User:Dave Young/RRW 1.1/Essay draft

An iconic image from computing history: nine men and two women, all looking decidedly bohemian in appearance and with a hippie fashion sense that easily dates the photograph in the 1970s. Looking at the image, you could be forgiven for assuming that they are a since-forgotten pop band from the era of flower-power and the Californian commune experiments. The photograph is often reproduced as a corporate motivational poster with the caption “Would you invest in these people?”, and in smaller writing underneath, the punchline: “Microsoft, 1978.” The juxtaposition of the caption and the image collides two opposing ideologies: that of the 'square' Wall Street capitalist investor, and the free-love liberal hippies from San Francisco that built the some of the most influential technology companies in the world. This link between the counterculture and today's multi-millionaire technology companies becomes less surprising considering that San Francisco was the base for the countercultural revolution and the nearby Silicon Valley, housing tech-giants such as Xerox, Microsoft and Apple, being the principal research center for computer technologies around the same time.

It wasn't only the hippie aesthetic that found its way onto the campuses of the new tech-startups: the ideology of the 1960s counterculture - and by extension the theorists and writers that inspired it – found their way into company philosophies. Positioned at a time of rapid technological advancements and with an eclectic mix of the inspirational sources such as the beat poets, Marshall McLuhan, and cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, a loose movement of non-conformist and technologically-minded innovators formed in California, unified by the belief that their efforts to break away from the world of consumerism and corporations and focus on the creation of utopian social structures could be achieved through the development of new computer technologies. This way of thinking became known as the 'Californian Ideology', coined by Andy Cameron in his 1995 essay of the same title, where he describes the ideologues as “advocates of an impeccably libertarian form of politics – they want information technologies to be used to create a new 'Jeffersonian democracy' where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace.” This utopian worldview doesn't remain entirely without criticism in Cameron's essay. Summarising the Californian Ideology as an “amalgamation of opposites”, he wonders will the technologically-augmented society subscribe to the New Right or the New Left's vision of a utopia: “As a hybrid faith, the Californian Ideology happily answer this conundrum by believing in both visions at the same time – and by not criticising either of them.” He goes further, by arguing that the foundation of Jeffersonian Democracy which the Californian Ideology is built on, is an inherently flawed imagining of democracy – i.e. the white plantation owner's democratic freedom to own humans as property. While obviously not insinuating that the Californian entrepreneurs advocated the ownership of slaves, Cameron does reveal a hypocrisy in their anti-establishment attitude that becomes more obvious with the commercialisation of the internet.