Tech capital-Internet: in the neoliberal nirvana

“California is Done, it’s Total Destruction,” Marc Andreessen, Venture capitalist and developer of the Netscape Navigator, complained in July 2024 in his podcast “The Ben & Marc Show”. The reason for the decline of California is the announced tax reforms of the bid administration, which, so visibly considers, considers the founders to take every financial incentive and thus also destroy the investors such as the investment opportunities. A little later, Andreessen, who had previously described himself as a “Normie-Democrat” and had Joe Biden and Bill Clinton in and went, that in order to stop this destruction, he would vote for Donald Trump in 2025.

The bidding administration, which, in addition to the feared tax plans, are already promoting laws and wanted to take cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence to the short leash of the state, has given up “the deal”, which would have tied up the tech billionaire and society to date. “Deal” describes a simple recipe from a billionaire: the state largely lets tech capital work on the future of the world alone and the society claps when its protagonists are approaching as philanthropes and patrons. But instead of clapping Big Tech, how the industry grew up and more and more social spheres into objects of apps and platforms, Joe Biden thought loudly about smashing Google and hardly anyone came up with the idea of ​​celebrating Mark Zuckerberg to accomplish 99 percent of his wealth into a charity.

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Die »California Ideology«

Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz were not the only capitalists of the Silicon Valley, who laid their progressive shell last year. In the former bastion of liberal capitalism, where origin, gender and body were once declared invisible properties, which soon dissolve in the revolutionary space of cyberspace, a president is now supported who advertised with mass reports and the fight against diversity. Mark Zuckerberg, who once courted Barack Obama, publicly announced his withdrawal from progressism a few days before Trump’s inauguration. He ended Facebook’s fact check program, fired the relevant managers and announced that the content management is moving content management from liberal California to conservative Texas. With JD Vance, the tech elite even sent its own candidates into the race. Vance, who described himself as a “Never Trumper” during his time in Silicon Valley and criticized the racist police brutality, is a former employee and confidant of the right-wing tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel.

Trump, in turn, rewarded the “Tech-Bros” generously for her support: Andreessen was appointed a key advisor, Zuckerberg is now allowed to visit Trump regularly in Mar-A-Lago and for Elon Musk the Doge Authority was created, which is currently being handled by the US Ministry of Education. This supposed political change of Silicon Valley could be justified with the opportunism of money and would probably not be wrong. But behind this alliance is also the ideology of Silicon Valley, which has been combining progressive and right -wing anti -state rebels for years. The first description of this ideology dates from 1995, shortly before the “New Economy” boom phase, from the left media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron: According to prophets from the tech industry, “alone, the cybernetic flows and chaotic vertebrae of free markets and global communication would determine the future”. This “California ideology”, as Barbrook and Cameron call them, is a peculiar mix of cybernetic market foundalism and the libertarianism of American counterculture. However, this had already achieved global spread through the dominance of the US tech companies and their advocates were working on the realization of their dream, by the abolition of democracy and social solidarity “to build a digital nirvana” “which is only inhabited by liberal psychopaths”.

Irr way of counterculture

In search of nirvana, part of the US counterculture of the 1960s, which was almost its headquarters in California, was also in the analog world. While the new left was looking for confrontation with the state in the fight against the Vietnam War and in the civil rights movement, numerous free spirits withdrew before the post -war company in agriculture, which was perceived as overwhelming.

These “New Communists”, which lived at hundreds of thousands of country municipalities at the height of the movement in 1970, did not want to combat the bureaucracy, rationalism and centralism of the state from below, but horizontally: through their municipal networks and another mindset, often promoted by taking psychedelic drugs. However, these municipalities fell masses in the early 1970s. At the same time, the ecological and economic crisis, which soon brought inflation, stagnation and increasing unemployment. The post-war euphoria ended, whereupon numerous ex-communards postponed their hopes for a supposedly contradictory world of absolute freedom and expansion of consciousness into the area of ​​the resulting techniques of the Internet.

The ex-Community Stewart Brand is paradigmatic for this tendency of counterculture. He once organized the psychedelic “Trips Festival” and was behind “The Mother of All Demos” in 1968: a presentation in San Francisco, on which computer technician Douglas Engelbart, who regularly consumed LSD together with Brand, presented a complete computer and software system. Many of the basic elements of the personal computer (PC) such as the mouse, windows or hyperlinks were presented to a public for the first time on this live demonstration, which had an enormous influence on Apple and Microsoft. With the “Whole Earth Catalog”, A magazine and product catalog of counterculture introduced Brand the new technologies and the associated worldview of a world as a unity of information systems into counterculture. The computer, which was still considered a rule of rule of the state destroyed at the beginning of the 1960s, had undergone a change in meaning on the instrument of antistal subversion within two decades. In 1984 Apple was able to increase his Macintosh as a revolutionary instrument against the feared synchronization of humanity: »Apple Computers wants introduce macintosh. And you’ll se why 1984 Won’t be like ›1984‹ «.

The digital municipalities and libertarian rights finally entered their alliance in the waist of neoliberalism.

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California prophets

In the 1990s, the dreams of the failed municipalities finally seemed to realize, since the neoliberal counter -revolution finally poured out the gates to digital nirvana. The Clinton administration continued the policy used by Ronald Reagan, while at the same time the PC found its way into private households. There were just 62 web servers in 1993, it was already 1250. Marc Andreessen went online in August 1995 with his user -friendly »Netscape browser« and the operating system from Microsoft was soon global standard. At the same time, the US economy experienced a boom from 1993 that ended the years of stagnation. From now on, the free market and the digital technologies would ensure endless growth in a post -industrial society, according to the prediction of the California prophets.

The digital communities and libertarian rights finally entered into this fumitory. In the influential magazine “Wired”, people like the Steward Brand or John Barlow, Republican and Poetry of “The Grateful Dead” wrote about the advantages of state cuts and deregulation and cheered figures such as the libertarian right politician Newt Gingrich. In the “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” from 1994, an influential manifesto that was a joint product of anarchocalist “cyberpunks” and conservative authors, the California ideology finds its so far sharpest expression: the cyberspace is the last “American Frontier” that had to be conquered. This conquest is dependent on the deregulation of entire sectors. Only then could “the central event of the 20th century”: “The overthrow of matter” and the victory of the spirit over “The Raw Empire of Things”.

But reality looks different: since the conquest of the last borders, it has not been possible to overthrow matter – on the contrary, the world of the thing strikes back in the form of ecological catastrophe and social movements with more raw strength than was ever painted from the Californian prophets. The once progressively sounding promise of a post -material world in which social inequality, gender or race no longer play a role is currently being realized – by the authoritarian entertainment of this continued forms of oppression, accompanied by a drastic attack on the welfare state, women’s rights and anti -discrimination programs. How far the market liberal psychopaths can still realize their dystopian nirvana depends on the resistant forces of the material world.