Rewriting the Californian Ideology
In this sense, tech today is less Jeffersonian than the first Californian Ideology suggested, celebrating the hacker, the dropout, and the lone builder, with the profound skepticism of centralized power entailed by these archetypes. It is arguably more Hamiltonian, focused on building state capacity at the national level. Whereas the old Californian Ideology captured the liberating power of technology, the new one affirms its constructive power. Tech’s social capital may be uneven, but its intellectual capital is growing. It is generating new ideas faster than most institutions can absorb them. Its ideological adolescence may still be bumpy, but the outlines of maturity are clearly visible, and only getting sharper as they are battle-tested in the political arena. Tech is well-positioned to usher in a new era of thinking and working. In tech’s model of the world, change is assumed to be a constant, and individuals are prized for their ability to invent and build us out of any crisis…
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