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I keep thinking about the NYT Douthat interview with Marc Andreessen, especially emphasizing the centrality of "woke" employees (ie, worker power + tech ethics) in pushing him over into Trumpism.
Now, the White House is holding the economy hostage to root out this perceived ideological enemy.
There is a deep contradiction here.
(Thread.)
Andreessen credits the rise of Silicon Valley to capitalist, center-left Democrats like Al Gore. And also he speaks of the Californian Ideology—the mix of capitalism and hippie counterculture diagnosed by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. I recently co-edited a special issue on the topic: https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/2023/08/15/special-issue-afterlives-californian-ideology
The contradiction is in that convergence.
Andreessen is right. The buttoned up Republican MIT technologists of the East Coast didn't become the engine of tech power. It took California. Yes the Californians were often libertarian capitalists, but they were also profoundly irreverent, impatient with hierarchy, and radical in their visions for a disintermediated world.
Now, the Californian ideologists have grown up. They have their companies and their power. And now they want to kill the very thing that created them. They bow around a cult of personality, believing their praises will obtain rewards under his reign.
The Californian Ideology was always a deeply pernicious thing, as Barbrook and Cameron argued. It was always deeply antidemocratic and resentful of the friction of real human life. But it did what it set out to do. It conquered the world with networks.
This seems to me the end of that Californian Ideology. Andreessen said they're in Washington now and they're going to stay. They're going to suppress the counterculture.
So we'll see. Can tech capitalism still thrive without semi-domesticated rebellion? Will the MAGA remedy prove fatal? Or has the "techno-capitalist machine" (as Andreesen puts it) become so powerful that it can jettison its countercultural sidecar?
@ntnsndr It's not really a Californian ideology.
Andreessen is from Iowa, by way of University of Illinois.
Musk from South Africa.
Zuckerberg from N.Y. expensive prep school culture.
Bezos grew up primarily in Texas and Florida.
Tim Cook from Alabama.
It's not a Californian ideology...
That would be, far more, someone more like Jobs or Wozniak.
Who actually did innovate and were technologists - Jobs with over 1000 patents - as compared to these exploiters.
It's a carpetbagger ideology.
@ntnsndr If anything, the far right push is being led and championed by those who came to the Silicon Valley, to exploit its well-educated, innovative workforce and its access to venture capital.
What we are seeing is an imported, counter-revolutionary extraction model movement. It's not the hippie libertarian left model at work, focused on charity and doing good. It's the "I've got mine, and I don't WANT more innovation. Let's kill the culture that creates it." model.
@ntnsndr @1br0wn
As well as the OpenAI gringing about DeepSeek, this @pluralistic concept seems highly relevant here.
https://isoc-ny.org/p2/2145
Every Pirate Wants to be an Admiral.
Every Counter-Culture entrepreneur wants a cultural monopoly.