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 believed that the future could be willed into existence, that rebirth was sufficient and necessary. It was also haunted by an urgent sense that the frontier may not just promise escape, but a cliff at 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. The resistance to explicit forms of coercion slowly morphed into 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 bridging of techno-utopian promise and countercultural self-expression in one corner and market libertarian discipline and anti-statist economics in the other. The Californian Ideology code promised transcendence without politics. The implicit claim was that digital systems, if left open and unobstructed, could promise better outcomes—more freedom, more expression, more equality—without the need for institutional intervention. Barbrook and Cameron’s critique was that the ideology presented itself as liberation, while reproducing the hierarchies it claimed to transcend. 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 side-by-side with Clinton/Obama-era Democrats who embraced globalization, growth, and hands-off regulation. Technology could move fast and break things, and the state could claim modernization and cultural progress without getting directly involved. “Pay taxes, support gay rights, get praised” was a win-win.
However, the alignment that was once viewed as common sense was revealed to be deeply fragile. Post-2008 financial crisis, markets that were once viewed as neutral, self-stabilizing markets now marked institutional fragility and manipulation. The 2016 U.S. election revealed how easily internet platforms could be exploited to control attention, sentiment, and even political legitimacy.
In the aftermath, progressive politics began to finally wave an iron fist—labor law, antitrust, compliance, content moderation. The same disdain for bureaucracy and faith in speed that originally made Silicon Valley feel progressive had now 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.
the “Tech Right”
The emerging “Tech Right” is often considered to be an embodiment of conservatism, but is better understood a displacement of the Californian Ideology. The shift exposes that the industry’s attraction is not to a political platform, but to an ideology of action. One that values decisiveness over deliberation, instinct over process, and results over legitimacy. The reality of this shift has been unpredictable at best. Political volatility has ceased to feel abstract. Rather than freedom, it feels erratic—unilateral power exercised without process, boundary, justification, or pause.
Abundance Liberalism
The other path, often described as abundance liberalism, is rooted in the premise that the fundamental issue with government is not one of ideals, but of capacity. Abundance liberalism rejects the idea that constraint is inherently anti-progress. It treats systems, procedural legitimacy, and durable institutions as throughput growth multipliers, whereas others would consider them friction.
For now, the Californian Ideology finds deep roots in the two emerging political paths we see the technology industry self-organizing around today. One prioritizes speed at the cost of political and social volatility, while the other promise that it can achieve legitimacy legitimacy without surrendering frontier pace momentum. Political allegiance becomes a tool rather than a principle. 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” 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. Anthropic has scaled rapidly, while pushing the boundaries on the assumption that influence must be purchased through proximity to and alignment with 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 wholly 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.
Once the assumption that tech must always move with power begins to fracture, political allegiance becomes less automatic and more contingent. 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.
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.