The Californian Ideology (1995)
One of the weirdest developments of the past 25 years since this was written has been the wholesale conversion of a huge set of these people to a weird hybrid of elements of the original current and traditionalist reactionary right wing ideology.<p>I watched it happen through the mid 20-teens and I am still puzzled about why and how this got such traction.<p>In any case one result of this was to cause the whole project of the “Californian ideology” to jump the rails. The original ideology was very libertarian about LGBT issues and generally not racist in the classical “race blindness” framing. This made it loosely an ally of the left at least on social issues, with the two agreeing to disagree on economics.<p>When the power of the technical aptitude of these folks met hard right reactionary ideology, you got high tech highly savvy movements like the whole 4chan-borne Pepe the frog… thing.<p>That in turn disgusted the left and turned off a bunch of the remaining adherents of the original ideology in its original libertarian form. Many of the latter were driven fully to the left, abandoning libertarian economics and certain less-lefty libertarian social positions.<p>Meanwhile the left got less liberal. I’m not sure how this happened either. Someone more familiar can tell that story. The time frame was the same though: the 20-teens.<p>This left us in the end with a techie community split between technocratic leftists who now believe in censorship and benevolent concentrated power and technocratic rightists who now believe in actual monarchy or even fascism or theocracy.<p>(I think this is a choice of two different awful dystopias.)<p>Some of us remain though. I feel like a baffled refugee after some kind of apocalypse. I continue to work on decentralized human centric tech designed to deliver both freedom and human dignity and empowerment like we thought we were doing in the 90s. I sometimes feel alone. I feel less alone on Mastodon where it seems some of us now hang.<p>Edit: or maybe what happened is just that the masks fell off. A lot of tankie reds and technocrats maybe once pretended to be more liberal while a lot of authoritarian rightists pretended to be libertarians. Maybe everyone stopped pretending, leaving those of us who actually believed in the fusion of liberty and humanism bewildered.<p>Also Californian ideology is a bit misleading. One did not have to be in California, though it did seem to be concentrated there.