Tech Won't Save Us - The Sunset of the Californian Ideology? w/ Richard Barbrook

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Richard Barbrook to discuss how the Californian Ideology illustrated the neoliberalism of Silicon Valley, whether it’s still relevant in the present, and how games can be used for political purposes.Richard Barbrook is the author of “Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village” and “Class Wargames: Ludic subversion against spectacular capitalism.” He’s a senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Westminster. Follow Richard on Twitter as @richardbarbrook.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Read the original Californian Ideology essay in Mute Magazine and Richard’s thoughts on the 20th anniversary in “The Internet Revolution: From Dot-com Capitalism to Cybernetic Communism.”France Insoumise presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon released a game called Fiscal Combat that helped inspire Corbyn Run.Richard mentions Guy Debord’s “A Game of War” and Bertell Ollman’s “Class Struggle” board games.Other resources: Marshall McLuhan, Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism,” and Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle.”Support the show

I was asked the other day, if you were going to rewrite the Californian ideology in 2021, what would you say? And I said, it wouldn't be the Californian ideology, it would be the Shenzhen ideology. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Richard Barbrook. Richard is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Westminster, and he's also the author of a number of books, including Imaginary Futures and Class War Games. He helped to write the Digital Democracy Manifesto for Jeremy Corbyn's 2016 leadership campaign and helped make the Corbyn Run app game for the Labour Party in the 2017 UK general election. But you'll probably know him best as the co-author with his late colleague

Andy Cameron of The Californian Ideology, a pioneering essay that looked at the neoliberal politics of the network technologies in Silicon Valley, and particularly how that was communicated through Wired magazine. I was really excited to talk to Richard about his work, in particular about the Californian ideology, how that concept kind of came to be between him and Andy and how those ideas remain relevant in the present. You know, I think this is a great conversation to kind of cap off the last four episodes where we were discussing technological and network histories. But beyond the California ideology, we also talk about some of Richard's more recent work on games and using board games and app games for political purposes, which I

think is really interesting, especially as we've seen this kind of resurgence of board games and interest in those in recent years. So I think you're really going to like this conversation. Before we get into it, I just want to touch on a few quick things. The first issue of the Tech Won't Save Us newsletter launched last weekend. I don't know if you had the opportunity to subscribe, but if not, I highly recommend you do so. You'll get it every Sunday. And it is called The Hammer, referring to both the hammer and sickle and the hammers of the Luddites who smashed those machines that were serving their bosses instead of them. So you can find a link to that in the show notes. Tech Won't Save Us is also part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find out more

about the other podcasts in the network at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like this episode, please make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. This episode of the podcast, like every episode of the podcast, is provided free to anyone who wants to listen to it, and that is only possible because the people who are able to support the show choose to do so. This week I sent out stickers to 23 more supporters across eight countries, and if you want some stickers of your own to join our Discord server or just to support the work that I do in making the show every week, you can join supporters like Emma H. from Oakland, California, Arnav Luthra, and Paolo from the Bay Area by going to patreon.com

slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Richard, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm very honoured to be interviewed by you. I recommend your podcast to people. I particularly enjoyed the one on Stafford Beer and cybernetics. It's one of my interests in life. Thank you very much. Now, obviously, you have been writing about and researching these issues around tech, the ideologies that go into tech for quite a long time. Obviously, I think it's fair to say that one of the pieces that you are known best for is the Californian ideology, which you worked on with your late colleague, Andy

Cameron. And so I was hoping that, you know, to start that you could outline a little bit what the Californian ideology is. And when you and Andy developed it in the 1990s, what was it kind of a response to? What were you observing at the time that went into this idea? Yeah, I think it's interesting that it's one of these articles we wrote, and it sort of comes back every few years. And I think that's because it obviously said something that wasn't said at the time, and now has resonated as we move move from sort of utopian moment of when the internet became a mass phenomenon to now where we're dominated by these big you know corporate digital platforms and all the stuff about you know the NSA spying on us all and you know Google and Facebook tracking

us and so on and so forth so in a way I've spent the last almost 25 years now to say, told you so. We were correct. So we originally wrote this in 1995. So Andy Cameron was working with me at the University of Westminster up in the media school. He wanted to set up an MA to, well, I thought it was, it was the first internet postgraduate degree in England maybe even in Europe and so he wanted to set this up we called it the MA in hypermedia studies just because we thought the name sounded amusing but it's also because we didn't want to define it just as the internet because at that time there was also cd-roms and early versions of sort of artists doing robotics and digital toys

and this sort of thing. So we use this very generalized phrase. But one of the things that we were responding to was the fact that Wired magazine was seen as the default setting for actually understanding what this new phenomenon of the internet was about. You know, this was the 1990s, we were at the tail end of this conservative government, it'd been Margaret Thatcher for 10 years, wrecking the British economy and the labour movement. And then it was followed by a slightly more, shall we say, low key version of neoliberalism. So we're like in the tail end of this conservative government. People were really against things like privatization

or marketization, except when it came to the internet. So you'd have people who wouldn't be in favor of privatizing the health service or the railways. But as soon as you started to talk about the internet, how do you create the infrastructure for it, the information super highway, as it was then called, these sort of things, they would start spouting neoliberalism. This was because Wired magazine presented itself as this sort of West Coast successor of the counterculture of the 1960s. So if you look at early Wired, they have this sort of quite psychedelic graphics. It had people in it like Howard Rheingold, to a lesser extent John Perry Barlow,

who obviously connected directly with that period. Fred Turner, in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, he sort of developed this much further than we did in the Californian ideology about how these people are around Whole Earth Catalogue and how they set up the well, and that particular strand of the 1960s counterculture, how it informed Wired magazine. But of course, I said that politics were very different. And so one of the reasons we wrote this is because in 1981, I spent a summer in Berkeley doing research. I was doing a PhD comparing the origins of radio broadcasting in America and Britain.

Obviously, one's very marketized, the other's very statist. So I'd met a lot of people who were sort of, you know, hippie veterans, people who'd gone round, you know, Maoist sects, hippie communes, Buddhism, you know, drug culture, all these things. They'd sort of gone circled all round. But one of the things I noticed is, you know, they were all very, very against Ronald Reagan, who was then the president, this new conservative orthodoxy that was coming in, what we would call neoliberalism now. So to suddenly see Wired magazine claiming that heritage for what was this neoliberal project at Silicon Valley seemed very odd. So Andy Cameron, who's setting up this MA, said, well, what we need

to do is write a manifesto criticizing Wired and essentially selling the cause, saying that what we're offering is a European perspective on it. That's why at the end of it, there's all this stuff about the digital artisans, which we are training on the cause, educating in basic Marxist theory so they can cope with neoliberal capitalism. So that was the point. It's to actually explain why countercultural West Coast hippie revolution could be then used to sell big tech. The opposite side of the barricades. I mean, I do remember meeting this woman who had been a Maoist in 1960s.

And she was not Berkeley. She was at the San Francisco University. And Ronald Reagan had sent tanks against them, literally tanks. They put up barricades. And so just like in Eastern Europe, he'd sent in the National Guard, I assume, with tanks, and she'd fought against tanks. The other thing was that because I've lived in the States, you know, as a child, and then I've been back there a lot. One of the things that's really, really noticeable to foreigners is the incredible racial polarization. And Andy Cameron had just read Gore Vidal's novel Burr. So we had lots of talks about this. And so we had this whole section mocking Jeffersonian democracy, because one of the things that Wyatt said is that, you know, the 20th century had been the era of big government and big business. And now when the internet comes along, we'd all go back to a sort of antebellum republic, where everybody would be like a small business person, essentially. And

this would allow minimum government and everybody would get rich and hip at the same time. And of course, if you think about it, this is the time of slavery. I mean, and Jefferson himself, on the one hand, is this great revolutionary, wrote the Declaration of Independence, very fascinating character. But on the other hand, he owned 400 human beings as his personal property. And we know he you know whipped children to make them work harder it was a pedophile because of course he had a sexual relationship with a 14 year old slave so it's that ambiguity we thought was quite interesting and to compare it with that that one hand you could talk about freedom and democracy

you know all those phraseologies which are coming, and, you know, good stuff that come out of the internet, that we suddenly did free us from a very narrow range of corporate media and suddenly there's thousands and thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of different voices on it. But on the other hand, of course, it's a very ambiguous thing because it also is about capitalism and imperialism, and in an American case, racism particularly. And I gather from people I know who had met Louis Rossetto that that was the bit in the

Californian ideology they hated the most. And yet we thought that that was actually the least controversial thing about it. We thought they'd really get upset with them mocking their McLuhanism, you know, the way that they used Marshall McLuhan sort of media technological determinism to justify all this. But actually, it was this whole stuff about Jefferson that they didn't like, which I thought was quite interesting because now, of course, with the sort of last few years

and particularly with Black Lives Matter, of course, that sort of, again, could become much more mainstream. In fact, actually, if you look at things like the New York Times 1615 project, in some ways it's gone to the other extreme, you know, because Thomas Jefferson has gone from being a saint to a devil, where, of course, the whole point is he's both a saint and a devil. It's a Puritan mindset of the settlers that still affects America.

It's the ambiguity, I think, that we were interested in. And the California ideology is about that ambiguity. You know, there are elements of the new left in it. I mean, because, you know, the personal computer comes out, the homebrew computing club, and lots of things like community memory at Berkeley, it's like the World Cyber Cafe in many ways. So in some aspects, it is true, it does come out of that culture. But of course, the other side of it comes out of the military industrial complex. The people who invaded Vietnam and invaded Iraq and have gone around destroying large numbers of people's lives over the last 70 years. So what we wanted to get out is the ambiguity of it, I think. It's not 100% evil, and it's not 100% good. It's both. I think you make that argument really well. When I was reading the Californian ideology, when I was starting to get into understanding the tech industry, what was going on with Silicon Valley, things like that, it was one of those texts that was really informative to me to help

me understand what was going on and the ideologies that were behind a lot of these narratives that we hear about, you know, the power of technology, how it empowers the entrepreneurs, like all these sorts of things, right? And so, you know, I thought it was a really important piece. And I feel like it's still relevant, you know, it maintains that relevance even today, when we talk about things that are going on. As I said, what is interesting is they didn't get shocked about the critique of McLuhan. But in a way, that's actually been a lot of the problem with even left writing on this subject, is you either get this sort of positive version of McLuhanism, which is the technology

is going to liberate us, or you get the negative version, the technology is oppressing us. But it's the technology bit that's the problem. In a way, they turn technology into the subject of history, or the self-expansion of capital as fixed capital, as the subject of history, not human beings. And so you can either have a positive or a negative view on it. But in a way, they're just mirror images of each other. And I think what we need to say is it's human beings who make their own history, if not in circumstances of their own choosing. Yeah, and I completely agree with that sentiment. And that's, you know, that's part of the goal of the show as well is to say, like, you know, it's not just technology that is moving things,

you need to pay attention to the people who are driving things forward, you know, the power structures that are behind things to actually understand what is going on. Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons why I guess it has lasted because it's not that default setting of either or, which is easy to understand. It's funny thing is I did this 20th anniversary talk in California and I discovered it's actually on the, you know, on the reading list. So at the time, Bruce Sterling had a little forum on the well called Loony Lefties Sniping at Wired. That was us. And then, of course, when enough time passes, it becomes a sort of honoured text among Californians because it's old enough, you know, which I think is quite interesting. It's a sort of strange evolution, isn't it, when you have writings like that. Another thing is the way the phrase

detached itself from the article. So I remember the first time I saw someone referring to the Californian ideology without footnoting us. I was a bit miffed. But then, of course, by the second time, I realised you've really made it when you've invented a phrase that actually turns into a meme basically and people can just say californian ideology and they know what it means immediately even if they've never read the text you know we actually invent a title and so i just went down my list you know i have a whole line of marx books and there's karl marx friedrich engels the german ideology and i thought yeah that's exactly right you know the key thing they argue in there is sort of left hegalianism. It could have only come from Germany. That particular moment in German history, that's why that particular type of belief system or,

you know, strange politics that they were sort of mocking. The people, their best drinking buddies in Berlin, who they were ruthlessly lambasting. But it was the same thing. I mean, I know Peter Lindenfeld said to us, say, it's not the Californian ideology, it's the North Californian ideology or the Bay Area. I said, well, yeah, you're in LA. To you, yeah, that seems obvious, but we live in Europe. So we just think California sounds much better. It's much farther. It's the other side of America. It's on the West Coast. And it just sounded good. And it could have only come from California. If you'd had those industries in New England,

you'd have had a totally different type of mixture. I mean, it probably had some elements of the same thing, but it's that particular West Coast, the whole beat culture, hippie culture, which does feed into it. I met this guy in 1981 who'd known Steve Jobs when he was a hippie, when he was at times when he was going to India to seek enlightenment. And he'd done acid with Steve Jobs. And I said to him, well, what went wrong? And he said, oh, you just wanted to make money. And this guy hadn't. And then he said there was some survey that showed

radical leftists in that period, the new left, earned on average $20,000 a year less than their peers or something. Obviously white people. And so there was obviously the mass of that group of people who had been politicized went into teaching or social work or setting up whole food shops or whatever. And so those ones who'd flipped over and gone into Silicon Valley and became these, like, star entrepreneurs were actually quite a small minority of that. I don't know whether Jobs was ever really political, but he was in that media. I think Fred Turner's book is really good to show how that whole earth catalogue people weren't of the new left. In fact, in many ways, they were antithetical to it.

But I think that, you know as as the group itself but obviously their followers a lot of them were as i said i met these people who'd gone around everything they'd spent their time in you know very political groups to personal individual developments or new agey stuff all in the sort of space of four or five years i think we're trying to just get that media i think his book is much better at drilling down, obviously because it's a longer book, and we were doing broad, bush strokes. It's more of a plemic, showing how that specific group

and how it fits. It's obviously not the Weather Underground or the Revolutionary Communist Party or any of those groups, you know, the new communist movement, all those sorts of groups. It's not that, and it's very much on the sort of much more conservative end of the green movement and that's why it sort of explains their technophilia even before they got into the digital sphere but again as i said it was originally done as a sort of manifesto for an ma course and it was just picked up i mean that's the other interesting

it was published by mu the net time mailing list it up, and then it generated a life of its own after that. Yeah, you know, what you're talking about there is fascinating. And I would echo what you're saying about Turner's book and how it really kind of lays out this distinction and how this group around Whole Earth Catalog, later Wired, and these publications, you know, were really central to a lot of this stuff. Global business network. Yeah, absolutely. And you were also talking about there, though, how, you know, had these investments or had this industry taken off in, say, Boston instead of Silicon Valley, it would have looked very different. And I wanted to ask you specifically about something that you wrote in the beginning of

the internet revolution, which is you talk about how at the time in the 1980s, you thought that England would import technology from France instead of the United States, which I think would sound a bit crazy to some people because France is often considered, I think, stereotypically as technologically backward, but they had this early consumer network, the Minitel system, right? Can you talk a bit about that and why it seemed like France and the Minitel system would be, you know, the future of network communications? They had a mass packet switching network in the early 1980s, when the internet was still basically something only used by scientists in university and a few techies outside. When we were doing pirate radio, friends of mine were on bulletin boards,

but they were like almost nobody else I knew. I know a friend of mine in the States, I mean, later on, he told me that he'd had an email around that period. But almost nobody else in the Anglosphere had computer-mediated communication, whereas if you went across the channel, they were people's homes they had these little terminals basically it was an online telephone directory but it had all these services like massageries where you could have online chats and people did all the things like an early internet like you know pretend to be different ages different sexes people met each other who would have never talked to each other

and there were political groups on it and hobby groups and things like that and that was all going on in the sort of early 1980s there so the assumption was that in fact Minitel would come over and so when the internet arrived it was like a sort of better version of Minitel and so again I suppose you're right I mean it gave me a distance to it because I'd initially had that experience in France. I mean, the only problem I have with it is that typing in French on a French keyboard is really difficult because the letters are in a different place. And if you're a touch typist, you instinctively revert to QWERTY as you're trying to type out the messages, which is a bit of a problem. But yeah, it was a fascinating system. I knew this guy who ran a radio station in Barbès in Paris, Radio Mouvance Internationale.

The massageries were on premium phone lines. So France Telecom would basically take 50%, you got 50%, and he would have a phone in with three or four lines going, and then a massagerie. And basically, this Radio Mouvance Internationale was actually funded by the massagerie. They would get amazingly large numbers of people logging in. But they did get some quite great events. Now, Oliver Tambo, when he was president of the African National Commonwealth, was on. And they had some quite prominent figures on.

But it was generating a lot of income for them. I think that was the other key difference. Because it came out of a government project, ironically, it was more capitalist. Again, I think this is something that Wired magazine completely missed, because they could actually set it up on premium phone lines. So if you set up a service like providing agricultural prices to farmers, you could make money out of it. You know, you didn't have to rely on advertising. People would log in, pay on the premium phone line, and you could employ people. Of course, because the internet came out of the university system, it was free. And so then it had to be funded by advertising. Again, it's interesting if you think about the difference between, as I said originally, my experience of going to the Bay Area in 1981 was to contrast the American system of broadcasting, which

was advertising funded, with the European system, which tended to be funded by license fees. Again, you can see that there's a similar difference where if you have the same technology, it can look very similar, but it can also be very different. I read Julian Maland and Kevin Driscoll's book about Minitel recently. And they were also explaining how the connections to the massageries and the other services was also a big thing that funded the media companies like Le Monde and the other major newspapers, because they got premium access to these short codes that you would pin in

to get into the Minitel system. And then they were able to make a lot of money through those, which they could then use to support the publications and I'm sure profits to shareholders and things like that as well. But it is fascinating to see how that played out. Well, that's why there was a lot of resistance in France to the internet, because it didn't have a business model. They had this very secure business model for computer-mediated communication, which was basically destroyed by the internet. And they then had to go to advertising funding with all the problems we know about.

Because to make advertising work on the internet, you have to start targeting advertising. And then targeting people, you have to monitor them 24-7 and build up large files on their interests, which, of of course the secret police are also very interested in. Yeah, absolutely. But that question of the business model of the internet is also a really fascinating one, right? Because in another one of your essays, you wrote that the internet originally presented like two distinct paths, right? One where we would have a high-tech gift economy that could be something like an online communism, and another one that was an electronic marketplace that facilitated online commerce.

And obviously, we know which direction this has gone. But why was the early, less commercial internet not able to withstand the pressures of commodification? Well, in a way, I don't think that's true. I think there is this electronic agora aspect of it. I caught this horrible evil virus. And so I've actually ended up with long COVID. So I had to spend a lot of time watching television, which I normally never do, to be honest. I couldn't really got into apart from looking at, you know, if somebody's put up a lecture and I really want to see it, I'll watch it. But I was just sort of sick. So I was watching randomly YouTube and there's huge amounts of content on it, which is produced for free. And some people make a little bit of money out of advertising, but it's not really why they're putting it up there.

It's mainly vanity, to be honest. And that's a sort of gift economy. I mean, what YouTube is doing is obviously making money out of it. They're essentially using advertising to fund the hosting of it. But a lot of the content is produced as a gift economy. And you could say even something like Facebook. People are making content and sharing it with each other, and Facebook are making money out of providing the hosting.

So you have a sort of combination of the electronic marketplace and the electronic agri together. Again, it's a bit like the Californian ideology. They only work together. YouTube doesn't like a sort of conventional sort of pre-internet corporate media. What they would do is they would produce the content. Well, they don't produce the content. They get other people to produce the content, and then they make the money out of hosting and delivering it, which is a quite different business model. And so I think that's the other interesting, is the way that that has still existed. I mean, I was interested in this distinction because, you know, I got into this subject partly through that I was involved in pirate radio in the early 1980s in England. And then later on, helped set up a multilingual community station

called Spectrum Radio in London, which is still going, actually. And so we saw that difference. You know, there's obviously the BBC, state broadcasting, essentially government propaganda service. There's also commercial radio, which tended to be, you know, they sort of jukebox radios of different kinds run with advert and then we were trying to make like a third type of radio very much based on people like kpfa in berkeley and the free radios on the continent which used bits of commercial funding

like advertising or sponsorship but essentially relied on volunteers to do it. You know, community groups, people who were just radio nuts, you know, this sort of thing, music enthusiasts. And so when the internet came along, you could see that that model was being reproduced again within it. Particularly, I think the reason why the gift economy model was so strong in the internet is because, unlike Minitel, it came out of the university.

You know, I'm an academic, so I don't want to say that academics are better human beings than anyone else because, you know, they're just as greedy and backstabbing as any other profession. But it's just the way that academic research is disseminated is not through a conventional marketplace. So, you know, you give papers at a conference, you contribute articles to a journal, and you've basically distributed for free for peer review. And particularly in natural sciences, that's how knowledge is advanced. And in a way, as we know, there's lots of disputes been going on for decades about the way that patents and copyright can actually hinder

scientific research as much as advance it usually what happens is there has to be a sort of a balance between the two if you over commodify scientific research you won't progress very far but obviously in some ways obviously the capitalist economy you have to bring it to market at some point and so when the internet came out of the university, it started off as a gift economy. Now, if you think about the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the browser to overcome the limitations of copyrighted word processors and other similar software

that the natural scientists were using in the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva. He's funded by the European Union. All his fellow scientists are funded by the European Union, so they're not worrying about money. But what they have is, you know, somebody's running, I don't know, WordPerfect, another one is running Lotus, another one is running Word, and they can't share documents really easily and edit them together. So he invents the browser to overcome

copyright and he says this you know if you read tim burton he said if you look at the architecture web it's all based on caching documents so you're making copies all the time that's what you're doing by using the internet is copying things and so it becomes difficult then to actually commodify it and we've seen this with music and things like this and films and lots of other types of media where there's this continuous bleeding between trying to copyright it on the one hand and share it on the other. It's an ongoing situation, I think. I mean, I think the reason why we've had these very strong digital platforms is because they worked out the commodification doesn't take place at the

level of content, but at the service of the system. And that you can monopolize. So I have students, some of whom get become very radicalized. And if they want to get hold of really obscure, you know, Marxist text by Gilles Dovey or Anaton Panikuk or whoever, you know, it's really easy now. So we'd have to go to some left-wing bookshop and get some really obscurely limited print run to get it. And now it's all online. Ironically, the more difficult ones are getting bits of Marx

and Engels' writings because the Stalinists have claimed copyright over them. But lots of these texts are easily available. And also, you know, okay, some of them are behind paywalls. But you know, you know, anyone in a university, they can jump over the paywall for you, download the PDF and share it with you. And then it goes around your little network. So as I said, I think we're in this very interesting situation that on the one hand, we have this incredible globalized monopolies, but on the other hand, it actually does create this discourse. You can get many, many, many different voices,

which would have been, when I was their age, really difficult to get hold of. Okay, they partly lose the fun of tracking down some obscure pamphlet or I have bits of vinyl, which I remember I had been looking for for six months, and when I found it, it was a great moment of my life. So they don't quite get that thrill anymore. But compared to, you know, the ease at which you can get this now is really interesting. It allows you an access to a greater level of knowledge than you could have done earlier on, I think.

Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point. You know, I wanted to switch tacks a little bit because a fair bit of your work recently has looked at gaming and what is going on with gaming and trying to use that, you know, I think in a radical way to explore radical potentials. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the work that you've been doing in gaming and how that has helped you to kind of illustrate some of these concepts. You have to say I'm the punk rock generation. So when I was 20 i saw the sex pistols in the hundred club and in the late 1970s but still a lot of radical politics were going along i had teachers who was stalinist and trotskyist and what was great in that punk rock culture especially because it was an art school revolution, a lot of people were discovering the more radical ends of 1968,

1968 revolution, council communism and ideas like that, and particularly situationism. So situationism was a sort of mixture between revolutionary politics and radical art. And in its origins in England, I mean, I'm not talking about the New York punk scene, but certainly the London punk scene and later on in Manchester, situation mean, I'm not talking about the New York punk scene, but certainly the London punk scene, and later on in Manchester, situationism was the

sort of intellectual side of it. So at a very impressionable age, I read Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, and thought it was the answer to everything. All in one short book. Nice pissy statements. And only many years later when I'd read lots of books that

Heidel read, I realised where the ideas came from. But, you know, it does, if you're, certainly, it makes a huge impression. statements and only many years later when i'd read lots of books that he'd read i realized where the ideas came from but you know it does if you're certainly it makes a huge impression and even now i've given it to 20 year old students and they've just thought it was amazing too which shows it stood the test of time so i wrote this book imaginary futures which very much comes out of the californian ideology and the cybernetic communist work we've just been talking about. And that's centered around Marshall McLuhan. And so the next book, I thought, well, what I'd really like to do is write a book about Guy Debord.

Now, the problem is that there are lots of academic books about Guy Debord, some of which are excellent, but their difficulty is that Debord himself said they have a corpse in their mouth, was his description. And it is that sort of way that academics take very radical ideas and they sort of pickle them and stick them on a shelf. But they don't actually sort of engage with them as a practice. They're just sort of dead theory. And if you read de Boer's actual work, this is something he absolutely hated. You know, he claims that one of the reasons he dissolved the situation in this international

was to stop it turning into a cult, a bit like the Maoists turned into a cult in 1970s France. So I was trying to think of a way into it. And Ilse Strasdiner, who's a member of Class War Games, she had this book with the rules of the game of war at the back. This is Guy Bracken's biography. class war games she had this book with the rules of the game of war at the back this is a guy bracken's biography before my father died i collected all these stuff that i'd left in his loft which included these toy soldiers so i made the game of war using these toy soldiers and we started playing it and much to our surprise it turned out to be a really good game there's things

like the class struggle game that bertel olman did which is a sort good game. There's things like the Class Struggle game that Bertel Ullman did, which is a game that you buy for Christmas and play once, because it's just a goose game, as it's called. The idea is great, and it's a really funny present, but it's a pretty useless game, to be honest. Whereas the Balls game, he obviously spent a lot of time on it. And he started developing it in this 1960 but particularly after 68 when he fled to the countryside having been threatened by the french

secret police in a sort of exile him and alice becker hoe his partner basically developed this game and then they tried to market it we started playing it i thought well this is a really interesting way of going and it's a board game you know it's not a digital game i've later helped make app games like corbin run and so we started playing it first doing you know just playing and showing other people how to play and then what we started doing is actually teaching people to play it so we got it made a double size board and then we were doing it at you know political events and art galleries and conferences and you get people together we had made a film which is 25 minutes class war games for this Guy Debord's the game of war me and Fabian wrote the script Ilse did a brilliant

directing job on it so we did like Guy Debord's own films it's like a film made out of other people's films with intercut with us playing the game. So we used to show that, explain what the game is, and then we split the audience up into two teams and get them to play the game. And out of that, you then have a discussion about why he invented this game. I mean, he really thought that the problem in the May 68 revolution is that people didn't think tactically and strategically. They were sort of trapped, really, within the old ideologies of social democracy and Trotskyism and Maoism and Stalinism.

And he thought if you sort of went back to reading Karl von Clausewitz's On War, and he invented a game which taught people the strategic and tactical principles that they needed, that you could say, having relied sort of on the vanguards being your generals the proletariat as a whole could be a sort of collective general so that was the sort of serious side of it i wrote class war games the book about this game ludic subversion against spectacular capitalism as a subtitle and so i just looked at the three sides of Situationism. So the first is Situationism as avant-garde art, Situationism as radical politics, and then this sort of solution that he had, which is sort of military theory and different types of gaming as well. Games as art, games as a

political message, games as basically as training exercises. And so that's something I've been interested in and you can see now particularly in the last 10 20 years with the whole sort of hybrid warfare color revolutions psyops and all the rest of it how gaming is an integral part of you know the american imperial project for a start in imaginary, I touched upon this at the end, the way that they'd gamed the invasion of Vietnam to the US military and American government, constantly gamed how they were going to win the war

against the Vietnamese. And according to the rules that they wrote for their role-playing exercises and computer simulations, the Americans were going to win. But of course, the Vietnamese weren't playing by the same rules. So the Americans lost, much to the delight of most of the planet. So that, I thought, was also an interesting way into it, to actually talk about how, in a way, people think about the world

within that gaming mentality. And you can see how, again, you know, the Americans have, in the last 20 years, they've invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. And again, they would, you know, they had all these counterinsurgency simulations which told them how to win the war. And of course, they've lost. And so that's an interesting thing in itself, where you have like a virtual reality created by the military industrial political complex where they

live in their sort of fantasy bubble and then it collides with reality the vietnamese deciding that they don't want to be run by america or afghans or iraqis or whoever and so we live in that world at the moment because as you can see there's another clash of empires going on with the rise of china as a great power. And they're gaming like mad. Interestingly, all the games show that if there was a confrontation between China and America off the coast of China, not surprisingly, America would lose, given that the Chinese are playing on their home territory. I think it's fascinating what you're discussing there.

And I think we've seen kind of a resurgence of board games and things like that in the past 10 years or so. Like there seems to be a renewed interest in them. I offered the book to both Verso and Pluto. One of the replies was, why do you want to write a book about a board game? And of course, now, later on, one of the guys from Pluto said, well, that was a really silly reaction. We didn't understand that board games came back.

And I think, again, it was more of a coincidence than anything else. It's just that everybody in the project, apart from Mark Copleston, who makes Toy Soldiers, we were all involved in digital in some way, either as artists or politicos. And it's because we spend all day looking at computer screens. The idea of playing a board game instead becomes very attractive. And I think a lot of the reason for the rise of board games among adults is that, you know, if you're working in an office or teaching or whatever, you spend a lot of time on computer screens.

And you're a teenager, you might have spent a lot of time playing video games. But when you spend 80 hours a day on a screen, the last thing you want to do in the evening is look at a screen. So if you are still into gaming, board games become a real possibility. And the other great thing, of course, is once you're a grown up, you can sit around a table and get drunk while doing it. And of course, what you're talking about there is also like using the board game as a means of communicating and educating on these kind of radical political ideas, which, you know, obviously seems like a great way to do it. Well, that's what the class enemy is doing. I mean, you know, they're training business

executives, they're training the military. I have a friend who works at Cranfield Defense Academy, and that's how they train officers, because you can't teach them by fighting wars. You have to train them through simulation. We tried to persuade the Labour Party hierarchy that they should be doing this before the 2019 election. And John McDonnell was urging them to basically do role-playing exercises. But there was a lot of resistance to this because they didn't get it. They really, in a very fundamental way, they didn't understand the advantages of exploring possibility.

As I said, the downside is obviously garbage in, garbage out. You can have a confirmation bias. You know, if we invade Vietnam, we will win, or Iraq or Afghanistan. But the flip side of that is it is a way of trying things out that, you know, I don't know, we wanted to get us to do a simulation of what happened if there was a Labour government and the obvious thing was something like a run on the pound or some other crisis like that. I wanted to do one that is trying to force them to agree to a military intervention. I thought would be a really interesting one. At what point would the hard left agree to send British troops to a foreign country?

So those sorts of things are really useful because you don't want to have to be confronted with those in real life until you've actually thought them through. And I think that's the advantage of them. And as long as you're aware of their limitations. We did this really interesting one at the 2019 Labour Party conference called A Taste of Power. So we took a local authority that had a redevelopment scheme. This is a common problem. If it's a right-wing Labour council, they often get into bed with property developers because it's a sort of easy way of raising money.

But if you have like a more left-wing council, it's obviously pulled in two directions. It wants to make money to fund services, particularly as there's been savage cuts on Labour councils. But on the other hand, it's got community organisations who want these schemes not to just be simple gentrification, revenue raising, and they've got other priorities. So we did this role-playing exercise where you get people to play the different sides and often try to get people to play against type. I mean, this is something that Guy Debord stressed. You know, if you want to beat Bonaparte, you have to play Bonaparte. So it's always very good to get the Corbynesians to play Blairites,

you know, get the more moderates to play the hard left, you know, that sort of thing, to get them to play the other side or get people to play the property developers. That's always a good fun. Some people really enjoy being the baddies. I think that's quite revealing sometimes about them. But I think that's also an interesting exercise. You know, if you can play the other side, you start to understand better what their motivations are.

And, of course, if you have to counter them, you know what their likely responses are to things. So yeah, we tried different types of gaming. You're talking about the Corbin Project. And earlier you dropped the nugget that you were involved in making the Corbin Run game. So I feel like I have to ask you to briefly explain what was going on there

and how you got involved in that project. Jeremy Corbin's number two, I guess, was a guy called John McDonnell. I worked with John McDonnell in the 1980s. I said earlier on, I'd been involved in pirate radio and then community radio. At the time, well, just like that happened when Jeremy was leader, we were absolutely monstered by the media. And John was deputy leader of the Greater London Council. So there was this unified London authority, the most important local government in England. And it had a hard left leadership. And Thatcher hated it.

And the Tory media, every smear that they could get. And all this stuff that Jeremy suffered about being smeared as an anti-Semite. We had exactly the same nonsense going on then. We were in favour of lesbian and gay rights, so we were all paedophiles, or we wanted to make peace in Ireland, so we were all terrorists. You know, the usual stuff that right-wing media do against its enemies. And so at the time, the Labour left were very interested in doing alternative media, and community radio seemed like a way.

And so John was involved in that. As I said, I helped set up Spectrum Radio. In his constituency in West London, there's a Hayes FM, which came out of that project as well. So when Jeremy won, most unexpectedly to all us, after the 2015 election, you know, I know John, I was involved in the project. So in 2016, I coordinated the writing of a digital democracy manifesto for the second Corbyn leadership campaign. And then when the election was called in 2017, John had a meeting and we sort of brainstormed different ideas for the election. And I played this game, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the France insoumise,

sort of the radical left candidate in the presidential election. His group had made, so it was called Fiscal Combat. So you had little Jean-Luc and Jean-Luc went around and beat up people and took their money, including women. So it shows you how dodgy this game was in some way. It was a good idea. It was a really good idea and it was funny, but it was slightly, first it was violent and I think that was a really good idea. And it was funny, but it was slightly, first it was violent.

And I think that was one of the problems with it. And it was all just centered on Jean-Luc, you know, because it's a presidential campaign. So we took that idea and altered it, basically. So the first thing we did is make it into an app game. Because the sorts of people we were trying to reach with the message of the election campaign were young people. And they were much, much more likely to play a game on their phone than anything else. So we did a sort of 16-bit homage. It's like a race game.

Jeremy is chasing Tories, bankers, and so on. As he catches them up, it releases money. And when you get enough money, it triggers one of the pledges from the 2017 Labour Manifesto. And so something like, you know, funding the NHS. And then people join Jeremy. So it's not just Jeremy. It's a sort of growing crowd of people who are supporting the campaign. And it worked really well.

I mean, much to our surprise, it went viral. It just took off. And it was something to do with the campaign itself, I think, because the Tories thought they were going to wipe us out in a way like they did in 2019. But social media, particularly, there was a lot of what were called alt-left blogs and Facebook groups and Twitter. And we were part of that.

So there was a sort of official Labour campaign, which you have to understand the Labour Party bureaucracy was still controlled by Blairites. And really, they wanted to lose the election, something that they managed to do very successfully in 2019, where we got trounced, basically. So they were just running a campaign to protect the Blairites MPs. And so there was like a sort of provisional election campaign going on

based around this whole social media and initiatives like Corbyn Run. It just caught the zeitgeist. So once we got a bit of media coverage, people started sharing it on Facebook and on Twitter, and it just took off. We got a million and a half impressions in about two weeks, and it was spread all over the world. That was the other really interesting thing. got like you know people from australia and russia and you know all over

the place we're covering this thing because it just seems so unusual to do and it is basically party propaganda to put it bluntly but it works because it's fun my son at the time was four and so he loved it and we when we did the launch he he played the game at the launch i think they did they say that when they invented graphic user interfaces they were a way of interacting with computers could be used by admirals generals and seven-year-olds well our principle was if it could be used by four-year-olds it was successful he absolutely loved it i mean you'd also met jeremy i mean that helps you know so he knew this character this person he's met is on again but it was really interesting to see you know if

you can make a game that simple but it's got a very clear political message you know who's going to pay for the labour party program the rich the tories the people who've done well out of neoliberalism and by releasing the pledges more and more people joined the campaign to win essentially just for me they included the ghost of margaret thatcher throwing ectoplasm at jeremy which i thought was very sweet of them obviously it's a fantastic game and i think it's a great example of using you know these new tools in a way to promote these kind of left-wing projects well and also and also not to be too po-faced about you know what we used to call in the 1980s political correctness and now it's called what is it wokeness or whatever

you know there's this whole side of the puritanical left which you know is very self-defeating in my view and one of the things about the game is it's funny it's making a serious point in a funny way and i think we do need to be joyful i think that's a really important part of the left project is that it's a pleasure project you know it does involve violent struggle as we can see with the palestinians at the moment it can be a lot of tragedy and pain but you've got to offer also hope and joy as well. And the game was very positive in that way. That's one of the reasons, right at the very beginning,

when we were talking with the people in Lotto, it's the leaders of the opposition, Lotto, that the people are involved. They all said, no violence. One thing we definitely want is no violence. And we said, yes, exactly. We agree completely. The first thing we're going to take out of the melon chocolate is anything that's violent in it. So it's just like a tag race. We are talking about redistributing wealth,

but it's done in this sort of humorous, joyful way. Yeah, you know, I think that's a really good point. And so, you know, as we come to a close, I did want to return to the Californian ideology, because as you said, you know, as we come to a close, I did want to return to the Californian ideology, because as you said, you know, you wrote this back in the mid 90s. And now, as we've seen, you know, these kind of ideas have spread around the world to many different countries. So I just wanted to close by asking you what you make of how these ideas have spread. And if you think the Californian ideology is still relevant to understanding these various permutations of this kind of technological thought that have moved around the world. Coming out of that California ideology project is I wrote this book called Imaginary Futures. So this is about Marshall McLuhan and his influence on the world. I like these maverick

intellectuals like Marshall McLuhan and Guy Debord. So in that, I talk about if you can own time, you can control space. I originally thought, like a lot of people from reading the histories of the internet, that it started as a technology and then became this sort of utopian project. But actually digging back into the origins, actually, I realized it's the other way around. It started as a utopian project. So in the late 1950s, in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, you had this group of people, the cybernetic communists, who thought the way to solve the problem of central planning and the total party, was to replace it all with a computer network, with feedback both ways. And then the Americans got very scared about this. You know, the CIA reported this, and out of that came the funding for the internet. For various reasons,

mainly the Prague Spring, the Soviet Union abandoned building a mass computer network because they were terrified. The Stalinists didn't want feedback from the workers and peasants. By then it had taken a bureaucratic life of its own in America. And so when the internet finally did become a mass phenomenon in the 1990s, you got this utopian idea that California today is the rest of the world tomorrow, that it's a beta version, essentially, of the future. And of course, in a way, you could say that the Californian ideology is the last time the United States of America was the future. And really, there hasn't been anything since then. So I was asked the other day about, they said, well, if you were going to rewrite the Californian ideology in 2021, what would you say? And I said, it wouldn't be the Californian ideology,

it would be the Shenzhen ideology. And unfortunately, I don't speak Chinese, but that's where you would have to start. If you want to look at where is the country where the future is being prototyped now, it's China, not America. I mean, they're the people with, you know, autonomous vehicles and 5G and big data and smart cities and AI. They're already pulling ahead. And you think another five or ten years, they'll be even further ahead. So, again, you probably get a version of the Californian ideology that sort of mixes Mao Tse-Tung and Friedrich von Hayek or something weird like that. But it would be a different version of that, I think. As we said originally, if you look at Minitel

or compared to the Silicon Valley experience, you'd get a different thing if you said Shenzhen. So I think that's the point. Everyone's talking about, oh, it's Cold War 2.0. So one of the things that America and China are competing about is who owns the imaginary future. And one thing I did learn from having to watch lots of YouTube while suffering from the evil

virus is the Chinese are pretty confident that they do. They just keep going on about, you know, we have tens of thousands of kilometers of high speed railway and America has zero, not one kilometre. They're still trying to build this high-speed rail between LA and San Francisco, which has been going on for about 10 years now, I think, while they're working on maglev trains that go up 600 kilometres now. And then all these other, as I said, the whole 5G, AI, smart city thing, so that you could see that that would be another model of the future.

Which is interesting, if you see the western response to this what they're doing is they're not talking about china they're looking in a mirror so they're really paranoid about you know chinese surveillance yes this is the country with the national security agency or in in this country we have gchq so who who is the people who are, you know, hacking everybody, spying on everyone? It's America, actually. You know, so you're talking about, you know, mass surveillance in Xinjiang,

but you're doing the same thing in Afghanistan, Iraq, or wherever else you're invading at the moment. So that's the other interesting, the sort of totalitarian paranoia about Chinese development of digital technologies, I always think is very much they're looking in a mirror at themselves, actually. There's a really good book called, I think it's called, You'll Be Harmonized, I think, by this German liberal.

And he quite rightly points out a lot of the very invasive possibilities of these technologies. But it was published before the pandemic, where, of course, as we can see, how much we might personally be a bit scared by it. If you've got a deadly pandemic, and COVID comparatively, compared to some previous pandemics in human history, has had a relatively low casualty rate. If you use these track and trace policies, technologies successfully and combine them with sort of Maoist mass line organization, you can have very, very

few dead people. So you only think the human rights to survive a pandemic, how does that trade off against other things? I mean, so America has 24 seven mass surveillance of the entire population, but it can't use it to stop 500,000 people dying of a disease, which you could do with basic medical science and tracking who's got the disease and quarantining them. You could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. So they had the technology, but they couldn't use it,

which I think is really interesting. Whereas the Chinese quite openly did it. I mean, at the beginning of the pandemic, I remember when i was really really watching this guy in i think shenzhen that's right daniel dumbrill and he's showing this app he has on his phone which has you look at the app and actually he could see in his neighborhood who was being quarantined by that granular level of detail okay shenzhen so you'd expect them to do that,

and it's probably not out in some village in the middle of nowhere. But nonetheless, it shows you the ability of this sort of smart city-type technology, which I think is quite scary. But on the other hand, if you have a pandemic, suddenly people think, well, maybe they're okay after all. Cicero says this, has his famous statement that the safety of the people is the supreme law. It's on lots of seals,

Sallu's popular supremer Lex Estow. It's on lots of state seals in America. So again, this would be an interesting discussion about ideas we have about human rights and the role of the state. And so that's, you know, you want to say the dated side of the Californian ideology is the critique of American libertarianism, so-called neoliberalism, and about whether we are coming to the end of the neoliberal four decades.

And the replacement is something more like what this Chinese friend of mine calls state capitalism with Confucian characteristics. Yeah, I think it does kind of give us that ability to think about what would be coming next and what we'll need to be paying attention to as we see the evolution of these ideas. And the thing is that having taught Chinese students, I mean, okay, they might be coming from the elite if they're going to the West, but it seems to be reflected on all the surveys is the massive support by the Chinese people for the Communist Party of China and its system of rule because it's delivered. You know, living standards have shot up.

You know, they have a pandemic where, you know, less than,000 died, in America, 500,000 died. And so in one way, I'm very pleased that China has lifted itself out of poverty. I think this is one of the greatest achievements of the last century. But on the other hand, it's a very authoritarian system, and it has been for thousands of years. So I think that's something we need to think about. The West's system is very authoritarian too, let us not forget. It's a plutocracy. And as we discovered in the Labour Party, if you challenge that plutocracy, they will come after you viciously to destroy you. But we have this veneer of democracy and human rights. But if you suddenly get a system which is, you know, a meritocratic bureaucracy that delivers the goods, that can take control of the future, it will really change the way we think about things.

And it's interesting that, you know, that you look at, say, Biden's program. He's sort of mimicking China now. America used to say China will become like America. You know, the Communist Party will clap, they'll have a Yeltsin and privatize everything, and it will break up into 10 bite-sized chunks, and we'll be able to dominate it like the Soviet Union, and Wall Street will rule the world. Then they started complaining that he wasn't doing that for a decade. And now we've actually got the first glimmerings of, oh, we've got to have a five-year plan, basically.

It'll probably take another decade before the first five-year plan for the United States of America is constructed. And the Chinese will be on to the 16th or 17th five-year plan by then. But you can see that. I mean, they've actually understood, finally, that the infrastructure needs to be upgraded. I mean, I'm still skeptical about whether the American political system can actually deliver it. But if you're a foreigner, it's really obvious what needs to happen. I have a Chinese friend who said they used to visit America to see the future. And now they go to America to see the past. And I said, that's the same. My mother says the same. I mean, she can remember going to America in the 1960s, which is she's on the front cover of imaginary futures. And she said it was incredibly richer than Europe, two or three times richer.

It looked like everything was bigger and better and brighter colored. There was a lot of optimism because civil rights was coming in and first ecological legislation, but it got lost it somewhere along the way. The empire, it became a bloated empire and wasted all its money on foreign wars, as empires tend to do. I think the Californian ideology might have been the sort of last hurrah of all that. Unless, you know, Bernie and the DSA can take over the country very quickly.

In 1981, it was very funny, I went round the whole American left, I could find, in the Bay Area. The Revolutionary Communist Party with Bob Avakian and people in the Democratic Party, people who agree. But the one people I met who I really liked was the comrades who were about to form the Democratic Socialists of America because they were the only people I could find

who knew who Eugene Debs was. And I was astounded. It was, again, the lack of memory. Here you are, here's the Bay Area left, and you go, you know, KPFA party, and you go, I really like this guy, Eugene Debs. And they go, who's he? I said, he got a million votes in the election after the First World War while in prison, you know, wrote lots of really interesting stuff. But the DSA were, you know, the last grasp of that tradition. But hopefully it's re-emerging.

I mean, it's really interesting to see these opinion polls where millennials and Gen Zers go, yeah, we're in favour of socialism. I mean, I'm not sure whether they all know what socialism means, but at least they're open to thinking about it. And I've seen, again, we talk about when I was ill and wanting to watch YouTube, watching 20-year-olds who are very articulate and very smart and well-read. So there's hope yet that America can at least invent another future, a better future.

Absolutely. And we need to maintain that hope. Richard, I've really been inspired by your work. And I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show and to discuss it with me. So thanks so much. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's a very impressive list of people on your podcast, and I'm very glad to join them. Honored, as they say.

Richard Barbrook is a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster and the author of Imaginary Futures and Class War Games. You can follow him on Twitter at at Richard Barbrook. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about the other shows by going to harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.