> _ Appendix
89 Correspondence with Dr Richard Barbrook : the co-author of The Californian ideology (an interview at his house) (please see the enclosed DVD for our conversations) (This is just is a small fragment of the conversation)
Bongani (author)-I have been second life 3 months, and am looking into how it works using your article the Californian ideology as a framework. Or rather asking the question has Second life been influenced by the Californian ideology. Barbrook - I remember in the mid 1990s when i was teaching in Harrow (Westminster Uni) my friends where into M.U.Ds and there where graphic versions of that and these are the precursor to that. And what he was using it for was to pick up rather fat American women, these where people working in universities with free internet. Barbrook - The Californian ideology came about because, I and this guy Andy Cameroon, we were lefties, and I had a lot of friends who were involved with the internet. And they were not in favour of privatising the railways, but as soon as it came to the internet they started spouting out 'free market' nonsense. ‘Neoliberal toddle’. And that was because they were reading wired magazine. We wrote it because it was the dominant ideology coming out of America. So we decided to write an article critiquing.... This particular type of leftism came from California. Having lived in California over summer, it was a sort of weird mixture of hippies and entrepreneurs..... Bongani (author) - you say it's came from Californian.
Barbrook - Yes it's in the bay area, Silicon Valley area of California. When I did my PHD in 1982 the year of the Brixton riots, I had been there, i mean the 60s were just 30 40 year ago then. It was even more obvious that there was a disjunction - on the other hand there was the talk of 'lets make loads of money, smoke a lot of cocaine, lets have fun' Silicon valley values. And on the other side that old hippie stuff of macrobiotics and Yeats, and the interesting thing is the way they overlap. You meet people who had burnt down their army training centres and university...by the time i meet them they were gun-woo capitalists. They had moved across from Maoism to neoliberals without noticing.....They where into Mao but they went into virtual reality and smart drugs. But they can from a leftist perspective....What Fred agues is that they were never leftist at all he might be right. But I think people like Kevin Kelly and Risoto we not. When I was there I meet people who went around hippie communes, they move around Maoist sect. They did L.S.D….the punters went round everything. Technically, they are not strictly leftist but in a European point of view they looked the same. Bongani (author) - I was watching Adam Curtis's Film all watched over by machines of love and grace. Barbrook (author) - He quoted me... Bongani (author) - he traces some of the stuff to Ayn Rand. Is that the right wing side of the Californian ideology? Barbook - The thing that this social Darwinist point of view or what we call Neoliberalism in Europe goes back in America in the 19 century…...so in a way it never went away....in a certain way America was set up by liberals Founded by people who owned other people as privet property. 'The right to privet property' Bongani (author) - well there is something 'there' because Second life is really based on privet property right.