우리나라에서나 미국에서나 정보통신기술의 확산에 앞장서고 있는 이들을 보면 ‘권리’의 신장이라는 측면에서는 나름대로 개혁적인 면을 보이면서도 기술낙관주의/기술결정론, 개인주의, 시장지상주의에 대해서는 비판적이지 못한 이들이 무척 많습니다. 다음의 글은 이같은 흐름을 California Ideology라고 부르고 있군요. html 파일입니다. 저자 Richard Barbrook과 Andy Cameron은 University of Westminster의 Hypermedia Research Centre에 재직하고 있다고 합니다. 다음은 introduction 부분만 발췌한 것.
Introduction
The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000 as well as the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and many others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, thirty-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the ‘infobahn’, cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the ‘post-human’ philosophy developed by the West Coast’s Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete.
On superficial reading, the writings of the Californian ideologists are an amusing cocktail of Bay Area cultural wackiness and in-depth analysis of the latest developments in the hi-tech arts, entertainment and media industries. Their politics appear to be impeccably libertarian – they want information technologies to be used to create a new ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ in cyberspace where every individual would be able to express themselves freely. Implacable in its certainties, the Californian Ideology offers a fatalistic vision of the natural and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market – a vision which is blind to racism, poverty and environmental degradation and which has no time to debate alternatives.
2000-05-28
