How progressive policies, tech dominance made CA a “neo-feudal” state of inequities and segregation
In 1972, Californian author Stewart Brand (subscriber paywall) predicted that the advent of computers would herald an era of enhanced “spontaneous creation and of human interaction,” empowering all of society “as individuals and as co-operators.” It didn't turn out that way—far from it, as Joel Kotkin explains in First Things.
In the early days of the tech revolution, the Californian ideology was notably egalitarian. The ‘early digital idealists’, as computer scientist and writer Jaron Lanier noted in 2014, envisioned a ‘sharing’ web that functioned ‘free from the constraints of the commercial order’.
Initially, this model worked for most residents of Silicon Valley, as well as those inhabiting the aerospace-dominated areas of southern California. High-wage jobs allowed the workforce to buy homes, raise families and send their kids to college.
And as left-wing scholars Manuel Pastor and Chris Brenner noted in 2015, Silicon Valley was also among the most egalitarian areas in the US. It was the ultimate beacon of opportunity. That included for immigrants, particularly from East Asia, who set up small tech businesses and launched larger firms.
Today, the oligopolist overlords of Silicon Valley, like Apple, Meta and Google, all enjoy market dominance. Those entrepreneurs who are not embraced by big venture-capital firms live largely at the sufferance of these tech overlords. One online publisher describes his website’s dependence on Google for ad revenue as being like ‘a serf on Google’s farm’.
Once a beacon of upward mobility, California’s tech-dominated economy has now become what analyst Antonio García Martínez describes as ‘feudalism with better marketing’. California has the fourth-highest GINI inequality index out of American states, and has experienced a sizeable expansion of inequality since 2010, according to American Community Survey data. Despite California’s fanatical commitment to ‘anti-racist’ affirmative action and racial preferences, African-Americans and Latinos perform poorly in terms of income and homeownership in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, with the latter among the most segregated places in the US. The gap between California’s fantastically rich elite and the struggling masses illustrates the emptiness of the elites’ supposedly ‘progressive’ values.
This article originally appeared in First Things. Read the whole thing here.
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