California Ideology Reading Group
About the reading group
Organized by Sanjana Iyer and Joseph Lubitz
Free and open to the public
To register email sanjana@wendyssubway.com
The 1995 essay “The Californian Ideology” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, argued that "the social liberalism of New Left and the economic liberalism of New Right have converged into an ambiguous dream of a hi-tech ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ with roots as old as Slavery. Radical transformations of the terms and conditions of life, work, and sociality have been and continue to propagate in Silicon Valley. Beyond privileging the biographical mystique of the entrepreneur, or even the legends of the Silicon Valley ideology proper, we understand these shifts as continuous with longer historical processes of industrialization, colonialism, and migration. From Mountain View to Bangalore to Israel, there are many and multiplying uncanny silicon valleys—specific places that are also the seeming sublimation of place.
This reading group is an attempt to think through the ecological, technological, and cultural transformations and resistances produced by the “Californian” infrastructure, as well as the racial and colonial forms of subjection, desire, and erasure that are its own condition of possibility.