
The California Ideology (1995) - sbilstein
http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/califIdeo_I.html
======
jal278
> 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.

------
api
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?

~~~
anextio
> 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
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. :)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>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.

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.

~~~
api
I don't think I'm the right person for this.

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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>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.

~~~
api
If you do try to flesh out an idea like this, I've got some suggestions.
They're my opinion only of course.

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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Frankly, I'm saving my Hitler and supervillain points for later. My hope is to
have things firmly in hand by the time the press and public catch on and then
be able to stand there going, "Even if you hit me with everything you've got,
resistance is useless, useless, useless, completely and utterly and absolutely
futile and useless!!!!"

You can only pull off multiple exclamation points once in a lifetime.

(Real answer: I'm a computer scientist, not a geneticist :-(.)

------
michaelchisari
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
> _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
(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."

~~~
cma
"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."

The latter sounds like "open-allocation."

~~~
michaelochurch
Fair criticism, so let me make a few points on that.

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.

------
arh68
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-h...](http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/cyber-communism-
how-the-americans-are-superseding-capitalism-in-cyberspace/)

------
eli_gottlieb
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?

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

~~~
_delirium
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
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
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.

