Join the Cyber Policy Center on October 14 from 12PM–1PM Pacific for The Texas Ideology, a seminar with Fred Turner.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Fall Seminar Series continues through December; see our Fall Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

Since 2020, some of Silicon Valley’s defining companies and most visible CEOs have picked up and moved to Texas. Hewlett-Packard is now headquartered in Houston; Oracle and Tesla have moved to Austin. Elon Musk calls the state home, as does Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies. This talk will argue that their moves reflect a wider embrace of a set of beliefs anchored in the history of the region: the Texas Ideology. The talk begins by comparing the tenets of the “Californian Ideology” famously outlined by Barbrook and Cameron with the views of key right-wing Texas entrepreneurs, such as Tim Dunn and Harlan Crow. It points out that both embrace fantasies of an endless frontier, celebrate the cowboy entrepreneur, and claim to hate the institutions of government even as they siphon off government resources. It then turns to Texas’s history as a religious refuge in the 18th century, an independent Republic in the 19th, and an oil drilling and ranching mecca in the 20th. This history, it argues, has imbued the Texas Ideology with a deregulatory fervor anchored in Christian nationalism and at the same time, a willingness to depict the extraction of natural resources as a divine mission. Much as the Californian Ideology’s dream of electronic frontiers fueled the age of computer networking, the talk concludes, the Texas Ideology will help legitimate the era of digital resource extraction now beginning.

About the Speaker:

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, where he studies the impact of new media technologies on American culture since World War II. He is the author of five books, including most recently, with Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University, a Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar at McGill University, and twice a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a journalist for ten years. He continues to write regularly for newspapers and magazines in America and Europe.