In the Valley of Lies

Have you ever heard of the Californian ideology? Even if you haven’t, your life is still being run by it: a laptop from Apple, a Facebook account, Googling, tweeting, finding a vacation apartment on Airbnb… this is all part of the Californian ideology.

The Californian ideology is what it is because the above phenomena don’t just involve a point-by-point change to our daily routines. Rather they constitute the reconstruction of all areas of our lives. In the Californian ideology – which is so called because its founders and most radical representatives come from Silicon Valley, California – our holistic thinking, technological determinism and economic liberalism are all lumped into one project, the results of which we can’t even begin to predict. The term was first coined in the 1990s by British media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, who use it to describe the “fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the high-tech industries of Silicon Valley” into a radical “dot-com neoliberalism.”

You just have to examine the rhetoric of the Silicon Valley founders and CEOs to recognize that this project affects society as a whole, and is realized by using their apps, programs and gadgets. These people want to do anything but save the world.

Rachel Botsman, for example, identifies all of our society’s problems in her book “What’s Mine is Yours.” Botsman is a former manager who today busies herself with propagating the idea of the sharing economy in articles, books and TED talks.* She isn’t alone. Programmer Steve Dekorte has compared the lawsuit being led by Uber in the United States to the American civil rights movement.

Easier, More Relaxed?

In a tweet, Dekorte wrote, “Yes, Uber disrespected the law. So did Rosa Parks.” Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, tweeted in a similar vein. His tweet on Feb. 13, 2015, read, “Apparently, during the Salt March, Gandhi stayed in homes. Good thing gov didn’t require a min 30 day stay. He wouldn’t have gotten very far.” Chesky was referring to new legislation in New York which aims to keep rentable property available for actual tenants, thus curbing vacation apartment rental scams. Resistance icons must, at least, serve as a comparison, otherwise there is no Californian ideology.

Back to Uber, the start-up from Silicon Valley, the company which uses a smartphone app to put those in need of lifts in touch with people who can offer them one. Uber isn’t just a way of making your selection of transport easier; Uber is a project which could revolutionize both the transportation system and the world of work – and there are also good arguments for this. Plus, it’s obvious why being an Uber driver is attractive. The drivers may have a car, but no job at that moment in time. They might not want to work in an office, but also don’t want to commit themselves to being a taxi driver. As Uber has no fixed tariffs, the rides are often cheaper than the equivalent journey with other modes of transportation. Uber drivers are often young and modern as it has become possible in the meantime to play your own Spotify playlist in an Uber vehicle. At first glance, it seems as if the advocates of the Californian ideology are saying that life is somehow becoming easier and more relaxing.

It’s not as simple as that. People are also losing out. First and foremost, of course, are the taxi drivers, whose jobs — at least in Germany, where Uber is illegal — are regulated as to tariffs. You could argue, though, that some business models survive while other new ones emerge, but that’s wrong. In the end, it’s not just the taxi drivers who are losing out … we all are. In a society in which the sharing economy is one of the central pillars, there is no longer a distinction between free time and work. Everyone has his or her own business. There’s no protection against dismissal, no parental leave, no sick days and no clocking out. Being in a bad mood is a thing of the past because nobody can afford bad moods. In the sharing economy, everyone is dependent on good ratings from customers.

Unremarkably, technological optimism stems from this. If you consider yourself to be conservative, you better not criticize the company. The faith in technology possessed by the Silicon Valley fanboys has nothing to do with real progress. The final result will be hyper-capitalism. The companies in Silicon Valley, primarily Google, are pursuing an ambitious project, the success of which seems almost inevitable today. Google isn’t simply a company which has built a search engine for the Internet, which sells advertising, and which pays for its staff to go to the “Burning Man Festival” each year. Google has a mission.

In this regard, Google’s corporate reorganization and creation of “Alphabet” is spectacular. With the search engine and online advertising, they are earning the money they pour into the research and development of equipment and tools which are supposed to make a holistic life — the utopia of fusing man and machine — a reality. The self-steering Google car and Google glass are just the beginning. The end result will be the glass person. Does that sound like freedom to you?

What the Californian ideology promises is so great that we rarely bat an eyelid when this promise isn’t fulfilled. In the 1990s, Wired magazine, still the central organ of the Californian ideology, identified the “Long Boom,” in which decades of prosperity (and the solution to environmental problems) were imminent. This limitless optimism also couldn’t be stopped by such precise events like the bursting of the speculative bubble around the year 2000; it simply gave rise to new, radical theories.

For example, former Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson wrote a book entitled “The Long Tail” about the niche products, instead of mass market — the business of the future — that would inevitably accompany the democratization of the market through the mass distribution of micro-entrepreneurs who are networked thanks to the Internet. Since then, Anderson’s theory has been disproven. The economy is still dominated exclusively by large companies.

A Dystopia

In order to understand the effect of the scheme, you must take a look at its origins. The Californian ideology is a hippie project and has its roots in the American alternative culture of the 1960s. The hippies dreamed of a new, better world. They wanted to leave the dull, gray lives their parents had behind and create a completely holistic lifestyle instead. In the California Bay Area around San Francisco where technology companies and programmers were located, limitless technological optimism, the hippie culture and ambitious entrepreneurship all blended together. The core belief was that technology improves the world.

Even in the very heart and soul of the beast, in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, the notion of keeping these promises is unrecognizable. Nothing has been democratized there. Even if the business culture in Silicon Valley is open, democratic and not hierarchical, the numbers say otherwise. While the percentage of women in boardrooms in other areas of the American economy is at 53 percent, in tech companies the proportion of women hasn’t exceeded 25 percent for years. Plus, the proportion of African-Americans gracing the executive suites of top tech companies is struggling to reach just 1 percent. A business culture which is proud of its diversity definitely looks different.

Believers in the Californian ideology are promising a utopia which is actually manifesting itself as a dystopia because its realization is still in its infancy. It is high time that we expose the preaching and prophesy of the Silicon Valley fanboys as lies and begin looking for alternatives.

*Editor’s note: TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. TED talks are part of TED, a global set of conferences run by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation under the slogan “Ideas Worth Spreading.”