Thirty years ago this week, it came out in Mute magazine and circulated on the early-adopter email list nettime. The essay described (and rhetorically, at least, demolished) the unspoken consensus that seemed ascendent in the US tech industry at the time. They said the quiet part out loud: the industry had combined countercultural chic with a sort of authoritarian capitalism determined to root out collective power wherever it appeared, all while talking the talk of democracy.
In many areas of life now, technology has become a replacement for political debate and policymaking. It is enabled by what I call “innovation amnesia”—the tendency to forget past social arrangements when new tech comes along to undermine them.
Thirty Years On, the Californian Ideology is Alive and Well | TechPolicy.Press
In the seminal essay, Barbrook and Cameron insisted that there are other ways to build technology, and to do it democratically, writes Nathan Schneider.
Nathan Schneider