Before I was born Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron summarized the beliefs of Silicon Valley as The Californian Ideology. Techno-utopianism, “free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism” grafted itself onto the organs of ‘Actually Existing Capitalism’ like a virus, beginning a plague that has not been fought in the name of the immune-compromised but celebrated in the name of those with natural immunities.
What is the Californian Ideology? We already know what it is, but it is hard to put it into words. New Left anti-corporate radicalism combined with free market capitalism. The idea that (until recently) the largest corporations on earth were little guys. It is the tech CEO who goes to work in jeans and a T-shirt as ‘one of us,’ he uses Twitter, and is not a ‘suit.’ It is the myth of the garage-door startup and the reality of venture capitalism that have all combined to create an ideological cognitive dissidence that we have accepted as natural.
To understand this ideology, we must examine the contemporary liberal subject. The politics of our current moment are those of complete moral good and evil. Contemporary liberal politics are, in effect, secular Calvinists. This means that those who believe in “good” are good, whether it be voting “blue no matter who” or defeating “fatphobia” by embracing unhealthy diets, meaningless actions that do nothing for the collective good because the collective cannot exist; our relationships to a dead god are personal, not social. This makes the actions of liberal subjects meaningless; they are hollow reflections of the actor’s moral value.1
The same is true for the propagandists of the Californian Ideology who embrace the social liberalism of our era (do what you want with your body) with chagrin because this extends to the economic realm: they and their programming “labor aristocrats” have succeeded out of the virtue of their education. Their secularized protestant work ethic guards them against the uncomfortable questions that we face when we look another human being in the eye and call her just another homeless person in San Francisco.
That this was built upon the ashes of a once-Spanish colony is even sadder. I am less nostalgic for the ideas Catholicism represented than many of my comrades but we all agree (to different extents) that, in America, Catholicism represents the social and something closer to the left than the capitalist right, which is epitomized by the horrors of the prosperity gospel.
Europe, broadly, represents the social as well. In the American imagination, it is Paris. Dense cities with cafés, boulangeries, and lots of public transit. There are strikes, unions, health care, and a social contract that hasn’t been ripped apart by the frontiersman’s dream of Jeffersonian democracy. Not all of Europe is Paris, of course – I’ve seen the poverty of rural France with my own eyes, and while it’s not identical, many things rhyme – but it presents a cultural counterpoint to the tech-billionaire nightmare we live with in America.
Europe also represents an escape from a perceived American philistinism. The type of Americans who run away to Europe do so with this image in mind. The difference is simple: on French TV we see philosophers with their shirts undone, in America, we see Elon Musk. Europe represents a high culture that is unconcerned with profits and more concerned with the finer things in life. Theodore Zeldin attributes this to the unhappy childhoods of the French but whatever the reason, it is something that many Americans want as we struggle to leave the New World behind.
Unfortunately, this is all imagined. When a Luxembourger asked me why I like France, I said that I imagined that it was like the Soviet Union, only closer. She laughed and said, “Of course not, in France they have strikes!”
France and the European Union are not workers’ republics. They have the same troubled histories that we have in America. And that should not surprise us, because they made us.
The type of American that becomes attracted to Europe is the one that wants to imagine the “old world” as something different but familiar. Despite our (self-imposed) language barriers we feel closely connected to the nations our accentors came from. Nations like Germany, Ireland, and Italy have an important imagined connection to millions of Americans. I learned German because Conrad Christian Henrich Julius Pfannkuche was born in a little German town called Holzminden in 1873. But the challenges that arise in learning a language cannot be overcome by the imagined relationship I have to a man who died a hundred years ago. Instead, Europe represents something to both the average American (and we are very average) and to the American that embarks on an imagined ‘return journey.’
But none of this is the case. Paris is a dirty city and Europe exists in the same world as ours, one infected by the awful Californian Ideology.
Even in 1995, Barbrook and Cameron wrote about “…a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the ‘infobahn.’” European (and Luxembourgish) participation in the Californian ideology has been there from the beginning, but Luxembourg’s participation is particularly perverse. Unlike Parisian capitalists who can safely hide their newly discovered philistinism and modern cathedrals (skyscrapers) in La Défense, Luxembourg is too small to even have a reputation to protect. Instead, it has embraced the California Ideology and built the tax haven university to facilitate its worst aspects.
From my desk at the tax haven university’s communications office, I can see the Luxembourgish Ideology’s worst aspects. Plans to turn the tax haven into a “Metaverse Hub” cross my desk with an alarming frequency. The government has funded masters in supercomputing in the hopes that it, and an emphasis on space exploration (they’ve even created a space agency), will rocket them into the first rank of nations because, in this digital age, size and scale are no longer what makes a great power, but how many web servers the nation can host. At least that’s how the Luxembourgish Ideology goes.
My other desk at the alumni office has put me face to face with the horrors of tax haven’s free market dreams. The upsetting number of emails I receive as a student encouraging me to start my own business is compounded by the fact that I am the one who writes their propaganda. Students receive regular emails suggesting they start a business, and that the university will help them succeed (a capitulation to the truth that obliterated the myth of the garage-door startup). Even if you don’t have an idea, you should make an appointment or sign up for a ‘start-up competition.’ In an interview for my propaganda, I was even told that students are encouraged to turn their dissertations into businesses. I wonder if they can find a way to make history profitable.
That last part is less of a joke than I wish it was. The history department at the tax haven’s university has outsourced a class this semester to a kind Luxembourger named Pit. Pit does not work for the university, instead, he is a ‘historical entrepreneur’ (I am also fuzzy on what that means but I’m told there are a lot of databases) who has managed to make historical curiosity profitable. The history department and associated research center are filled with this ideology. History must be digital at all costs. This does not just create more work; it also lets bad history slip by, and some of the tax haven’s professors have been very open about the irrelevance of the truth for their projects. What matters is the digital, truth is a convenient bonus.
The Luxembourgish Ideology is plain for all who care to look. It’s been there since the tax haven’s birth.2 But it’s part of the misery I feel here. An extended Paris syndrome not because of the filthy streets but because of the ideological mismatch between my dreams of an intellectual Europe and this tragic reality. My classmates here are incredibly smart, I once had a lovely conversation about Dürrenmatt with a woman who thought he was a hack. Goethe is well-known, and Sartre was required reading in lycée. It is the teachers who, in their embrace of the Luxembourgish ideology, have forgotten their historical training in favor of coding lies. The professors have embraced a philistine mindset and seem disappointed when students reject them. They are the hip counter-cultural movement. They are the CEOs in t-shirts. They are the missionaries of the Luxembourgish Ideology.
Where does that leave the student? We are, I fear, reactionaries in the minds of our techno-optimist professors. Luddites who, in our refusal to adapt to the digital moment are damned by a secular god (capital) to be swept aside for a more pliable cohort. That is, if one remains.
When I began my program, we were thirteen and now we are just eleven. It was once twenty-five, but even before the plague, the numbers were declining precipitously. The new cohort that began this year is only nine. We tell anyone who will listen about our suffering, but there are two types of people who can afford to stay in the tax haven anymore: those who have embraced the Luxembourgish Ideology, and those who cannot leave.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
- They are, in effect, the Eucharist as a metaphor.
- You don’t become a tax haven without embracing the awful logic of global capitalism. The race to the bottom can be very profitable for those who are actually there.
Normal Thoughts 