Last night I had the privilege to speak on a panel at Sciences Po where Stanford professor Fred Turner presented his study of California Authoritarians. It was a packed audience that featured Sylvain Parasie, director of the Media Lab, who contextualized the event by pointing out how now more than ever these discussions are vital.
If you haven’t read Turner’s work, it is essential reading to understand the history and culture of why Silicon Valley is, well, Silicon Valley. His work is unparalleled at understanding the same roots of our utopian visions of digital democracy and the dystopian current reality of authoritarianism are represented by what happened in California communes in the 1960s. While certainly many factors have led to our current techno-fascism (one of many monikers), Turner’s deft analysis shows how the focus on the individual has led to both of these pendulum swings of the seemingly left-leaning liberatory spaces of the internet to the right-leaning digital dominance today.
My comments opened with the unusual decision to cite Turner from the endnotes of my book, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives: “Turner explained [in his book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture] that…the New Communalists…challenged the bureaucratic order with collaborative technology rather than reject the technical/military-industrial complex outright…early Internet pioneers such as Stuart Brand, founder of the WELL, were inspired as children by the face-off against the USSR in the cold war. For these pioneers “the liberation of the individual [emphasis added] was simultaneously an American ideal, an evolutionary imperative, and, for Brand and millions of other adolescents, a pressing personal goal.”
My very next endnote, “Barbrook and Cameron critiqued Wired Magazine for promoting what they called a California Ideology, a ‘profoundly anti-statist dogma.’ They argued that it embodied an Internet utopian philosophy of individualism and the free market at the expense of others. …. In a 2015 article, I build on and refine their argument by specifying a Silicon Valley Ideology that is tied to the corporate headquarters and platform control of digital neoliberalism and that includes a belief in non-hierarchical, diverse individual participation in online social media spaces.”
In fact, this focus on the individual is paramount to how digital technologies have been promoted for decades – that you no longer have the dogma of bureaucratic institutions, parties, or “big government” but that you can be free to express yourself online. The reality, however, is what I call digital bureaucracy, which is essential for powerful online engagement, and conservatives have won out over the last few decades with not only resources but an array of boots on the ground. I describe one case, though, on the left in this article on the Strong Ties of Social Movement Emergence in the Digital Era. In fact, last night’s win by Mamdani last night is a perfect example of the importance of this offline grassroots organizing.
But back to Turner. Read his work. All of it. Among his many accomplishments, he has nailed the historical and cultural patterns that we see today in techno-fascism. His work is published in French by C&F Editions. For another important take on the powerful role of Silicon Valley, check out Olivier Alexandre’s book (in French and English): Tech: How Silicon Valley Remakes the World.
Also offering insightful comments last night were Dominique Cardon, of the Sciences Po Media Lab and Benjamin Loveluck of Télécom Paris.
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