Silicon Valley is already a land unto itself, a parallel universe where twentysomethings become overnight billionaires, where cars learn to drive themselves, where code is the common tongue and nerds rule. Unemployment rates are low. Housing prices are sky-high. Not coincidentally, this mostly suburban expanse also has one of the largest homeless encampments in the United States—and a widening wealth gap between the rich and the rest of us.

Like Hollywood or Manhattan, Silicon Valley occupies a singular place on the American cultural and economic landscape. Unlike those other locales, however, the Valley's more idiosyncratic political leanings have led to murmurings of secession more typical of rural hinterlands that already feel cut off through sheer physical isolation. That chatter has culminated in a measure that appears headed for the statewide ballot to split California into six separate states, of which Silicon Valley would be one.

While ostensibly a plan to make the entire state of 38 million people more governable, the six-state initiative is being led and funded by a member of the Silicon Valley elite, many of whom would no doubt welcome the increased political clout that would likely come from carving out their own statehood. In the hands of most, the six-state initiative would look like a pure stunt. But with Silicon Valley behind it, this effort's chances at the ballot box can't be dismissed out of hand. Unlike most other would-be revolutionaries, Silicon Valley has a long record of taking ideas that sound outlandish at the time—affordable computers in every home, private rocket ships—and managing to make them real. It also has a seemingly endless stream of money that, combined with heavy doses of ingenuity and shamelessness, give its goofball ideas the fuel they need to take off.

Silicon Valley's Superhero Complex

Leading the six-state push is Tim Draper, a wealthy third-generation venture capitalist known for his theatrics. He hosts the superhero-themed Draper University of Heroes, a kind of motivational cram session for would-be startup entrepreneurs, and once wore a Captain America costume himself on a magazine cover. Last month, he bought nearly 30,000 bitcoins auctioned off by the U.S. Marshals Service after authorities had seized them from online black market Silk Road. In short, he's exactly the kind of guy with the time, money, and temperament to push a wacky-sounding ballot measure.

"Our gift to California is this—it's one of opportunity and choice," Draper said at a press conference yesterday where he announced the campaign had collected far more than 800,000 signatures needed to get the measure on the ballot. "We're saying, make one failing government into six great states."

>Through Silicon Valley's lens, California looks like the worst kind of incumbent—an ancient, inefficient institution mired in old ways of doing business

Tim Draper. Bloomberg via Getty Images

The campaign in favor of the measure argue that six states will mean six state governments more responsive to local concerns, rather than the unwieldy process of orchestrating the state's 158,000 square miles entirely from Sacramento. But the subtext to Draper's push is more ideological, though not in the traditional right-left sense. During the first dotcom bubble, British media critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron identified what they called the "Californian Ideology," a pro-business strain of West Coast counterculture whose ascendancy paralleled the rise of the internet, which its adherents often helped to build and are helping still.

"The Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies," Barbrook and Cameron wrote. "This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies." With the six-state proposal, the Californian Ideology appears to be seeking out its final, fullest, most ironic realization by underwriting Silicon Valley's emancipation from California itself.

Disrupting California

And why wouldn't Silicon Valley seek to be free? Through the lens of its own sensibility, at least, California looks like the worst kind of incumbent, an ancient and inefficient institution mired in old ways of doing business, a monopolist that holds onto power through manipulation, not innovation. To six-state supporters, holding onto the idea of a single California represents, at best, an irrational sentimentality, a commitment to the past grounded in lazy logic and unexamined assumptions. Breaking up California is exactly the kind of "disruption" that titillates the venture capitalist imagination. In the process, the new state of Silicon Valley—which would stretch from San Francisco to Monterey–would also, conveniently, separate its great and greatly concentrated wealth from the poorer parts of the state.

Silicon Valley would also no doubt relish the increased political power to match its business might. It's not hard to understand why the people who brought the world Apple, Google, and Facebook, not to mention a fecund startup culture that has changed the face of global capitalism, might feel like they deserve their own senators in Washington. Even if California voters approve the six-state ballot measure, however, politics will likely trip up Silicon Valley before it ever gets its own state bird.

>Ironically, Silicon Valley itself was founded on, and remains driven by, much of what the California ideal stands for.

The Valley's "hacker way" has so far proven a clumsy fit for the strategic complexity of the political process, which relies more on realism than idealism. Before California would officially break up, per the U.S. Constitution, the existing state legislature would still have to sign off, which it's unlikely to do for a host of reasons, not least being the tax revenue lost to Silicon Valley seceding. Congress would also have to approve what would amount to the dilution of its own power by granting California twelve senators instead of the current two.

Cultural politics also trip up the hyper-rationalists of Silicon Valley at least as often as the electoral variety. California as an ideal still has a powerful hold on the national imagination, and among Californians themselves. Whether that ideal still really "makes sense" in the 21st century is beside the point. For a great many people, the dissolution of California would be experienced as a profound loss. Ironically, Silicon Valley itself was founded on, and remains driven by, many of the values associated with the California ideal: progress, self-invention, independence, liberation. In that light, trying to break up California might be the most Californian thing Silicon Valley could possibly do.

Homepage Image: Kai Schreiber/Flickr