09.02.2026

In the early hours of January 17th 1994, a 6.7 magnitude earthquake shook California’s San Fernando Valley – the Golden State’s tectonic plates at play. Later that same year, Carmen Hermosillo published ‘Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace’. Hermosillo lived in California, where, at the time, a market bubble was being inflated, one which would burst, rather dramatically, some six years later – the dot-com-boom.

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18-months later, across the ever-narrowing gulf of the Atlantic Ocean, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron co-published ‘The Californian Ideology’ (1995). Barbrook and Cameron were media theorists at the University of Westminster, and in their essay they proclaimed that a rising cohort of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley shared an identifiable set of ideological traits. Namely, this emergent class seemingly believed that the technologies they were developing could, and ultimately would, fundamentally alter the fabric of human relations. According to Barbrook and Cameron, this belief was built upon a theoretical substrate which had coalesced both the ideas of self-organising systems, as manifest in the communes of the 1960’s counterculture, and of Ayn Rand’s stark individualism, as taken from her magnum opus novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’ (1957), which, at the time, adorned the pocket of many a Patagonia fleece.

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Whenever I read ‘Pandora’s Vox’, I think back to the 1990’s. The 1990’s, to me, might as well be a time of primordial chaos, one from which all order and reality was formed one afternoon in April 2003. All I am able to grasp of this time are fleeting images of boxier cars, the high-pitched whine of static TV sets, and the somewhat yellowed hue of home VHS tapes. Nevertheless, the 1990’s did actually happen, or so I am told, and it was a time of great prosperity and opportunity, or, again, so I am told.

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In 1900, California governor James Budd began a project diverting water from the Colorado River into a dry land basin known as the Salton Sink. By this time, California was already over its Gold Rush and now in the midst of its Oil Boom. Budd’s aim was that the irrigation of the Salton Sink would produce fertile land from arid firmament, and thus open up a new agricultural market for the state to reap. By 1905, several considerable engineering mishaps had already caused the entire flow of the Colorado River to drain into the Salton Sink; this then went on for two years. As the basin, one of America’s lowest and hottest, gradually filled, it submerged the entire township of Salton, one Southern Pacific Railroad line, and half of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Reservation.

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On The The’s 2017 album ‘Midday to Midnight’, Matt Johnson samples one David Edwards, a journalist and campaigner focused on media critique and the co-founder of Media Lens. According to Edwards, “…there was an opportunity, perhaps over the last 10 or 15 years, when we could have taken advantage of the internet…”, as, “…there was a more innocent age to the internet, when it was a bit more balanced, where there was more scope for competing…”. From these statements, one might assume that Edwards has simply donned his own rose-tinted spectacles, and is thus waxing nostalgic on the lost futures of the internet. Indeed, the type of optimism once espoused by proto-technocrats is scarce to come by in 2026. Then again, so is a good pill.

On the other hand, one does wonder whether there was ever any chance that those prosletyzing the great emancipatory potential of the emergent internet might have been proved right somehow? Was there any real possibility that the internet could have been anything other than what it is today?