The Californian Ideology in Ruins

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.