the Californian ideology, revisited
on the "Tech Right," abundance liberalism, and "The Adolescence of Technology"
Elmer Wachtel, Mt. San Gorgonio, 1927
Before it was an industry, before it was a political force, California was a disposition. Joan Didion once wrote, “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
Didion’s California is saturated with belief and delusion—that the future could be willed into existence, that rebirth was sufficient and necessary. It’s also haunted by unease, an urgent sense that the frontier may not just promise escape, but mark the end of the world. With the pulsing energy of optimism ran a quieter undercurrent of societal decay, a shift from a rooted, agrarian past to an untethered society organized around suspicion and motion. What unsettled Didion was not ambition itself, but the way belief replaced structure, and motion stood in for continuity.
When technology took root in Northern California, its culture embodied this ideology: that individuals should be liberated, systems minimally governed, and that movement was inherently progress. The history of counterculture to computing is often told as a rupture, but emotionally it was continuous. The suspicion of authority that animated the counterculture took root at the heart of this new locus of industry.
By the 1990s, this mood had hardened into something explicit. What began as resistance to explicit forms of coercion fused with an aversion to any sort of social or market intervention. Language began to shift. Systems became friction, markets became networks.
Barbrook and Cameron called this worldview the Californian Ideology in their polemical essay of the same name written in 1995. The Californian Ideology was a fusion of techno-utopian promise with market libertarian discipline, countercultural self-expression with anti-statist economics. An ideology where code promised transcendence “without” politics. Networks promised coordination without institutions. The implicit claim was that digital systems, if left open and unobstructed, would legitimize themselves through better outcomes—more freedom, more expression, more equality—without the need for intervention. Barbrook and Cameron’s critique was that the ideology presented itself as liberatory while reproducing the hierarchies it claimed to transcend. Barbrook and Cameron were not warning about a future distortion, but naming a contradiction already in motion.
This was the lowercase california that Didion wrote about, now capitalized.
By the 2010s, the Californian Ideology had become prevailing common sense. Silicon Valley stood hand-in-hand with Clinton-era and Obama-era Democrats who embraced globalization, growth, technocratic expertise, and light-touch regulation. The arrangement was mutually beneficial. Technology could move fast and break things; the state could claim modernization and cultural progress without asserting direct control. “Pay taxes, support gay rights, get praised.” This was peak tech liberalism: the belief that history bent correctly as long as innovation remained unimpeded.
Yet alignment was always conditional. What was viewed as common sense was revealed to be extremely fragile. Markets that were believed to be neutral and self-stabilizing exposed institutional fragility after the 2008 financial crisis. The weaponization of social media platforms during the 2016 U.S. election made clear how easily attention, sentiment, and even political legitimacy could be manipulated at scale.
In the aftermath, progressive politics turned toward enforcement as containment—labor law, antitrust, compliance, content moderation. The same features that originally made Silicon Valley feel progressive—its disdain for bureaucracy, its faith in speed—made it deeply incompatible with this new political turn.
The Californian Ideology, Revisited
When progressive Democrats became the face of bureaucratic decline, factions within tech began to more clearly form. It no longer pointed in a single direction. It split.
the “Tech Right”
The emerging “Tech Right” is best understood not as a turn toward conservatism, but as a relocation, or even displacement, of the Californian Ideology’s unresolved tensions onto a different political host. While often viewed as a betrayal by other tech elites, the shift reveals that the Californian Ideology had never fundamentally rested on party loyalty. Its earlier alignment with liberalism was one of convenience, rather than conviction. Its attraction is not to a platform but to a style: decisiveness over deliberation, instinct over process, results over legitimacy. Once that premise is accepted, political allegiance becomes instrumental rather than principled. Instrumentality is not a moral failure here so much as a revealing constraint.
From within this frame, a politics that promised to bypass process, ignore intermediaries, and treat rules as negotiable did not register as authoritarian. However, the functional reality of this shift has been unpredictable at best. Political volatility has ceased to feel abstract. What once felt like freedom began to register as erratic—unilateral power exercised without boundary, justification, or pause. For a sector that prizes control and optimization, this instability is disruptive (not the good kind).
Abundance Liberalism
The other path, often described as abundance liberalism, is rooted in the premise that the crisis of governance is not one of fundamental ideals, but of capacity. A revision of the core commitments of the Californian Ideology, rather than a flat out rejection. Instead, abundance liberalism rejects the idea that constraint is inherently anti-progress. It treats state capacity, procedural legitimacy, and durable institutions as throughput multipliers rather than friction. Revision wagers that legitimacy and constraint are actually conditions, not enemies, of progress—that systems must be rebuilt, not abandoned, if growth is to continue without destabilizing the ground beneath it.
For now, the Californian Ideology finds deep roots in the two emerging political paths we see the technology industry self-organizing around today. Displacement prioritizes speed at the cost of political and social volatility, while revision seeks legitimacy without surrendering momentum, but has yet to prove it can deliver at the expected pace of frontier innovation. The split reflects a deeper uncertainty about where technological power derives its political authority and how it sustains it.
The rise of Anthropic is uniquely significant and of-the-moment here. It is perhaps the only market-leading AI lab to remain openly liberal-leaning, institutionally cautious, and explicit about the risks posed by its own technology. As other tech leaders have moved closer to political power, Anthropic has done the opposite, opposing regulatory rollbacks and declining to participate in the usual displays of access.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent essay “The Adolescence of Technology” makes the stance even more explicit. He argues that advanced AI may be incompatible with autocracy, that democratic governance is not a moral preference but a practical requirement, and that the concentration of both wealth and political access poses systemic risk. What makes this posture notable is that it has not come at an obvious commercial cost (yet). Anthropic has scaled rapidly, while pushing the boundaries on the assumption that influence must be purchased through alignment and proximity to power. Anthropic suggests, without necessarily resolving, that credibility and constraint may also function as leverage. Of course, this posture should be read as a test case, not an absolution; holding federal contracts while criticizing federal policy is its own form of access, and whether this posture survives contact with genuine commercial or political pressure remains untested.
Seen this way, the split within the Californian Ideology is not about left vs. right, or regulation versus freedom. It is about where tech believes authority comes from.
The answer remains unresolved, and increasingly consequential. But once the assumption that tech must always move with power begins to fracture, political allegiance becomes less automatic and more contingent. And that forces the question the ideology has deferred for decades: not which side to align with next, but what kind of power it believes itself to be exercising—and what it is prepared to legitimize in the process.
Thirty Years On, the Californian Ideology is Alive and Well
It's been interesting to observe the difference in attitudes among my friends rooted in DIY tech culture vs. folks who came up through SV / tech industry.
There's a feeling of betrayal among the former; that tech was a frontier for curiosity, rather than cold-hearted commercialization. Even open source contributions are now viewed with caution; how long until a corporate overlord uses those contributions for extraction?
There's a sense in the industry camp that the tinkerers are naive, that business success is the best measure of intelligence, and (among the darker corners) that this is the last window to accrue power before hyper-consolidation in an AGI world happens. Even the tinkerers in industry speak sheepishly of their side projects, noting how non-viable they may be, not remembering that tinkering is the foundation of the industry itself. The Google "20% time" days are long gone.
In popular media "tech" is synonymous with "tech industry" now, where in the 90's -> early 2010s tech was synonymous with garage startups and bespectacled nerds (maybe because there was no real political power in the industry back then.) Curious people who could push our very powerful AIs in directions compatible with broader popular sentiment are increasingly, I think, turned off by the industry.
I wonder what will bring a fresh wave of curious tinkerers through the gates, or if it's better to close that chapter and imagine where the curiosity, inherent optimism about the future, and skepticism of authority that underpinned the California counterculture tech movement will manifest itself next.