
The Californian Ideology (1995) - jasonhansel
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology
======
malvosenior
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
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-
millenni...](http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/)

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?

~~~
joejerryronnie
Hey Millennials, welcome to adulthood. Every generation has its hardships and
every generation complains that they have it worse than everyone before them.
Sure, you have a lot of self imposed student loan debt and you can't afford to
buy a house in the most desirable locations in the world. But imagine being
forced into actually shooting people for a cause you viscerally disagree with?
Here's a news flash - big business, big government, and big money have always
ruled the world and always will because of greedy human nature. Should you
continue to rally against inequities and fight for what you believe is right?
Absolutely, just try not to be so damn whiny and self righteous about it.

~~~
aalleavitch
What is this? What are you doing here? Millennials got "whiny" and "self-
righteous" because we're actively under attack. The problem we have is not
that we have struggles, every generation has had struggles; the problem is
that the response to our attempts to rectify this situation is exactly the
kind of derision you're showing here. You're essentially doing the same thing
as calling a 1960s civil rights activist "uppity". You're even agreeing with
the existence of the issues I'm raising and the need to speak out but feel
some emotional need to respond to my perceived tone with an attack on a
baseless stereotype.

Why is the response to the statement "millennials have problems" so commonly
angry and defensive?

~~~
joejerryronnie
>Why is the response to the statement "millennials have problems" so commonly
angry and defensive?

Because many millennials want to have their cake and eat it too. You can't
have it both ways:

\- You can't choose to attend an $80,000 per year private liberal arts school
and then complain you have too much student debt

\- You can't move to the most expensive place in the country with no money and
a low paying job and then complain it's too expensive

\- You can't regularly use convenient and artificially cheap gig-economy
services (like Uber and Instacart) and then complain when their business model
doesn't support giving you a $150,000 a year job

\- You can't demand free speech protection and then violently oppress
viewpoints you disagree with (for the record, I am a political moderate)

The Millennial hypocrisy is astounding, but I'm sure every generation goes
through this to some extent. The real generational moment of revelation is
when you realize that every choice you make has consequences - and not just
the choices/consequences you choose to believe. If I buy a cheap toy at
Walmart, I know that some labor exploitation was involved. If I buy fruit at
Costco, I know that burning of fossil fuels is involved. If I choose to use
Google services, my data will be exploited for profit.

What everyone is asking Millennials to do is take some responsibility,
acknowledge that your actions are part of the problem, and that you have some
power to drive solutions. It's fine to lament about some level of inequity
handed down from previous generations, we have all done it. What everyone is
getting a little tired of is the classic Millennial argument that paints an
entire generation as helpless victims and essentially says "You did this to us
and now we want you to make the bad man go away!" Kind of like an entire
generation of Robin Arryns for all you Game of Thrones fans.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
> You can't choose to attend an $80,000 per year private liberal arts school
> and then complain you have too much student debt

1\. This assumes that everyone went to a private liberal arts college, which
isn't true. 2. Historically a degree wasn't as necessary because employers
actually provided growth potential and entry-level positions to people. Those
aren't options for millennials. That kind of forces people to get degrees to
have any chance of economic growth.

> You can't move to the most expensive place in the country with no money and
> a low paying job and then complain it's too expensive

If those are the only regions of the country experiencing economic growth,
then what else are they supposed to do? Work in Dollar General in a city of
12,000 people their whole life?

> You can't regularly use convenient and artificially cheap gig-economy
> services (like Uber and Instacart) and then complain when their business
> model doesn't support giving you a $150,000 a year job

People will always use the cheapest or most efficient option when it comes to
purchasing services or items. It's not their fault that such services are
legal, it's the government's.

> You can't demand free speech protection and then violently oppress
> viewpoints you disagree with.

I agree with you here. The internet has made it so that those who complain the
most are perceived to be the majority when they're not.

~~~
wott
> what else are they supposed to do? Work in Dollar General in a city of
> 12,000 people their whole life?

And here we go... it did not take long. Why on Earth would living in a 12000
inhabitant city be infamous, be a failure, be a shame? Not fancy and shiny
enough for you, eh?

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

So true, sad and hilarious all at once.

~~~
lifeisawesme
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
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.

------
nanna
Franco "Bifo" Beradi published a crushing critique of this, also in Mute.

[http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/proliferating-
fut...](http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/proliferating-futures-re-
californian-ideology)

~~~
Barrin92
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
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_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_\(TV_series\))

Hypernormalisation also covers some of the same ideas and is more recent.

[https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation](https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation)

~~~
sxp
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.

------
Pica_soO
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.'

------
ivm
"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.

------
jopsen
> 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
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.

------
benbenolson
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
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
Oh, okay, thanks! Great explanation.

