MIII. “California Ideology” Among the First Generation

In an influential essay that first appeared online in 1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron likewise write of the emergence of a curious “heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age [called] the California Ideology.” They characterize this new orthodoxy as “a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the high-tech industries of Silicon Valley… promiscuously combin[ing] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies.” More specifically, the California Ideology weds “a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies,” with a “passionate advoca[cy] of what appears to be an impeccably libertarian form of politics.”

Alongside what Cameron and Barbrook charitably characterize as an appealing advocacy of individual liberty, these libertarian “technoboosters” -– of whom the Cypherpunks are definitely some – who preoccupy the attention of “The California Ideology” are “reproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery. Their utopian vision of California depends on a willful blindness toward the other, much less positive features of life on the West Coast – racism, poverty, and environmental degradation.”

But quite apart from the familiar disavowal by “rugged individualists” of their broad interdependence with others as at least co-incident collaborators in sociality, not to mention their disavowal of more particular dependencies on the efforts, accomplishments, or ongoing exploitation of others, there seems to be an inexplicable ignorance of institutional history in play here as well. “For the first twenty years of its existence, the Net’s development was almost completely dependent on the much reviled American federal government. Whether via the U.S. military or through the universities, large amounts of taxpayers’ dollars went into building the Net infrastructure, and subsidizing the cost of using its services.”

Barbrook and Cameron then turn their focus more specifically onto the actual California of their “California Ideologues”: “On top of these public subsidies, the West Coast high-tech industrial complex has been feasting off the fattest pork-barrel in history for decades…. For those not blinded by free-market dogmas, it [is] obvious that Americans have always had state planning: they call it the defense budget.”

Paulina Borsook expresses the same exasperation at the rather facile and yet unexpectedly widespread disavowals that sometimes seem to underwrite the anti-governmental hostility of techno-libertarian sensibilities, enraptured by the prospect of encryption techniques that might circumvent despised regulations and even, many would appear to devoutly wish, smash the state altogether. The techno-libertarian, she notes with astonishment, “simply ignores... ongoing government funding for work-study jobs and for land grant universities. Indirect government subsidy (defense electronics contracts) created and nurtured the microelectronics industry and its companion infrastructure (middle-class home-mortgage guarantees and deductions for its laborers). Federal and state institutions provide an operable legal system… which ensures that the courts can remedy disputes over intellectual property squabbles and corporate espionage.”

As she bluntly puts the point: “Where would you want to do business in the year 2000?” And as she goes on to amplify the terms of her own rhetorical question she offers up as its alternatives, on the one hand, the instability of Russia at the close of the twentieth century taken (possibly somewhat hyperbolically) as an expression of libertarian theory in practice –- precisely as did Lawrence Lessig in his own framing of related questions in his book Code -– to which she then counterposes, on the other hand, again, the California of Barbrook’s and Cameron’s own puzzled fascination: “In Russia, where [presumably] there’s no regulation, no central government, no rule of law; or in Northern California, where the roads are mostly well paved and well patrolled and trucks and airplanes are safer than not, where the power grid is usually intact and the banking system mostly fraud-free and mostly works… where people mostly don’t have to pay protection money, and the majority of law enforcement personnel are not terribly corrupt or brutal?”

Although her point here is surely well taken and the bad faith of market-ideologues well-worthy of the strongest exposure and critique, it is difficult to shake the sense that in staging her confrontation between “Russia” and “California” of all places, Borsook is mobilizing as exemplary figures here landscapes that are especially fraught with dread and desire in the conventional American political imaginary. How much can they finally illuminate, then, rather than simply reverse but still re-invoke the terms in play for crypto-anarchists alike when they conjure up their own comparably fantastic countervailing thundercloud terrains of dread and desire, terrains with names like the “State” and the “Net”?

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