The Californian Ideology in Ruins

Stray thoughts inspired by Richard Barbrook

Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0

Richard Barbrook is a British media scholar best known for co-authoring “The Californian Ideology,” a seminal and highly prescient 1995 study of what they described as the “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley.” The emergent tech elite of the era, they noted, had synthesized the countercultural spirit of the 1960s with the free-market nostrums of the 1980s—in effect, fusing the worldviews of the yippies and the yuppies. “In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich.” For a moment, during the Obama presidency, it seemed to many that such a future had arrived, especially if you allowed the shiny new things being conjured into existence in the ZIRP era to distract you from the lingering effects of the Great Recession. That ended in 2016.

We are now living in the wreckage of the utopia promised by the Californian Ideology. Elon Musk’s ketamine-fueled effort to bring the gospel of “disruption” to Capitol Hill was like a fever dream from the ’90s: At long last, for a brief moment, it seemed that sex, drugs, and Milton Friedman ruled everything around us. But seemingly to Musk’s befuddlement, the sheer dead weight of the “paper belt”—in the classic form of an omnibus reconciliation bill—has crushed his fond hopes for a lean, mean Grok-run Social Security Administration, at least for now.

But dreams die hard, and some of the scattered remnants of the Californian Ideology will survive this setback. Their persistence, indeed, is on full display even in the heart of the very political establishment that Musk failed to disrupt all that much. Consider, on one hand, “abundance” liberalism, the new center-left credo that found its manifesto in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s March book of that title. Promising that reducing regulatory burdens will unleash innovation, Klein and Thompson have essentially revived the original left flank of the Californian Ideology pioneered by the Atari Democrats and Al Gore. On the other side of the aisle, Vice President JD Vance just spoke at the annual Bitcoin conference, where he declared that “Crypto is a hedge against bad policymaking from Washington, no matter what party is in control”—a remarkable thing to do when you are the second-in-command of the party that is in control at the moment, but also a rather conventional expression of Californian Ideology.

According to Barbrook’s 2007 book Imaginary Futures, a rich expansion of the ideas developed in “The Californian Ideology,” this continuity goes back quite a bit further. The Californian Ideology, by the account he offers there, is just the most recent form taken by an “imaginary future” that has hovered over the American—as well as Western European and, eventually, global—political landscape since the end of World War II. This was the ideal of the “post-industrial society,” heralded by figures like the sociologist Daniel Bell in the postwar era.

In Barbrook’s account, it isn’t accidental that Bell was a former Marxist who, in his youth, had believed in a very different image of the future. This was the Cold War, and America was up against an adversary, the Soviet Union, that laid claim to the future and claimed it would “bury” its retrograde antagonists in the West. Sputnik was only the most famous source of anxiety that the Soviets might be well-positioned to redeem that claim. This anxiety had an ideological as well as a practical, technological dimension, and it is here that ideologues like Bell came in. As Barbrook explains, “In the struggle for soft-power primacy with Stalinist Russia, the American empire needed former Marxists to invent Marxism without Marx.” That is, they needed a vision of historical progress that assigned the United States the role of protagonist, rather than a rear-guard defender of the status quo. Bell’s earlier work, along with that of defenders of midcentury managed capitalism like Walt Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and John Kenneth Galbraith, positioned America as the present site of the most fully realized social and economic prosperity, but didn’t guarantee a claim on the future. With Gagarin in orbit, that was a problem.

The ideological elite of Cold War America, Barbrook argues, found their new Marx, surprisingly enough, in a middle-aged Canadian English professor turned intellectual celebrity: Marshall McLuhan, whose Understanding Media was a sensation in the new televisual era it attempted to theorize. “Just like Marx,” writes Barbrook, “this prophet had also foreseen that the next stage of modernity would sweep away the most disagreeable manifestations of capitalism: national rivalries, industrial exploitation, and social alienation.” Most helpfully of all, all this would be accomplished without a proletarian revolution, or any violent political conflict at all, since it was technology itself, not human beings, who were the protagonists of McLuhan’s history: “Rather than deciding their own destiny, new technologies determined what was going to happen.”

As Barbrook explains, the teleological vision offered by McLuhanism was so powerful that it captured the imaginations of even the internal opposition to the Cold War establishment: the New Left, which “turned the prophecy of the information society into the theory of their own rebellion.” In the hands of Bell and other establishment intellectuals, post-industrial society could be a vision of the improved present, of enduring technocratically managed democracy; but for the counterculture, McLuhan’s “global village” became the vision of a neo-Jeffersonian utopia of horizontal participatory democracy. This was the starting point of the trajectory documented in Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, an essential companion to “The Californian Ideology” that reveals just how the yippie-yuppie fusion came about.

Imaginary Futures ultimately suggests that ideas and debates about technology are ways to divert our attention from more fundamental political problems. From Barbrook’s Marxist perspective, the most fundamental of these is class conflict. If you want to promise continued historical progress while also promising not to disturb bourgeois property relations, one way to do that is to imagine that technological progress can be conceived of as driven by a logic separate from that of social change more broadly. In Marxian terms, this is a form of fetishism, since it takes the products of human labor and treats them as autonomous, self-determining entities.

Our technology debates today take this fetishistic form. The most obvious case comes from “effective accelerationism,” which promises that social and material progress can be achieved by unleashing an artificial intelligence that will solve humanity’s problems for us and usher us into an era of infinite prosperity—fully automated luxury communism sans politics, in effect. “Abundance liberalism,” in a milder form, expresses the same idea, telling us that the “fettering of production,” as Marx called it, can be undone through unobtrusive regulatory fixes; abundance can be secured, in other words, in the absence of any democratic demand. Finally, there is Vance, seen by some as a spokesman of right-wing “dark abundance,” who seems to be telling the attendees of Bitcoin 2025 that his own realm, politics, is an irredeemable cesspit (also Musk’s conclusion) against which they must “hedge” by turning to technologies of “exit.”

Barbrook concludes Imaginary Futures by warning that “those who forget the future are condemned to repeat it”—in other words, we are not only repeating the past, but repeating the past by recycling its visions of the future. The various futures on offer over the past 75 years have all had in common the projection of technological change as a way of sidelining human political agency. The antidote, as Barbrook says, is a “defetishized theory” of technological change in which “humans … are the heroes of the grand narrative of history.”

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