Two years ago, two Stanford professors teamed up with a journalist to survey more than 600 “elite technology company leaders and founders” about their political views. The average executive, they found, believes in free markets, supports gay marriage, likes environmental protection, hates unions, and distrusts regulation. He says he wants higher taxes to fund social programs, but he’d prefer it if entrepreneurs ran such programs instead of the government. (This may explain his fondness for charter schools.) Countless newspaper or magazine profiles have described his lifestyle. He microdoses LSD. Each year, he travels to Burning Man. He may well have attended the Women’s March or protested the Muslim ban. These, we often hear, are the politics of Silicon Valley—a distinctive mix of liberalism and libertarianism.



Decades ago, two British media theorists came up with a term that encapsulates this set of views: “the Californian Ideology.” In an influential essay first published in 1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron described the politics of Silicon Valley as a synthesis of socially liberal attitudes inherited from the Bay Area counterculture with “an anti-statist gospel of cybernetic libertarianism.” The philosophy “promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies,” Barbrook and Cameron wrote, while mixing “the social liberalism of New Left and the economic liberalism of New Right.” It’s why Wired magazine could run a flattering interview with Newt Gingrich on its cover.

Since the 2016 election, politicians and pundits have begun to question the longstanding assumption that the internet is always and everywhere a force for good. But the “tech backlash” has yet to overturn another assumption: that the Californian Ideology still governs the tech industry as a whole. The upper rungs still clearly subscribe to its tenets. Yet those tenets are nowhere near as dominant among the workers who make up the majority. And a failure to differentiate the people who own the industry from the people who work in it is causing the media to misread the rising wave of rank-and-file rebellion.

Employees at companies like Google and Amazon are challenging their employers to drop contracts with the Pentagon, ICE, and other government agencies. They are organizing for workplaces free from sexual harassment and discrimination. They are demanding better wages, benefits, and working conditions for the contractors who supply much of the labor that makes the industry run.

As they do, they are invoking a very different language than their bosses are. Indeed, they are creating a whole new paradigm.