Now available (PDF), my dissertation at RCA Critical Historical Studies, which is part of the first year at Design Interactions. On the ‘matrixical relations’ of California’s technology culture between business and idealism and futures for art and design as social prototypes and storytellers.

When I started the research for this dissertation, I originally set out to look for ‘grand projects’– endeavors like Herman Kahn redesigning whole African nations, the architects Superstudio re-imagining Manhattan covered with giant structures or Nikola Tesla’s countless patents, many of which could be world changing if only realized. Yet curiously, when asking around for more examples of such projects, by far the most relevant reply came from a friend in California, suggesting a broad range of work, ranging from transhumanism, nanotechnology, computer science to projects like Steward Brand’s Long Now Foundation, a truly grand project which aims to give people a ten-thousand-year scope of history by creating both a clock that works in this cycle and a library. However fantastic this might seem, it is deeply rooted in the alternative culture of the 1960s and 1970s, just like Brand himself. I became increasingly interested in the implied connections and the reasons for which these projects at first glance seemed much more relevant for the present than, for instance, many of the radical architectural visions of the last 30 years such as Superstudio.

Eventually, I came across an essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, titled The Californian Ideology, which was initially published in 1995, at the onset of the initial boom of the internet and the so-called New Economy. While fairly ideological itself in demanding “Europeans to assert their own vision of the future”, a call to arms for the dormant Left against what they perceived as a “resurrection of [...] economic liberalism”, Barbrook and Cameron did manage to successfully point out the key paradox of a Californian ideology, should it exist. This paradox essentially consists of the unlikely combination of countercultural notions of fundamental transformation of society and the financial backing that these ideas came to have. This, at least at this scale, arguably unique constellation is what has rendered the rise of information technologies so successful in the last 40 years. Even more so, with the virtual community having long become a main-stream phenomenon in the developed countries and continuing to change how we socialize, work and play, the potential of the industry which evolved around this “hybrid faith”, as Barbrook and Cameron call it, is far from exhausted. In the light of global climate change, in large parts popularized by former New Economy-proponent Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the ecologist notions which formed the foundation for a Californian ideology in the near future might attract attention and investments at an unprecedented scale.

Yet, what might have an even greater impact in the medium-term future, is the fact that the many of the paradigms and notions associated with information technology have been increasingly prevalent in biology, especially with the seemingly exponentially increasing possibilities of manipulation at the molecular level of living organisms. However, considering its historical origins, this development can only be regarded as consistent if not consequential. In this dissertation I will attempt–through sourcing various materials, as well as hopefully through interviews with some of the past and current protagonists–to historically trace the transformation from American fringe culture into a system of technologies, which in the last decades have experienced enormous “global resonance”. From there on, I will try to extrapolate the present developments into the future, especially in relation to notions and technologies which will be likely to have a far greater effect on our natural environment–and ultimately on ourselves.

(Image: ATS-3, the US communications satellite which took the first photo of Earth in whole–an image which later appeared on the Whole Earth Catalog)