Re: AUT: Where on the political spectrum is the "Californian Ideology"?

[Thomas Seay <entheogens@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael,

I think the "California ideology" as presented here
is pretty much tantamount to the Libertarianism of
the Libertarian Party USA.  Liberal in terms of
personal freedoms, against government intervention
into such things as drug use, sexual preference, etc
and economically for free markets.

However, at least here in Silicon Valley, this
libertarianism has gotten a shock.  On the one hand
you have 9/11 which brings up questions about the role
of the military (keeping in mind that Libertarians are
normally against military conscription and a standing
army) and the wave of layoffs in the past year...it
was a lot easier to be pro free-market as an engineer
or programmer during the BOOM when demand for your
services was so much higher than supply.

Anyway, I see little distinction between "the
Californian Ideology" and Libertarianism...the former
is (or was) just an exuberant extension of the latter.

Thomas
--- Michael Handelman <mhandelman1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> http://cci.wmin.ac.uk/HRC/ci/calif5.html
>
> "Across the world, the Californian Ideology has been
> embraced as
> an optimistic and emancipatory form of technological
> determinism. Yet, this utopian fantasy of the West
> Coast depends upon its blindness towards - and
> dependence on - the social and racial polarisation
> of
> the society from which it was born. Despite its
> radical rhetoric, the Californian Ideology is
> ultimately pessimistic about fundamental social
> change. Unlike the hippies, its advocates are not
> struggling to build 'ecotopia' or even to help
> revive
> the New Deal. Instead, the social liberalism of New
> Left and the economic liberalism of New Right have
> converged into an ambiguous dream of a hi-tech
> 'Jeffersonian democracy'. Interpreted generously,
> this
> retro-futurism could be a vision of a cybernetic
> frontier where hi-tech artisans discover their
> individual self-fulfillment in either the electronic
> agora or the electronic marketplace. However, as the
> zeitgeist of the 'virtual class', the Californian
> Ideology is at the same time an exclusive faith. If
> only some people have access to the new information
> technologies, 'Jeffersonian democracy' can become a
> hi-tech version of the plantation economy of the Old
> South. Reflecting its deep ambiguity, the
> Californian
> Ideology's technological determinism is not simply
> optimistic and emancipatory. It is simultaneously a
> deeply pessimistic and repressive vision of the
> future."
>
> Can we even place the "California Ideology" on the
> political spectrum? Or is it such a mix, that it
> "goes
> beyond left vs right" (which is a fascist slogan)?
>
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=====
"The tradition of all the dead generations
 weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"

-Karl Marx

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