I live in Santa Cruz, a college and surfer town about seventy-five miles down the coast from San Francisco historically known for its boardwalk. Until the resident University of California campus (UCSC) was built there in the 1960s, it was a small town largely settled by farmers and fisherfolks and enjoyed by retirees and vacationers. UCSC changed the tone of the place to that of earth-muffin and sunny good vibes: What else could be expected from a school that has as its mascot the banana slug? UCSC's History of Consciousness graduate program (not mickeymouse but as rarefied as you'd think) is highly regarded among humanities geeks. Its pioneering programs in organic gardening and agroecology are world famous, as is its music department with its strength in Javanese gamelan.

In recent years, this nuclear-free, vegan-friendly, lesbian/feminist-sympathetic, New Age-tolerant town has become a southern satellite extension of Silicon Valley.

But in recent years, this nuclear-free, vegan-friendly, lesbian/feminist-sympathetic, New Age-tolerant town has become a southern satellite extension of Silicon Valley. Twenty miles through the coastal mountains over nasty tortuous Highway 17, Santa Cruz is taking on a new identity, that of a bedroom community for one of the greatest and growing concentrations of new money, technologyworkers, and corporations that the United States -- and the world -- has ever seen.

From Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech by Paulina Borsook. Reprinted with permission of Public Affairs Books www.publicaffairsbooks.com, copyright 1999. Buy the book from Amazon.com and help support GraceOnline.

Surveying the personal ads in free weekly alternative papers are always a good way to key into what matters locally: For example, in Washington, D.C., GS grades are specified. So it didn't surprise me when, maybe for the tenth time during the four years or so since I had moved to Santa Cruz, I saw listed in the personals a particular kind of notice for a man looking for a woman. It didn't say he was buffed or liked walks along the beach or motorcycle trips to Big Sur or was into caring and sharing or, more mode de jour, that he was dominant but respected limits or was predominantly attracted to Asian women. Instead, "Ayn Rand enthusiast is seeking libertarian-oriented female for great conversation and romance. I am a very bright and attractive high-tech entrepreneur."

This juxtaposition of Ayn Rand enthusiasm and high tech entrepreneurship might seem as random an association as eye color with birthdate, for when people think about high tech, they may not think about politics or culture or the values carried with it. All they may know of high tech are its advertised appeals: the charisma of Apple Computer and Steve Jobs, the quirky pleasures of Web surfing, the scads of instant millionaires it creates, the way email so readily puts grandparents in touch with their grandchildren or long-lost childhood sweethearts.

People who are rightfully glad to be participating in a mailing list for migraine-sufferers or to be using laptop computers to work from home most likely haven't thought about the corporations, institutions, and people that have made doing so possible. People not intimate with technology may be thrilled by how holdings in high tech stocks have enhanced the value of their retirement portfolios, pleased by the ease of online shopping (furniture.com! i-dry-cleaning! e-gravel!), concerned that their children may not be Web-savvy enough to have a lucrative career as a knowledge worker, bemused when they spot a blimp flying over a sporting event carrying signage for a tire company's Web site.

The libertarian-technology axis has been solidly in place long enough that the phrase "a self-described neopagan libertarian who enjoys shooting automatic weapons" required no further explanation.

But high tech, like any human artifact, is not culturally tasteless, odorless, colorless. It contains attitude, mind-set, philosophy; and with geeks, the attitude, mind-set, and philosophy is libertarianism, in many-blossomed efflorescence. The libertarian-technology axis has been solidly in place long enough that the phrase "a self-described neopagan libertarian who enjoys shooting automatic weapons" required no further explanation when it appeared as part of a technology news feature in an April 1998 issue of the on-line magazine Salon. A Wall Street Journal front-page feature by Gerald Seib in June 1998 described how "by wading into the world of computers, federal trustbusters also have waded into the country's foremost hotbed of libertarian political activism." Northern California's high tech community is a libertarian psychographic hot zone, and this guy's mate-quest had to be the Real Deal.

High tech's dominant libertarian mind-set is less well known than the obvious wealth and new ways of living and working it keeps spinning off -- and, upon close inspection, is also far less appealing.

Yet high tech's dominant libertarian mind-set is less well known than the obvious wealth and new ways of living and working it keeps spinning off -- and, upon close inspection, is also far less appealing. It's a pervasive weltanschauung, ranging from the classic eighteenth-century liberal philosophy of that-which-governs-best-governs-least love of laissez-faire free-market economics to social Darwinism, anarcho-capitalism, and beyond. It manifests itself in everything from a rebel-outsider posture common in high tech (I program, I attend raves, and I practice targetshooting with the combat shotgun on weekends) to an embarrassing lack of philanthropy (unless it involves the giving away of computers). The technolibertarian stance can be well thought out or merely a kind of reflexive guild membership (all my geek friends and coworkers think like this, so why not join the fun?).

Related Links

Rewiring DotCom Culture
Paulina Borsook, a critic of high-tech culture and writer for Salon, Wired, and Mother Jones, joins Paul Saffo, Director of the Institute of the Future, and Kevin Jones, journalist and business analyst for Forbes ASAP and Interactive Week, to take a hard look at the "religion" of silicon valley. Forum.

The C.E.O. and the Soul
F. Gibson Myers, chair of a venture capitalist organization in Silicon Valley called the Entrepreneurs' Foundation, discusses the place of one's social conscience within the big-money corporate culture.

Humanizing Capitalism
Business is routinely dismissed by its critics as soulless, valueless, and rapacious, but Michael Novak argues that business creates social connections, lifts its participants out of poverty, and builds the foundation for democracy.