Bonus - AI and Silicon Valley Reactionaries w/ Becca Lewis (Preview)
American Prestige
Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to American Prestige. |
| 0:03.2 | To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at AmericanPestigepod.com. |
| 0:08.3 | Find the link in our show notes. |
| 0:13.2 | So, Becca, I was curious, what's the Silicon Valley ideology? |
| 0:17.6 | This is obviously something that's been written about from a lot of different perspectives. I don't think as you gestured toward earlier, it's not easily identifiable as |
| 0:26.9 | libertarian or anything like that. But is there an ideology of the valley? I mean, |
| 0:34.8 | you could probably write books about how it's changed over time, but how would you |
| 0:37.9 | characterize it today? |
| 0:39.7 | Yeah, this is like getting into the meat of my book project, actually, so I could talk about |
| 0:45.1 | this for hours. |
| 0:45.7 | But for years and years and years, the prevailing idea is that the main ideology in Silicon Valley is this thing called the Californian ideology. |
| 0:58.1 | And this was, the California ideology was an idea that was, you know, dubbed in a newsletter |
| 1:06.3 | article by two British Marxist scholars, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. |
| 1:12.5 | And they called it a mix of left-wing counterculturalism with right-wing libertarianism. |
| 1:21.2 | And so for years and years, people said that's what the Silicon Valley ideology is. |
| 1:25.9 | Is this blend of like countercultural |
| 1:27.7 | aesthetics with libertarian economics. And a lot of what I've been working on is trying to |
| 1:37.0 | challenge the idea that that was always the prevailing set of ideas. I mean, you have a long |
| 1:43.3 | standing right-wing presence in Silicon Valley from the beginning |
| 1:47.5 | and people who explicitly believed that new technologies were a way of kind of restoring an older |
| 1:54.4 | social order, whether it be kind of maintaining, you know, patriarchal power within the family and the workforce, |
| 2:04.8 | whether it be kind of maintaining older racial power dynamics, whether it be about kind of, you |
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