(Roughly) Daily

The estimable cultural historian Fred Turner, a seasoned observer of Silicon Valley, on what’s happening as Bay Area tech entrepreneurs turn their eyes (or, indeed, relocate) to the Lone Star State. He opens with the story of Tesla’s Gigafactory outside of Austin, then looks more broadly…

… For Elon Musk and his backers in the state capitol the Gigafactory is much more than a place to make cars. The complex’s enormous assembly floor, with its shiny red robots and twenty thousand employees, sends a Texas-sized message to entrepreneurs everywhere: the future won’t be built in California or New York. It will be built in the Bible Belt, by men—always men—with the willpower to tame the forces of technology, wrestle profit from the land, and create new industries out of whole cloth. It will rise up like the oil derricks of a hundred years before and give evidence of the limitless, God-given natural bounty of the region. It will make some men rich and when it does, it will provide evidence that the land still breeds heroes like Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, defenders of the Alamo.

You can see where this is going. In press releases and feature stories, Tesla’s Gigafactory is a translation device, turning decades and even centuries of Texas lore into elements of a new cultural formation, a Texan Ideology. Thirty years ago, when political theorist Richard Barbrook and artist Andy Cameron published their canonical essay “The Californian Ideology” in Mute, a British journal devoted to critiquing early internet culture, the computer industry of Silicon Valley was surrounded by the remnants of San Francisco’s 1960s counterculture. The collision of these worlds produced a new orthodoxy, they wrote, one that “promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies.”

Today, the hippies have aged out of the computer industry entirely, the yuppies are retired, and high-tech entrepreneurs like Musk are leaving California for Texas. The world of digital technology has changed too. In the 1990s, everyone from modem makers to software developers was focused on building the global network. Connection was the order of the day. Today, the World Wide Web is in place, our computers are in our pockets, and the smart money bets on turning the data we generate into patterns that can be sold to the highest bidder. The global system of connection built out in the 1990s has turned the social world into a resource for the oldest form of capitalism, extraction.

For that kind of work Texas makes an ideal home. Built early on from the profits of cattle ranching and slave-picked cotton, propelled to national prominence by the oil booms of the early twentieth century, Texas has long been synonymous with turning natural and human resources into money. Its promoters have been expert, too, in turning cowboys and oilmen into emblems of American masculinity and celebrating a muscular Christianity. From its earliest days as part of Mexico, when the Mexican government required settlers to convert to Catholicism, extraction has been entwined with religion and racial politics. In the 1920s and 1930s, fundamentalist Christian radio echoed across the state. In 1953, Reverend Billy Graham staged a revival that filled the Cotton Bowl with seventy-five thousand Texans. Since the 1950s, Southern Baptists, whose conservatism has increased over the decades, have dominated the state’s religious scene. Today, they and right-wing members of other denominations help organize and fund the state’s politics…

[Turner unpacks the history, both formative and recent, and explores the motives of the tech migrants, and the ways in which the culture, attitudes– and the economic and legal structures in Texas– suit them…]

… In the 1990s of the Californian Ideology, a loose hippie spiritualism prevailed, but going to church was for the hopelessly square. Today, as Silicon Valley leaders turn to the right, and particularly when they migrate to Texas, many are embracing the simultaneous celebration of entrepreneurship and Christian discipleship at the heart of the Texan Ideology. Elon Musk has announced that although he doesn’t go to church, he considers that the “teachings of Jesus Christ are good and wise” and thinks of himself as a “cultural Christian.” [Palantir co-founder] Joe Lonsdale is Jewish, but he regularly promotes “Judeo-Christian” values as fundamental to the good society. When he moved to Texas, he brought with him the Cicero Institute, a free market and public policy think tank he founded in California. Once there, he helped establish the University of Austin, a school devoted to teaching the great books of the Western canon. For Lonsdale, as for [oil billionaire and “the state’s most powerful figure” Tim] Dunn and, increasingly, Musk, the high-tech future will have to be built in a way that blends church, state and market, to the benefit of those most able to seize public resources and turn them to private profit.

That fusion is the essence of the Texan Ideology. The millenarian impulse that animates it could be felt in 1990s California too, but the Californian Ideology grew from the counterculture, a movement driven by the search for a new consciousness, for new ways to understand our collective interconnection and so leave earthly politics behind. Its spiritual tendencies proved ideal for motivating and legitimating the construction of a global digital network. The Texan Ideology grows out of two centuries of resource extraction in the heart of the Bible Belt. Its Christianity emphasizes the idea that saints walk among us and should be venerated over the notion that we should tend to the least among us first and foremost. The Christian elements of the Texan Ideology lead to the building of private compounds, not soup kitchens.

Then again, maybe the Texan Ideology has more in common with its Californian forebear than we think. After all, it was precisely the failure of the digital industries to build an egalitarian society that led to homelessness on San Francisco’s streets. And it may be that in due course, the economic inequalities that have long plagued Texas will drown out the self-serving voices of the high-tech entrepreneurs. If the schools become bad enough, the housing expensive enough, and the Christian nationalist ethos constraining enough, Texans might finally find a way to undo Republicans’ gerrymandering and kick the current regime out of office.

In the meantime, the Texan Ideology is making its way back to California. In February 2025, the Stanford Review, a conservative student publication cofounded by Lonsdale’s former mentor Peter Thiel when he was an undergraduate, published an essay titled “Manifest Destiny is the Antidote to Bureaucracy.” The essay reached deep into the heart of Texas history to justify its calls for massive deregulation of industry, the liberation of entrepreneurial innovation, and the conquest of Greenland and Mars. “Without the frontier, elites would have monopolized land, blocking progress—just like in Europe,” said the authors. “In the oil boom, Texas’ loose regulations let wildcatters drill freely, giving rise to Exxon, Shell and Texaco. More recently, SpaceX was capable of innovating in hard tech when everything from airplanes to automobiles stagnated precisely because space remained a wholly unregulated frontier.”

In the authors’ view, as in that of multiple generations of technology entrepreneurs, the state has to set the regulatory stage for exploration and then get out of the way. The measure of America’s success will not be equality among its people. On the contrary. Only when the right men are allowed to roam the plains will oil be found. And only when oil is found will God’s mission for America finally be fulfilled…

Silicon Valley looks for Lebensraum in the Bible Belt: “The Texan Ideology,” from @thebaffler.com. Eminently worth reading in full.

* John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

###

As we mess with Texas, we might remark that today is the birthday of a man with a claim to being the “father of modern Texas” (and who in any case certaibly embodied many of the key traits illustrated by Turner above), Stephen F. Austin; he was born on this date in 1793.** Austin (for whom the state capital is named) was the first successful “empresario,” a grantee of the right to settle on land in the eastern areas of Coahuila y Tejas in Mexico in exchange for recruiting settlers in the early nineteenth century. Austin brought  300 families and their slaves from the United States to the Tejas region in 1825.

Throughout the 1820s, Austin sought to maintain good relations with the Mexican government and helped suppress the Fredonian Rebellion. He also helped ensure the introduction of slavery into Texas despite the Mexican government’s opposition to the institution, and he led the initial actions against the indigenous Karankawa people in this area.

By the 1830s Texas settlers had become dissatisfied with the Mexican government and Austin abandoned his conciliatory posture. In the Texas Revolution, Austin led Texas forces at the successful Siege of Béxar, after which he served as the Republic of Texas’ commissioner to the United States. He ran as a candidate in the 1836 Texas presidential election but was defeated by Sam Houston, who appointed Austin as Secretary of State for the new republic, a position Austin held until his death in December 1836.

** year of birth corrected; apologies for your correspondent’s fat fingers…

source