Californian Ideology – with Richard Barbrook
11 July 2017 | LIBRARY London, London, UK
Virtual Futures presents Richard Barbrook in conversation with Pat Kane on the Californian Ideology and cyber-communism.
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s The Californian Ideology, originally published in 1995 by Mute magazine and the nettime mailinglist, is the iconic text of the first wave of Net criticism. The internet might have fundamentally changed in the last two decades, but their demolition of the neoliberal orthodoxies of Silicon Valley remains shocking and provocative. They question the cult of the dot-com entrepreneur, challenging the theory of technological determinism and refuting the myths of American history. Denounced as the work of ‘looney lefties’ by Silicon Valley’s boosters when it first appeared, The Californian Ideology has since been vindicated by the corporate take-over of the Net and the exposure of the NSA’s mass surveillance programmes.
In the essay Barbrook and Cameron peel back the layers of genius machines, paradisal diction, and cosmetic liberalism to reveal the darker conceptual basis of the throbbing robotic heart of the technology world. He sees America’s techno-elite – the ‘Virtual Class’ – as spouting the founding fathers’ deeply seated contradictions in a different accent, wearing a new mask; the same regressive ideals wrapped in shiny plastic verbiage, the same talk of liberty shouted proudly from a pedestal of exploitation and slavery, the same confused logic of self-gain as collective benefit.
In 1995, incisively and essentially, Barbrook saw a perverted combination of “the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies”, which resulted in a promiscuous melding of the new-left and new-right. His social microscope hones in on the ironies of, among others, the Valley’s insistence on a total free market while government and military support were foundational to its development, and its insistence on freedom in an industry more dominated by contracts than any other.
Richard Barbrook is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, London, England. He is a trustee of Cybersalon and a founder member of Class Wargames. He has written about the politics of the Net and gaming in his books Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity; The Class of the New; Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village; and Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism.
Moderated by Pat Kane, a writer, musician, activist and consultant. His blog is at radicalanimal.ning.com