CRV419

Albert K. Bates works on a Kaypro-10 computer from his home at The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, in 1981

KMO reads and responds to the 1995 essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology framing it in the Colin Woodard's lexicon from American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Barbrook and Cameron describe the ideology of Silicon Valley as a mix of hippy idealism and free market libertarianism, but Colin Woodard's take sheds light on it as being the amalgamation of the Utopianism of New England Yankees and the rugged individualism of the Appalachian borderlanders. It's also helpful to incorporate the roles that the defense and intelligence communities had in creating the internet as described by Yasha Lavine in Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet which is summarized in the Baffler.