The Californian Ideology

The ideological foundations of cyberspace

How Geeks Ate the World is the working title of a book that I’m writing, exploring the development of reactionary movements in geek culture (media, tech, and hobbies) since the internet era, and how these movements have come to dominate real world politics in pretty horrifying ways.

I will be publishing chapters and essays related to this project for paying subscribers around once a month. Unlike my regular newsletter, these essays will remain paywalled.

Episode 1 - How Geeks Ate the World
Episode 2 - Demons of Suspicion
Episode 3 - Backward Male
👉Episode 4 - The Californian Ideology

Super special thanks to

Dave Karpf

for helping me access some research material I needed for this episode. Check out his Substack The Future, Now and Then for more tech and tech-politics.

“We have, in the Electric Age, come suddenly to the end of the Neolithic Age,” wrote Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan in 1967, “After several thousands of years of specialized habits and technology and fragmentary tool-making, we discovered the electric circuit. It is the circuit that ended the Neolithic Age.”¹

It is in this essay, “The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion,” that McLuhan is said to have predicted the internet. That’s not strictly true in a literal sense—he didn’t know much about the technical aspects of how computers network, and in fact, US government scientists were already working on the idea in secret by the beginning of the 60s—but he very much predicted the direction that technology would move toward based on his sociological understanding. McLuhan was a media theorist working in the age of television, the best known of a handful of philosophers whose work focused on popular media culture and technology, and although he didn’t know the political reasons for developing the internet he knew, by merely following the trajectory of human civilization, that such a thing was both inevitable and imminent.

The television form has remained quite invisible—will only become visible the moment that television itself becomes the content of a new medium. The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the satellite environment or the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form; but this process whereby every new technology creates an environment that translates the old or preceding technology into an art form, or into something exceedingly noticeable, affords so many fascinating examples I can only mention a few.¹

It's McLuhan who coined the term “the global village,” and proposed that media is an artform, more than it is a way of conveying art, and media itself is the primary driver of human association, rather than any particular message conveyed by the media (in fact, his most famous statement is that media is the message). Each new form of media invented over the course of human history has built upon the previous form and becomes nested within the next one that comes along. Speech became the content of writing; writing became the content of print; print became the content of the telegraph; telegraphy became the content of television. Each development brings more of the world together within the global village.²

As the end of the 20^th century approached, the next step upward was due, and like any other media form the technology would not be developed for technology’s sake. It would be developed by humanity’s need to be more social.

Thus, before websites, there was social media.

When people think of “social media” they tend to think of Facebook and Twitter, centralized platforms that grew out of the so-called “Web 2.0” era, but the whole idea of cyberspace was social before it was corporate. As with so many innovations it was driven primarily by a desire for community and shared knowledge. Money-making opportunities came later.

Before what we knew of as “the internet” existed, there were online bulletin board systems (BBS), and their invention was driven by the needs of hobbyists to keep in touch. It was during the Great Blizzard of 1978, when physical movement particularly around the Ohio Valley was difficult, that computer scientists Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss invented a way to connect computers via the telephone network to keep in contact with their Chicago area computer hobbyist club.³

When cyberspace (or the “modem world” as it was known at the time)⁴ really began to expand beyond fringe computer hobbyists it was thanks largely to the 1983 movie WarGames,⁵ the first mainstream film ever released that featured online computing as a plot point. In it, a high school student played by a pre-Ferris Bueller Matthew Broderick (who was 21 at the time, but passed for a teenager thanks to Hollywood age magic) uses a device he rigged together with a computer and a telephone handset to access his school’s computers and change his grades, but inadvertently contacts a top secret NORAD artificial intelligence system. The film attracted media attention to the availability and purpose of a device known as a “modem” (modulator/demodulator) and doubled the size of the modem world within a matter of months.⁶

In 1989 the US Census Bureau reported that around 5-7 percent of computer owners used these bulletin boards and most of them were single white men, a demographic that was twice as likely as any other to be a denizen of the modem world.⁴ This new space wasn’t just a new convenience for communication, it was much more than that—it was an escape. It was a refuge for an ostracized culture.

Patrick Kroupa was a young prodigy who would become a founding settler of this new world. According to Kroupa, “most of the pioneers were guys who were simply unhappy . . . or to be more exact, so unhappy that they had given up on finding joy in the "real world" and were constructing a rocket ship called Cyberspace to get them out of here as fast as possible.”⁶

Kroupa himself was a high-functioning heroin addict who was introduced to hard drugs at a very young age when he signed up for a collective that called itself the Technological Assistance Program (TAP), which he thought was a club for kids interested in telephony and computer technology, but was actually a front organization for the Youth International Party (YIP).⁷

The YIP, who came to be nicknamed the Yippies, were a movement that sort of bridged the gap between hippies and hackers in the very early days of technological counterculture. It sounds bizarre but also kind of intuitive that, before computer networks, people hacked telephones, a primordial version of hacker culture known as “phreaking.” The YIP, in particular, had a huge beef against the Bell Telephone Company, which they saw as an evil monopoly. The TAP was so named because the Yippies were already known to the FBI and couldn’t open a bank account unless they obscured the name of their organization.⁸

Kroupa grew up in the New York district known as Spanish Harlem, where he remembers drugs were being dealt on every street corner, and his best friend’s uncle was a heroin dealer who encouraged him to imbibe.⁷ In combination with his crossing paths with a heavy drug-using hippie splinter movement, it would have been a miracle for him not to have fallen into addiction. A tragic story when you consider that he was just a nerdy kid who wanted to learn how telephones worked.

Phreaker culture quickly evolved into hacker culture when the modem world arrived, and hacker culture quickly became the dominant culture of primeval cyberspace. As Professor of Media Studies Kevin Driscoll points out in his book The Modem World, most historical accounts of the creation of the internet draw a straight line between the US Government’s ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) project and the modern commercial web but tend to leave out the parallel story of its origins in the bulletin boards. This seeded its culture and formed the primordial soup of what would become known as social media.⁴

In fact, ARPANET, the system more commonly cited as the direct ancestor of the internet, struggled to attract users for its primary purpose of sharing scientific research. While the popularity of the social modem world was exploding among hobbyists, the more “practical” ARPANET was less popular than expected and some feared the concept would fail to take off at all.⁹

Until WarGames exposed the modem world to the world outside, and for some time following, its environment was powerfully concentrated geekdom. No gatekeeping was needed—the technology required the technical proficiency of a dedicated hobbyist. It was very much an underground club of libertarian white men playing out a virtual, text-on-screen version of a mythopoetic community or even the hyperbolic version of one from Fight Club. A great many of its original population were phreakers and hackers, who formed online “gangs” with comic book villain names like Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception, their members adopting similarly fantastical aliases like “Phiber Optik” and “Erik Bloodaxe.” Kroupa himself was known as “Lord Digital,” which probably sounded a lot more original when there weren’t too many other people competing for nicknames.

Tales that circulated in the mainstream media of the time of a “Great Hacker War” between these gangs were probably vastly exaggerated.¹⁰ A credulous media was eager for an exciting story about a new counterculture steeped in unfamiliar lore. Patrick Kroupa, for his heavy (and eventually debilitating) hard drug use, had been described romantically (and ominously) as “Jim Morrisonesque.”¹¹ As Kroupa recounted:

Everything really was this big beautiful game, and here we were with an overview of the whole jigsaw puzzle, and the sudden power to do anything we wanted to do with it. For the first time in recent history you COULD reach out and change reality, you could DO STUFF that effected EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, and you were suddenly living this life that was like something out of a comic book or adventure story. In a place filled with magical lands and fantastic people who you had only read about, and suddenly you WERE actually talking to Timothy Leary, or Steven Wozniak, and some guy who was just on the cover of a magazine was speaking with you and thought that YOU were cool, and then finally you were IN the magazines and at the forefront of an entire subculture that was being rapidly assimilated into the cultural mythos.⁶

It's fitting that, like Jim Morrison, many of the participants in this subculture were profoundly broken people, however talented:

"Peace, love and happiness" was not exactly the driving force behind the rise of the electronic domains. A more realistic rallying cry was one of "Gee this technology is neat, and I'm gonna use it to make a whole new world where I can be happy and none of you can ever bother me again. You'll all be sorry, just wait and see!" They were building the cult of high technology in the hopes that it would somehow save them from whatever they thought had prevented them from attaining happiness anywhere else.⁶

Kroupa evidently struggled, too, with his masculinity. Online, the nerdiness that had isolated him in life became his supreme strength, as he adopted the persona of a warrior god commanding legions, but it was inevitable that Lord Digital would have to log off eventually and become Patrick. In addition to his heroin dependency, he became addicted to bodybuilding, dieting, and fitness.¹²

In 1992, Kroupa and fellow Legion of Doom hacker Bruce Fancher established MindVox, one of New York City’s first internet service providers, although again, this predated what we today recognize as the internet—there were no browsers and there was no World Wide Web. What users would dial into in these days was still a largely text-based landscape of the social internet’s evolutionary ancestors. BBS and newsgroups anticipated forums, and multi-user dungeons (MUDs) were the first online multiplayer games that bridged the gap between tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons and later gaming developments that would ultimately become the massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) and esport leagues that we have now. MindVox’s home BBS described itself as “a sprawling Tavern at the crossroads of the entire world.”¹¹

This was still geek paradise. The modem world had enjoyed just a little over a decade of geek libertarian exclusivity, but technological progress is inexorable. While hobbyists were thriving in their digital world of mythopoesis across interconnected phone lines, the US Defense Department had recently unshackled their own invention, ARPANET, the inter-network, from exclusive government control and released it for public use.

This was the 90s. Capitalism was about to arrive, and the dot-com bubble was about to start inflating. Normies were coming. Girls were coming. When they came, they would land in a territory already steeped for some years in men’s rights and antifeminism culture.

Continued after the paywall: The pop culture invasion, Wired, and the arrival of the World Wide Web.