The Californian Ideology

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Californian Ideology

Notes

emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics.

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Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless.

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The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism

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power of big business and big government would be overthrown by the intrinsically empowering effects of new technology on individuals.

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the pioneering work of the community media activists has been largely recuperated by hi-tech commerce.

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Unable to subject them to the discipline of the assembly-line or replace them by machines, managers have organised such intellectual workers through fixed-term contracts.

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these hi-tech artisans not only tend to be well-paid, but also have considerable autonomy over their pace of work and place of employment.

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the values of the counter-culture baby boomers will continue to shape the development of new information technologies.

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use hypermedia to replace corporate capitalism and big government with a hi- tech 'gift economy' in which information is freely exchanged

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direct democracy within the electronic agora will inevitably triumph over its corporate and bureaucratic enemies.

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each member of the 'virtual class' is promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur.

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Almost every major technological advance of the last two hundred years has taken place with the aid of large amounts of public money and under a good deal of government influence.

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The result of a lack of state intervention meant that Nazi Germany lost the opportunity to build the first electronic computer in the late '30s when the Wehrmacht refused to fund Konrad Zuze,

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One of the weirdest things about the Californian Ideology is that the West Coast itself is a product of massive state intervention.

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Americans have always had state planning, but they prefer to call it the defence budget.

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Entrepreneurs often have an inflated sense of their own 'creative act of will'

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When Japanese companies threatened to take over the American microchip market, the libertarian computer capitalists of California had no ideological qualms about joining a state-sponsored cartel

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a result of the failure of renewal in the USA during the late '60s and early '70s. Although the ideologues of California celebrate the libertarian individualism of the hippies, they never discuss the political or social demands of the counter-culture.

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racial segregation still lies at the centre of American politics - especially in California. Behind the rhetoric of individual freedom lies the master's fear of the rebellious slave.

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the exclusively private and corporate construction of cyberspace can only promote the fragmentation of American society

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yuppies and their children can play at being cyberpunks in a virtual world without having to meet any of their impoverished neighbours.

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another apartheid between the 'information-rich' and the 'information-poor' is being created.

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inimical to progress. Whose progress?

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Unable to surrender wealth and power, the white people of California can instead find spiritual solace in their worship of technology. If human slaves are ultimately unreliable, then mechanical ones will have to be invented. The search for the holy grail of Artificial Intelligence reveals this desire for the Golem

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Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved.

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only the cybernetic flows and chaotic eddies of free markets and global communications will determine the future. Political debate therefore, is a waste of breath.

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The Californian model is only one among many.

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feminism, drug culture, gay liberation and ethnic identity have, since the 1960s, ceased to be marginal issues. Ironically, it is now California which has become the centre of the ideology which denies the relevance of these new social subjects.

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the potentiality of hypermedia can never solely be realised through market forces. We need an economy which can unleash the creative powers of hi-tech artisans. Only then can we fully grasp the Promethean opportunities of hypermedia as humanity moves into the next stage of modernity.

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