Information Society Watch

August 1995, Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron, Alamut

The California ideology describes the development of the technocratic political inclinations that have shaped dominant ICT discourse to date. Through a hybridisation of radical, anti-corporate activism and entrepreneurial, free-market spirit, with a solid dose of technological determinism and faith in the potential of ICTs, the California Ideology has emerged as the ruling philosophy of the information society. The article calls attention to the dangerous tendency of the California Ideology to embrace the sometimes contradictory notions of freedom--in both the open source sense and the market sense--under a romantic illusion of ICTs as the great equaliser. In fact, ICTs also favour the dominant classes in a widening of the digital divide that evokes the history of exploitation of people and environment, enabling an information society (IS) to develop in the first place. The authors call upon ruling technocrats to remember that private enterprise has only succeeded in the IS as part of a mixed economy. Thus policy discussion must draw upon public funding and infrastructure development, and the contributions of the "hacker" community, as both have played and will continue to play a significant role in the development of ICTs.

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