Dispatch from California: Is the Golden State losing its shine?
Why California's influence is in flux but not for reasons you may think
‘California is no ordinary state; it is an anomaly, a freak, the great exception among the American states.’ Â
So wrote West Coast journalist Carey McWilliams in his book California: The Great Exception published in 1948. "In California the lights went on all at once, in a blaze, and they never have dimmed" he wrote of the Gold Rush which was, in his view, the origins of Californian exceptionalism. As Karl Marx acknowledged, the sudden speed to secure fortunes in the West was like no other event in history; it was capitalism in fast-forward. And this, as we are often reminded, has been the story of the state ever since.
But what if Californian exceptionalism lies not in its historic ability to ‘move fast and break things’ but in the energy created by its rampant contrasts? California typifies, more than any other state, what historian Simon Schama has dubbed the ‘bi-polar nature’ of American culture. Friction, not speed, is the source of its power. The place that is the home of McDonalds is also the home of clean eating and juicing. The home state of Barbie and commercialised porn is also the birthplace of Dolores Huerta and Joan Didion. The land of the selfie also invented the sharing economy. The home of Reagan and the birthplace of Nixon is also the home of the Free Speech Movement and Harvey Milk. The birthplace of American outlaw culture and Harley Davidson also creates safe space zones. The gay rights movement grew in solidarity alongside televangelism. Religion and philosophy have always come in extreme forms in California, from death cults to self-help. The place which has done most to encourage man to be at one with nature is also the place where man has done his best to corrupt it. It is the home of the gambler and the moralist, the puritan and the hedonist.
One gives birth to the other, but this friction also runs alongside a seemingly inexhaustible belief in reinvention, of the individual - yes, but evident too in food, products, and religion. The yoga practised in studios across the world originates from the East but was reinvented in California, along with sushi and meditation. These cultural phenomena, like the Hollywood stars of yesteryear, have been put through the Californian mincing machine and churned out for the world to consume. Â
I reflected on all of this as I stood at the Griffith Observatory stroking a dog, but not just any dog. He had won an Oscar after having been found a stray and trained by inmates at Lancaster State Prison. Of course, I followed him on Instagram.
This is what I expected of California; a place where you feel every encounter should end with someone shouting ‘cut'. I also expected, and witnessed, the high level social dysfunction; chronic and widespread homelessness exists just a short drive away from the most expensive real estate in the world. What I didn’t expect was how old fashioned California now feels (contactless payments anyone?). LA stands as an urban museum to the twentieth-century; the city’s nerve system built for the motor car, former icons Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra etched into the walls. One of the liveliest spots downtown is Button Mash; a retro restaurant making pinball and arcade games cool again. It was also Oscar week, which meant that Hollywood Boulevard was log-jammed due to scaffolding for a spectacle that feels as undemocratic and unrepresentative as, well, a King’s Coronation. But it was San Francisco that felt more out of kilter, though not for reasons you might expect.
I was there to speak at a conference for a company called BetterUp, leaders in tailored and on-demand personalised coaching, on a mission to offer this most Californian practice available to everyone, not just top executives. BetterUp is a brilliant endeavour and they are clearly doing something right judging by the companies represented, from Google to Hilton, from Chevron to the US army. What struck me, though, as I mingled with delegates and other speakers was a prevailing confusion as to how the world of work had changed since the pandemic.
Let me explain. Silicon Valley, like Wall Street, isn’t just a place, it’s a mindset. Indeed, one that self-consciously stands at odds with the cold-served capitalism of New York’s banking district. Call it hippy capitalism or bourgeois bohemianism, the fact is that Silicon Valley reformulated commerce into a much more palatable form where lofty ideals of the individual and communitarianism provided a nice veneer to the profit motive. While Conservatives back in the 1970s dismissed hippies for defying capitalism, what no one foresaw was how they would eventually come to fundamentally reshape it. As David Brookes has pointed out, "the Free Speech movement provided more corporate executives than Harvard Business School." Hippie capitalism then, has never been about disruption as such, more a redesign; where social and economic liberalism collided to create something that would seed in Silicon Valley but spread across the world.
Forget Gordon Gekko’s ‘Greed is Good’ speech, it is Ridley Scott’s infamous 1984 commercial for Apple (which entreated us to celebrate the ‘crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers’) which was truly prophetic and might be dubbed the Valley’s Declaration of Independence. But it was not until the 2008 Crisis - when institutional trust was beginning to crumble, tech was in the ascent, corporate culture desperately needed reframing, and a new generation was entering the workforce - that the tech bro philosophy went mainstream. What followed were the innocent days when geeks became gods, we all loved a harmless poke on Facebook, Ellen DeGeneres did that famous Oscar selfie and when the Arab Spring heralded a new, exciting era of social media-inspired progressive politics. Â
Tech utopianism came of age just alongside the millennial generation, giving us something to clutch onto just when we needed it - the limitless possibilities of digital connection, the freedom and trust of the sharing economy and the disruptive belief in ourselves and careers. If you want to remember back when the oil industry was glamorous and rich just watch Dallas and Dynasty, if you want to remember when law was sexy and aspirational (especially for women) just watch Ally McBeal and This Life. But tech? There wasn’t one TV series that glamourised the sector, for it permeated all culture. None more so than in non-tech sectors which needed to reform their image post-Crash and entice the new complex breed of millennial graduates. In came the casual attire, whiteboard wall brainstorms and sleep pods with a dose of purpose thrown into the mix, but so too a level of digitalisation that blurred all boundaries. Millennials who had been groomed from a young age to intertwine their identities around careers, entered the work force at a critical juncture, when digital workloads became relentless and when work itself seemed to guaranteed less and less. It wasn’t our ‘desk that was our altar’ but our laptops and phones, closer to our bodies these machines, like ourselves, only switched off when they froze or overheated.
Soon, though, the Silicon philosophy began to fray at the edges. Big Tech got too big, platforms denied their responsibilities as employers, then came Cambridge Analytica, privacy and safety concerns, the election of 2016 and Frances Haugen. Last year heralded a consequential low; a cool dose of economic reality that felt unfamiliar. 120,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2022 - nothing to the millions of blue collar workers made redundant in 1980s-1990s for sure, but tech was a sector only built for expansion, now employing few who had institutional memory of the dot.com bubble. Add in the collapse of Crypto and the pantomime villain Elon Musk buying Twitter and suddenly tech-optimism seemed a long time ago.
This crisis of confidence in the Silicon Valley doctrine was palpable at the conference. Businesses are now understandably having to prioritise productivity and profit and are perhaps unsure whether all the commitment made to the holistic self, of wellness and learning, is even practical in sector braced for further shocks. For the last twenty years Silicon Valley has defined work, but for how much longer? "We aren’t that far off being able to calculate individual employees' contribution to shareholders" said one in a sentiment that would have made even Milton Friedman blush. "Sport appreciates the need for rest and days off, so why don’t we in. the workplace?" noted another in a simple, but powerful sentiment. The organisational psychologist Adam Grant hit the right tone when he recommended that it should be a requirement that all CEOs be CHROs before rising to the top job. The audience, made up of mostly HR folk aware of their challenge of having to convince CEOs to prioritise investment in people these-days, rallied in cheerful applause knowing it would never happen. Â
The conference finale was a sit down with the company’s Chief Impact Officer, a chap called Harry Windsor who had left his previous role because of its detrimental impact on his wellbeing and family life and relentless surveillance culture associated with the post. He met his wife on Instagram, he gushed about his kids, he talked about his commitment to self-improvement. He sounded so happy (genuinely!) but also so millennial, so middle aged and possibly out of sync with the new vibe shift evident amongst the latest generation of workers: Gen Z.
And therein lies the problem. If there is one unifying theme as to how California has invented the modern world it is the way that the individual has been at the centre of everything. But everywhere you look, the next generation are questioning it. According to US Gen Z activist Ziad Ahmed: [Millennials] "said 'I can be whoever I want to be,’ and we’re saying… Gen Z is the generation of we’." This promotion of togetherness and shared endeavour sounds nice but if anything typifies Gen Z, it is their world-weariness. Perhaps the correct characterisation of Billie Eillish or Greta Thunberg is as modern day romantic poets, Shelly or Keats, hankering after nostalgia armed with the inevitable cynicism that comes after a period of destructive change. Â
Digital natives Gen Z may well be, but they display much more scepticism of Silicon Valley capitalism and the doctrine of self-optimisation that accompanies it, none more so than in the workplace. You can see it in their mockery of CEO 5am routines or their Zoom-fatigue comedy on TikTok. You can see it in the fact that reportedly 80% of them continue to look for a job even though they have accepted one. For this generation, full of savviness and determined to learn from millennials’ mistakes on the work dedication front, they are wanting strong boundaries, a separation of their identity from their career, and yes, more money and a desire to work less. Just as Gen Z have started to question it, now some millennials are waking up to it too; burnout from turning themselves into a ‘brand’, realising that business was just busyness and questioning why society has mistaken activity for achievement. Â
As I drove out across the bay to the airport, news hit that there was a run on Silicon Valley Bank, raising questions about the future of fast-paced tech investment and, perhaps, offering a neat metaphor for a state that seemed unstoppable but whose dominance in fact reveals its vulnerabilities. In truth, the sequel to the Bay’s story has already been rushed out. As tech enters its new AI Gold Rush and is reinvented once more, it needs to embrace the power of friction that has defined its past. This means that in the age of the artificial, there’s a need to prioritise the real; in the age of digital disruption, understanding and integrating human disruption and diversity is going to be key. Today, that means getting to grips with Gen Z; tomorrow, it will mean understanding Gen Alpha even as we build the world they'll grow into.
The development and use of AI will likely define the next 20 years, dividing between those businesses and states that use it to centralise power and those that recognise its ability to work in harmony with humans. The history of California suggests it is poised to own the latter, but to do so it must rediscover the value and the intricacies of human interaction and evolving human values.
It’s All Relative Podcast
‘Tis the breeding season so….I sat down with demographer Dr. Paul Morland to talk about what Elon Musk has defined as a "bigger risk to civilisation than global warming", the demographic ticking time bomb. Dr. Morland takes us through the complex subject of demography, explaining how a combination of low birthrates, ageing society and low infant mortality is playing out across the globe. You can buy Paul's Book 'Tomorrow's People' here.
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I’m taking two weeks from writing over Easter. I just want to say thank you for reading. I know how much stuff flies into people’s inbox and so the fact that this newsletter continues to have such an exceptional open/read rate remains a great source of pride for me.
I love writing and communicating with you all through this medium, but as I’m sure you are aware it takes a lot of time and effort - many late nights as children are tucked up in bed! I also want to maximise what Substack can offer so from May you will see many changes on here- all positive I promise!
More on that soon but in the meantime, I’d like to wish you a happy and relaxing Easter.
Thanks for your continual support,
All best wishes
Eliza