Dr. Richard Barbrook is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Westminster. He is the author of Media Freedom (Pluto, 1995) and Imaginary Futures (Pluto, 2007). His other important writings include The Hi-Tech Gift Economy, Cyber-communism, The Regulation of Liberty and The Class of the New, and today with Jules he is discussing his prophetic 1995 essay "The Californian Ideology".
In the essay, Dr. Barbrook and Andy Cameron argue that the rise of networking technologies in Silicon Valley in the 90s was linked to American neoliberalism and a paradoxical hybridization of beliefs from the political left and right in the form of hopeful technological determinism. This new amalgamated ideology combined the ideas of Marshall McLuhan with elements of radical individualism, libertarianism, and neoliberal economics, using publications like Wired Magazine to promulgate their ideas. This ideology mixed New Left and New Right beliefs together based on their shared interest in anti-statism, the counterculture of the 1960s, and techno-utopianism.
The original promise of the Californian Ideology was that computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes, in control of our own destinies. Instead, today, we feel the opposite—that we are helpless components in a global system—a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or change.
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