have in mind?
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    (Different responder.) 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."
jal278 12y ago
> The developers of hypermedia must reassert the possibility of rational and conscious control over the shape of the digital future. 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.
arh68 12y ago
I found the article very well-written. Barbrook's article on politics is equally fascinating [1]. I'm not sure what to make of it all, but it's certainly thought-provoking. [1] http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/cyber-communism-how-the-americans-are-superseding-capitalism-in-cyberspace/ http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/cyber-communism-h...
schoen 12y ago
The title of this article should read "The Californian Ideology" rather than "The California Ideology".
- _delirium 12y ago
  Since the late 19th century, it's been standard in English to use U.S. state names as adjectives unmodified. In part that's because many states have rather strange adjectival forms, or no good ones at all. For example, "the Michigan ideology" would be almost universally preferred over "the Michigander ideology", except perhaps in some hyperlocal writing. But even adjectival forms previously in use, like "Californian" and "Texan" (or the even older "Texian") fell largely out of use a century ago, in favor of the adjective following the noun form. For example, according to Google's ngram stats, "Texas law" and "Texas legislature" overtook "Texan law" and "Texan legislature" somewhere around 1890, and have been orders of magnitude more common in recent decades.
  - schoen 12y ago
    Oh, I was referring to what the original authors called it, not to what I thought would have made a better title. The HN title doesn't reflect the official title chosen by the authors. I definitely agree that it would have made sense for the original authors to have titled it "the California Ideology".
    - _delirium 12y ago
      Wow, sorry, I totally missed that! I read this as a grammatical-pedant comment, and somehow missed that the linked article actually has the title that you mention.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Wow, this and the "Apocalyptic Libertarians of Silicon Valley" post in the same day! Hacker News is really doing some reflective self-questioning now, eh?

33 points by sbilstein 12y ago

api 12y ago

Yawn. 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?

e40 12y ago
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. 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.
- api 12y ago
  My original post wasn't all that clear. I'm kind of scatterbrained at the moment. 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.
anextio 12y ago
> 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. 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.
- api 12y ago
  I think you're misinterpreting me a little. I don't think history is over. I'm just saying that I get the sense that everyone else does. :) 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. :)
codahale 12y ago
The irony here is that your jaded insight is a retread of Fukuyama's 1992 framing of liberal democracy as a Hegelian end-state in _The End Of History_.
- api 12y ago
  Maybe so, but I think it's worse than that. Liberal democracy has also failed in that it's regressing into extreme wealth inequality. 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.
scarmig 12y ago
This is going to be a bit discursive, but bear with me. 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.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >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. What have been the experimental failures of social democracy and democratic socialism?
forkandwait 12y ago
I couldn't stomach reading the entire link, but I think your post is quite lovely. 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....
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-decl... The feeling of "it's all exhausted" is at least partially a deliberate product of neoliberalism itself.
- api 12y ago
  I've read that before, and I think it makes some great points. I do get the impression that paralysis is an intended endpoint for some people. 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.

michaelchisari 12y ago

Coming out to California for the second time (last time was in 1997), I'm once again amazed at how economically and socially different the tech side of California believes itself to be, and yet, how regressive it all feels despite this.

Florin_Andrei 12y ago
> and yet, how regressive it all feels despite this I could interpret that a few different ways. Which one do you have in mind?
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  (Different responder.) 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."

jal278 12y ago

> The developers of hypermedia must reassert the possibility of rational and conscious control over the shape of the digital future. 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.

arh68 12y ago

I found the article very well-written. Barbrook's article on politics is equally fascinating [1]. I'm not sure what to make of it all, but it's certainly thought-provoking. [1] http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/cyber-communism-how-the-americans-are-superseding-capitalism-in-cyberspace/ http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/cyber-communism-h...

schoen 12y ago

The title of this article should read "The Californian Ideology" rather than "The California Ideology".

_delirium 12y ago
Since the late 19th century, it's been standard in English to use U.S. state names as adjectives unmodified. In part that's because many states have rather strange adjectival forms, or no good ones at all. For example, "the Michigan ideology" would be almost universally preferred over "the Michigander ideology", except perhaps in some hyperlocal writing. But even adjectival forms previously in use, like "Californian" and "Texan" (or the even older "Texian") fell largely out of use a century ago, in favor of the adjective following the noun form. For example, according to Google's ngram stats, "Texas law" and "Texas legislature" overtook "Texan law" and "Texan legislature" somewhere around 1890, and have been orders of magnitude more common in recent decades.
- schoen 12y ago
  Oh, I was referring to what the original authors called it, not to what I thought would have made a better title. The HN title doesn't reflect the official title chosen by the authors. I definitely agree that it would have made sense for the original authors to have titled it "the California Ideology".
  - _delirium 12y ago
    Wow, sorry, I totally missed that! I read this as a grammatical-pedant comment, and somehow missed that the linked article actually has the title that you mention.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

Wow, this and the "Apocalyptic Libertarians of Silicon Valley" post in the same day! Hacker News is really doing some reflective self-questioning now, eh?