What I find missing in Dean is the sense of a struggle over how tech and flesh were to coadapt to each other. Let’s not forget the damage done to the conversation about the politics of technology by the Cold War purge, in which not only artists and writers were blacklisted, but scientists and engineers as well. Iris Chang’s account of the fate of Tsien Hsue-Shen in Thread of the Silkworm is only the most absurdist of such stories.10 This pioneering rocket scientist lost his security clearances for having social ties to people who, unbeknownst to him, were communists. And so he was deported—to communist China! There he actually became what he never was in America—a highly skilled scientist working for the “communist cause.” This is just the craziest of thousands of such stories. Those who find the tech world “apolitical” might inquire as to how it was made so thoroughly so.

Hence the Californian Ideology is a product of particular histories, one piece of which is documented so well in Turner—but there are other histories. The belief that tech will save the world, that institutions are to be tolerated but not engaged, that rough consensus and running code are all that matter—this is not the only ideology of the tech world. That it became an unusually predominant one is not some naturally occurring phenomena—even though both Californian ideologists and Dean both tend to think it is. Rather, it is the product of particular struggles in which such an ideology got a powerful assist, firstly from state repression of certain alternatives, and then by corporate patronage of the more business-friendly versions of it.