June 2023

“Electric lights are actually attractive. They make a night drive like this bearable. Beautiful, even. I mean, just imagine if we had to do this drive in total darkness. Because that’s what the natural state of the world is, at night, isn’t it? Total darkness.”
-Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.”

-OpenAI, Mission Statement

Introduction

As ‘software eats world’, the Californian Ideology – a heuristic for a constellation of
American techno-epistemologies, beliefs, fantasies, and practices – has come to manifest in private institutions, political bodies, supply and production schemas, popular media, and, of course, the infrastructures and commodities we depend on for everyday existence. This paper illustrates how Berlant’s concepts of crisis ordinary and optimism (2011) and Halpern et al.’s smartness (2017) are complementary in describing the temporal logic of the Californian Ideology, as well as how these theories offer a framework to interpret how dominant systems produce their forcefulness cyclically. I argue that the Californian Ideology acknowledges and reifies the precarity described in Berlant’s (2011) model of the crisis ordinary to justify its endless project of techno-solutionizing towards a smart-utopia.

Indeed, ideology cannot exist apart from a vision of the future: “works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine
shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated” (Jameson 1979, 144). The fantasy bribe explains how, in an ontos of constant precarity, the uncertainty of the future becomes ripe for exploitation as the anxiety of the common subject cultivates a proclivity towards an optimistic position of knowing (144). The optimistic attachment, in the Californian context, becomes a politics of temporality: the management of time under a specific configuration at a specific point in time (Adams et al. 2009, 1-2). It authorizes an anticipation, speculation, and imagination of future possibilities informed by the past and felt affectively in the present. However, time becomes tangled up, blurring and collapsing the past, present, and future. This, I argue, is the Californian Ideology’s logic of temporality.

In this paper, I do not describe the speed or rhythm of time under the Californian
Ideology, but rather its direction(s). First, I will address what we mean by the term Californian Ideology through a historical account of its emergence, politics, and visions of utopia (Barbrook & Cameron 1996; Turner 2009). Second, I will lay out the situation of the late twentieth to twenty-first century subject as described by Berlant (2011). Their characterization of the present as crisis ordinary asks us to consider how unstable relations between subjects and their environments, their present and future, might be exploited or repaired by forces external to them. Then, Halpern et al.’s (2017) characterization of smartness will be discussed to frame how the Californian model of rationality manages the crisis ordinary through an optimistic, anticipatory techno-logic. Here, the intensities felt by the present subject, driven by the situation tragedy (Berlant 2011), form a solid foundation on which endless demos can be built to prepare for infinite possibilities of crisis and towards a utopia of resilience (Halpern et al. 2017).

Framing the Californian Ideology with Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism allows us to
conceptualize the logic of the techno-solution temporally (built on the past, felt in the present, anticipating the future), epistemologically (objective, apolitical, rational), and teleologically (accounting for the preparation of crisis that cannot be known). Ultimately, this study asks, how does the Californian Ideology imagine precarity, resolution, and utopia to manage temporality in the crisis ordinary?

Historicizing the Californian Ideology

The term Californian Ideology was first introduced by Richard Barbrook and Andy
Cameron (1996, 1) to signify the “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley” that emerged through a shared belief “in the emancipatory potential of… new information technologies” – namely, a global information highway made possible through the convergence of traditional media, communication, and telecommunication technologies. The utopian ideal of this techno-orthodoxy hinges on the combination of the counter-cultural ideals of California’s New Left of the 1960’s and the free market liberalism of the 1990’s New Right.

To understand this fusion, one must “go back into the past and identify the social work that has gone into aligning emerging digital technologies with libertarian political ideals” (Turner 2006, 3). Barbrook and Cameron (1996) trace the lineage of the Californian Ideology to the Californian New Left of the 1960’s, emerging from a felt precarity around the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and a growing acknowledgement of human-induced ecological crisis. This group of ‘radical’ intellectuals, artists, and activists idealized “universalist, rational, and progressive ideals, such as democracy, tolerance, self-fulfillment and social justice”, “[prefiguring] the libertarian society of the future” (Barbrook & Cameron 1996, 2). Their vision of a better future took the shape of Marshall McLuhan’s electronic agora, a utopia where technological innovation would mitigate the precarity of the masses through universal access to free information (2). The New Left, blinded by their optimism, believed that capitalism was crumbling and that technological progress would result in an inevitable ecotopia.

In 1984, the first Hackers Conference was held in California to discuss the role of the free market in advancing the reach and development of counter-cultural information technologies (Turner 2006, 8). Turner (ibid., 10) states: “By and large, they agreed that the free dissemination of information was a worthy ideal, but in some cases, it was clearly only an ideal.” The New Left’s utopian vision, optimistically attached to technology as the agent of resistance, freedom, and equality, became overshadowed by a new optimism towards the promises of the marketplace (Barbrook & Cameron 1996, 4).

By 1994, the New Right were running their political campaigns on promises of personal
liberty achieved through investments in techno-solutions (Barbrook & Cameron 1996, 5). While the descendents of the New Left still envisioned a free and equal future through progressive information technology, the right saw computation as a market ripe for financialization and a return to the “America of the Founding Fathers” (4). As of 1995, Barbrook and Cameron claim that the right won; the trajectory of Californian technology became attuned to the utopia of the Jeffersonian-liberal and an unrestrained free market (7). Today, one need only look to the utilitarianism of TESCREAL, the ‘long-termers’, and effective altruists to weed out the right’s influence in Silicon Valley. To many, however, tech-companies are interpreted as leftist institutions with progressive political agendas. There is an intense ambiguity to the Californian Ideology in its political affiliations, its promises, and its fantasies. In this ambiguity its power grows, as it is capable of signifying anything to anyone (4).

Precarity and utopia are built into the logic of the Californian Ideology through the fusion of the reactionary practices of 1960’s counterculture with an emergent neoliberalism and the ‘right-winging’ of technology in the 1980’s and 90’s – the period in which Berlant (2011) claims ‘crisis’ gradually became more ‘ordinary’. The Californian Ideology as a term, then, is used here as a heuristic that signifies a processual history of beliefs and profit-driven practices, tied to contradictory politics which together aim towards a blurry vision of utopia.

Crisis, Optimism, Utopia

Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, theorists have attempted to account for ontologies of general and particular subjectivities under the machinations of capitalism and the normalization of liberalism in both global and local contexts. Lauren Berlant (2011) addresses the specificity of the current subject through a theory of attachment to provide a history of the present and the prevalence of crises that characterize it. Berlant looks to the relations between subjects, objects, and situations to describe an affectively-inhabited present and imagined future governed by rupture and precarity.

Berlant (2011, 2) begins their account of the present with a theory of attachment predicated on a specific definition of optimism:

All attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.

To Berlant, attachment is an affective state, meaning it is a pre-qualified, bodily feeling that marks the present in time. Attachment emerges when a subject perceives their relation with another subject, object, or situation as insufficient, worthy of maintenance, or in need of optimization, facilitating the construction of a subject’s desire and a fixation on or towards satisfying that desire (1-2). The somatic nudge of attachment–its affective state–moves the subject to speculate on the potentials of satisfying a possibility. Rather than an enthusiasm or confidence in what is to come, optimism is anything at all felt about change that will or will not come (e.g. hope, fear, anxiety, elation) (2); optimism signifies an ambiguous possibility in that what is present, felt, or imagined now will or will not be so in some undisclosed future.

Optimistic attachment, as a theory of affect and possibility, has a temporal dimension.
Firstly, affect resides in the present; to be affected means to experience an intensity now before it becomes qualified and taxonomized, before it becomes history (2). While optimistic attachment is felt in the present, it is informed by past experience that shape fantasies of future resolutions; in the face of presently sensed precarity and uncertainty, it facilitates comfort in conventionality, predictability, and non-precarity promised by the authority of normative ideals or, as Berlant calls it, fantasies of “the good life” (2). In times of rupture, the optimistic subject has a tendency to “return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way” (2). Optimistic attachment travels back and forth through time, informed by the past, embodied in the present, and always pointing forward. It sets up the promise of satisfaction, predicated on a fantasy of change, that cannot in itself ensure that the tools of repair are capable of fixing the situation. Indeed, Berlant states those tools can become “an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). When the object or practice that directs possible satisfaction actually diverts the satisfying of that possibility, optimism becomes cruel. For instance, the optimism of combating climate change through clean energy becomes cruel when acknowledging that renewable batteries are made from lithium and lead – the extraction of which wreaks havoc on surrounding communities and ecosystems. In short, optimistic attachment can fuel that which is the enemy of a desired resolution – of utopia.

This example of mineral extraction is only one of an infinitude that characterize the state of precarity in our current time of crises. There is clearly precarity in the situation of laborers in lithium mines–dangerous working conditions, questionable contracts, and asymmetrical power relations with management. There is precarity for the environment–ecological disruption and chemical runoff, one technical failure away from spectacular catastrophe. There is also precarity for the institutions who extract these minerals–resource scarcity, supply chain disruption, and legal liability. However, the institution, unstable as it might be, is the only of these parties with the power to manage their precarity, to optimize the uncertainty of the future through methods of anticipation, financial leverage, and ideological intervention.

The management of future possibilities leads us to Berlant’s (2011, 5) theorization of the
situation: “a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amid the usual activity of life. It is a state of animated and animating suspension that forces itself on consciousness, that produces a sense of the emergence of something in the present that may become an event.” The situation is the sensation that something is coming, as the individual feels the air pressure drop and looks to the horizon for rain clouds. It is the anticipation of imminent change, of inevitable rupture that forces one to speculate on the possibility of crisis and its resolution. The uncertainty of the situation’s end enables relations of optimistic attachment to emerge in the promise of some better future. As the situation is always emergent and already unknowable, “the rules for habitation and the genres of storytelling about it are unstable, in chaos” (Berlant 2011, 6). The “genres of storytelling” become ‘up for grabs’ as the institutions equipped with tools of prediction are able to shape the narrative of crisis. The earth quakes and the subject’s methods for standing upright are turned sideways. One must renegotiate their figurement to account for the inevitable arrival and uncertain shape of the impending crisis.

To Berlant, the situation of the twenty-first century subject is “fragile beyond repair, one gesture away from losing all access to its fantasies: the situation threatens utter, abject unraveling” (6). The situation authorizes the subject’s trust in, or fantasy of, genres – or schemas of utopian satisfaction. However, Berlant states, normative schemas of satisfaction “now appear to mark archaic expectations about having and building a life” (6). The children of the 1990’s watched their parents buy into the normative procedures of the good life and suffer anyway in the wake of catastrophe (e.g. the Great Recession) and in the quotidian anxieties of everyday life (e.g. divorce, job loss, overdue bills). In states of rupture, the individual encounters an impasse, or a stasis of possibility in the present which forecloses movements towards the future (4). This is the crisis ordinary, where precarity has become perpetual to the extent of hegemony: the subject’s self-optimism, that they can auto-navigate constantly shifting ground, is obliterated by a consent to the precarity authorized by the modern situation. They must lean on something or someone else as if it were always the natural façon d’être. Through the crisis-situation, dominant authorities become able to leverage the affective state of the subject through a promise, a fantasy bribe, of genuine resolution and utopia (Jameson 1979, 144).

The Californian Ideology manages hope and fear, elation and anxiety, utopia and dystopia, and in this management its magnitude grows (Jameson 1976, 144). It leverages fear by imagining and realizing crises that are tautologically legitimized by the precarity of the past. It reaches into the future and grabs hold of predicted or imagined crisis-events, reifying them in the present. The resultant negative affects that mark the present–anxiety, discomfort, nausea–beg for a resolution. Promises of resolution, preparation, and utopia give life to an optimism towards the fantasy-future. Today, this optimism is managed to promise both a mitigation of the negative and an optimization of the positive through smartness. But this optimism, I argue, is cruel.

A New (Cruel) Hope

In 2020, shortly after the novel Coronavirus cultivated a synchronized impasse at a global scale, software engineer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote a rallying-cry for the Californian techno-class called, “It’s Time to Build”. He (2020, 1) states that the calamitous effects of the pandemic were foreseeable and indicative of major failures in our trusted systems’ abilities to prepare. “Part of the problem”, he says, “is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t do in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability build” (1). To Andreessen, stochastic rupture is inevitable and its infinite possibilities of future action and reaction should always be imagined. Anticipatory knowing, predictive skepticism, and utopian fantasy become moral imperatives; we chose not to prepare and we should be ashamed. Here, Andreessen attaches his optimism to an ambiguous practice; he tells us that the solution is to build more, bigger, and better, to build endlessly to account for all possible situations and resolutions. But, what is it exactly that he wants to build?

As stated, the ambiguity of the Californian Ideology resides in its contradiction of two
opposing visions of a libertarian utopia (Barbrook & Cameron 2009, 4). Both accounts of utopia are techno-deterministic: the New Left imagined liberty as a social ideal marked by equality, justice, and tolerance. The New Right imagined liberty as an economic ideal marked by unconstrained personal freedom. The promises of both camps lean on the fantasy that technology can only optimize human existence. These optimistic narratives take material form in the shape of the techno-solution, a mechanical imaginary of a brighter, smarter future (Halpern et al. 2017, 107).

Halpern et al. (2017) periodize a history of American rationality that emerged in the
precarious wake of World War II, at the same time that the New Left was forming in California and neoliberalism was planting its roots. In this period, the unstable relations between the United States and the Soviet Union resulted in a war of informed suspicion and a global battlefield of uncertainty. This dynamic gave rise to a new mode of institutionalized reason called Cold War Rationality, proponents of which put their trust in quantitative, data-driven, ‘objective’ algorithmic decision making systems (110). These Cold War Rationalists idealized positivist computation as the harbinger of a world free of human error, a utopia where uncertainty might always be known and precarity accounted for. Halpern et al. (2017) attribute current Californian epistemologies to this emergent mode of reason: “Cold War rationality has given way to the tyranny of smartness, an eternally emergent program of real-time, short-term calculation that substitutes ‘demos’… and simulations for those systems of artificial intelligence and professional expertise and calculation imagined by Cold War rationalists” (110).

The tyranny of smartness signals a shift in systemic epistemology. Building on the Cold
War Rationalists, the smart regime imagines a globally integrated system of

human beings and machines [in] a seamless ‘Internet of things’ that would
generate the data necessary for organizing production and labor, enhancing
marketing, facilitating democracy and prosperity, and… enabling a mode of
automated, and seemingly apolitical, decision-making that would guarantee the
survival of the human species in the face of pressing environmental challenges
(Halpern et al. 2017, 107).

The practice of smartness is to automate decision making through a probabilistic, algorithmic logic informed by massive cybernetic pipelines. Teleologically, smart technology moves towards producing a more resilient human species through a global infrastructure able to react to and “absorb” uncertain crisis in real time (107). Smartness aims to sense the situation, in Berlant’s (2011) terms, and anticipate possibilities with an optimistic attachment to the promises of techno-solutions to domesticate uncertainty: “The smartness mandate embraces the ideal of an infinite range of experimental existences, all based on real-time adaptive exchanges among users, environments, and machines” (Halpern et al. 2017, 110).

In Berlant’s (2011) theory of the crisis ordinary, rupture is ever present, unceasing, and inevitable, calling upon limitless fantasies of possible “existences” and resolutions (110). Smartness aims to eradicate the uncertain by always already knowing how to prepare. Smartness looks forward in time to grapple with uncertainty that is ultimately unknowable; it frames crisis as inevitable, ambiguous in shape but impending nonetheless. Adams et al. (2009) propose that the uncertain-inevitability of future crises construct a moral injunction to consider, speculate on, invest in, and build out techno-solutions, instrumentalizing optimism to present the future crisis as real now (254). This moral injunction is highly visible in pieces like Andreessen’s (2020) who hides the insufficiency of the preparatory ‘construction project’–which can never prepare for all possible crises – through a discourse of ethics.

The telos of Californian smartness is its promise of resilience (Halpern et al. 2017, 107).
Resilience is built on an optimism towards the techno-solution, an object or system that is promised to satisfy a desire or need that we cannot generate from ourselves. The optimism of smartness, its promise of resilience, occurs through optimization: “the pursuit of ‘the best’ — the fastest route between two points, the most reliable prediction of a product a consumer will like, the least expenditure of energy in a home, the lowest risk and highest return in a financial portfolio” (118). Like Berlant’s (2011) optimism, optimization is boundless and anticipatory; there is infinite room for improving efficiency as a processual, never ending project that operates on the logic of “can only get better.” Optimization is a rough measure of efficiency, quantitatively arrived at through algorithmic projection of a situation’s “maxima and minima”, where possibilities and resolutions emerge through approximate values (119). Optimization, like optimism, tries to find the Nash Equilibrium of an unknowable, stochastic situation and derive possibility from this. However, the future crisis, in its uncertainty, cannot be truly known and only approximated; therefore, optimization forsakes the truth of the future and relies on a logic of ‘just good enough’. Optimization is optimistic in the capacity of the techno-solution to be preparatory, but it is cruel in that it can never prepare adequately for the specificity of rupture, legitimizing an endless readying for endless uncertainty. The contradiction of optimization as solution reveals a symptom of the endless ‘construction project’ found in Andreessen’s (2020) narrative that we can never anticipate or prepare enough (1); the truth of the emerging situation, frankly, is of no regard to the techno-solutionist.

The left’s vision of ethicizing possibility and the right’s drive to financialize possibility
results in a logic of anticipation (Adams et al. 2009)–economically and existentially–which, I argue, is a mode of optimism (Berlant 2011). Adams et al. (2009) posit that anticipation is the keystone of the current episteme, where truth is abandoned for speculative forecast as a forward-looking technique of epistemology. Anticipation is not only a practice or reaction to an emerging or distant situation, but a position that a subject takes which “actively [orients] oneself temporally” (247). Anticipation points towards the future and, like optimism, it is experienced as an affective state felt in the present and informed by past experience. The speculation that occurs in the anticipatory position is no longer concerned with unearthing hidden truth but instead aims to work with uncertainty. Indeed, “preparedness is infinitesimally possible and infinitely malleable when one has a good working model of an anticipated ‘future’” (247). Through smart technologies imagined by the Californians, the anticipatory position materializes in a temporal politics of imagined preparedness. Anticipation acknowledges the perpetual state of rupture and change found in Berlant’s (2011) crisis ordinary, and provides a schema with which to understand the telos of smartness. Anticipation asks us to form optimistic attachments with forces external to ourselves that promise a deliverance from crisis and precarity, not through truth and prevention but through preparation and resilience.

The current utopian vision of Californian smartness is found in its promise of confronting rupture through resilience: “The logic of resilience is peculiar in that it aims not precisely at a future that is ‘better’ in any absolute sense but at a smart infrastructure that can absorb constant shocks while maintaining functionality and organization” (Halpern et al. 2017, 121). Resilience, to the Californian Ideology, is a logic of living with precarity and adapting to change in real time through information-pipelines pumped by smart technologies to be assessed by automated, decision making systems. Resilience is predicated on crisis imaginaries, the fantastical possibilities derived from the affective state of the subject sensing the situation. In the crisis
ordinary, it becomes difficult to detach oneself from the anticipatory mode of knowing in conference with the affective state of optimism: “We need to want these things… we need to build these things” (Andreessen 2020, 2). Anticipation, authorized by the impending situation and an optimism towards resolution, is the key to resilience as utopia; it blurs temporality so that the future itself is named the threat and, through the logic of always already anticipating, pulls the subject into an uncertain future that is framed as here and now. The Californian Ideology issues forth a fantasy bribe (Jameson 1979, 144), leveraged on the anxiety and moral imperative of the subject in the emerging situation, to promise a resolution to uncertainty through a consent to precarity. As an always sensing and adapting system, the smart utopia is not a place in time but a process through time; not a condition but a position.

The Californian Ideology’s management of time appears through its logic of optimistic
anticipation. The age of smartness is also the age of the crisis ordinary, “positing resilience as a more general strategy for managing perpetual uncertainty and encouraging the premise that the world is indeed so complex that unexpected events are the norm” (Halpern et al. 2017, 122). Smartness, in the face of perpetual uncertainty and precarity, calls forth an epistemology of optimistic anticipation where solutions are not produced as end-products but haphazard version-releases that are promised infinite updates towards further malleability. The Californian Ideology dictates that we must always be preparing for the possibilities of an uncertain future, crises that we cannot know in shape or magnitude. It frames these crises not simply as uncertain
but as inevitable, justifying an epistemology of anticipation that leverages the anxiety of the masses. The Californian Ideology is cruel in its promise of utopia. The subject, when met with grand narratives of impending crisis, faces an impasse from which they cannot escape on their own; they are no longer able to inhabit the present as, by the Californian logic of anticipation, the future is already now and utopia is still in development. The present becomes blurred with the past and future, resolutions become blurred by a consent to precarity, and utopia is blurred by the non-resolution of the smart resolution.

Conclusion

The reigning narrative found in the Californian text “It’s Time to Build” (2020) is that we
are never prepared enough; after all this time, all this work, all this anxiety, we still do not have the tools at hand to still rupture and order chaos. The Californian techno-solution is an object that gains power through optimism. Even if desire is satisfied or a crisis is prepared for thoroughly, a new crisis or condition emerges and forces us to reshuffle our feet and prepare again with new tools. The techno-solution, in the face of an unknowable and uncertain future, promises a certain, dependable outcome. Even when it fails in providing this outcome, our attention is shifted to the next affective intensity that begs to be satisfied again, continuing the endless project of preparation. To Berlant (2011), we have no other way out of impasse than to buy into cruel optimism; even if we know our optimism is misplaced, what other mode of reason do we have to
negotiate with the world around us? In this time of absolute precarity at both collective and individual levels, where optimistic-attachment to movements towards the “good life” are managed by the Californian Ideology’s resilient-utopia, the non-resolution of resilience actively sustains the hegemonic forces of manufactured optimism.

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