If you want to understand why today's leading AI companies behave the way they do, prioritizing scale and monopoly over caution, treating "intelligence" as a single measurable, ownable quantity, you have to go back further than the founding of OpenAI or DeepMind. You have to go back to a horse farm in 1876.
A fusion of two contradictory instincts
In 1995, media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron coined the term "Californian Ideology" to describe a strange fusion running through Silicon Valley: the anti-establishment, information-wants-to-be-free idealism of 1960s counterculture, fused with an uncompromising, winner-take-all capitalism. You can see both strands throughout the region's history, sometimes in the same company, sometimes in open conflict.
The open, communal strand shows up in the "hacker ethic" born at MIT and carried to the Bay Area's Homebrew Computer Club: the belief that knowledge should be shared freely, that you learn by taking things apart, that centralized authority (corporate or governmental) should be distrusted. It's the spirit behind the open architecture of the early Apple II, and it's the direct ancestor of today's open-source software movement.
