4. California Ideology- belief system outlined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in their, Californian Ideology that is rooted largely in the beliefs and theories of individuals involved in the West Coast technology boom.  Based on the assumtion that technology will eventually create a new, Internet-based social system where individuals are free to express what they want and exchange goods and services outside of our current corporately-controlled system, and through which the world will become universally connected.

"The California ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism... information technologies [will be] used to create a new 'Jeffersonian Democracy' in cyberspace where every individual would be able to express themselves freely. ...the Californian Ideology offers a fatalistic vision of the natural and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market- a vision which is blind to racism, poverty and environmental degredation and which has no time to debate alternatives." (p.1)

" Community activists will increasingly use hypermedia to replace corporate capitalism and big government with a hi-tech 'gift economy' in which information is freely exchanged between participants. ...direct democracy within the electronic agora will inevitably triumph over its corporate and beuraucratic enemies." (p.2)

#4. California Ideology (by elliot)

    A belief system based on the assumption that information technologies will naturally lead to a new social order where limitations to individual freedoms are expelled; the desired result being an end to poverty and environmental degradation.

"The Californian Ideology rejects notions of community and of social progress and seeks to chain humanity to the rocks of economic and technological fatalism. Once upon a time, West Coast hippies played a key role in creating our contemporary vision of social liberation. As a consequence, feminism, drug culture, gay liberation and ethnic identity have, since the 1960s, ceased to be marginal issues. Ironically, it is now California which has become the centre of the ideology which denies the relevance of these new social subjects"

~Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron

Week Four | September 25

The California Ideology, by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron