The Californian Ideology and Geographic Specificity
In 1995 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron coined the phrase “The Californian Ideology” in an essay by the same title which provided a genealogy of the concept of the internet as a placeless and universalizing utopia: “This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, Web sites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.” A lot of forces were at play in the mid-nineties, but Wired Magazine with editor Kevin Kelly were especially influential in promoting information technologies as emancipatory, limitless and beyond geography.
Although the internet has the power to build communities and bring together diverse geographic places, it has also emerged as a very local and geographically situated place. Geert Lovink has articulated this point nicely by highlighting statistical figures of internet use: in August 2008 China surpassed the United States in internet use, with users being overwhelmingly non-Californian – Asia has 578.5 million users, Europe has 384.5 million, North America has 248.2 million, and Latin America/Caribbean has 139.0 million. (For an excellent overview of a lecture Lovink gave in February 2009 at UC Irvine, see Liz Losh’s insightful “The Empirical Turn.”) Within these statistics, a Californian Ideology doesn’t hold up. It’s grown to be an incredibly diverse place linguistically, with highly localized and geographically situated practices.
As Lovink has humorously pointed out through a drawing from the webcomic xkcd, even our concepts of digital space are localized:
(Enlarge “Map of Online Communities” by xkcd)
Today our concept of the internet has more similarity to political balkanization of physical geography than universalizing dreams of VRML, for example.
(View Balkanization animation)
In terms of my own experiences, many things change with a change in physical location. This includes art scenes, and living in Southern California for the past six years has significantly impacted my work. Creating the work still consists of sitting down, building, soldering, and producing it, but the community that it enters into and circulates in is considerably different. It’s not the “Californian Ideology” that makes a difference, though: it’s the local that has the greatest impact.
