California of the Mind

"Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies, there is an island named California, very close to that part of the terrestial Paradise"

- Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, 1510.

California is the essential American experience.

I am not writing about the state itself, which relatives and friends assure me is a beautiful but at times mundane and tiring place to live and work.

No, this hub is about the myth that overshadows the reality, about the incredible cultural power that the idea of California still holds over the imagination of billions. After all, why dwell on the reality when you can have the illusion? Why worry about entrenched real-world problems of budget deficits, environmental degradation or stubborn unemployment when you can embrace a dream instead?

The ongoing cultural myth of California has, in my view, three principal roots:

1. The myth of the West.

As Natalie Merchant poignantly and ironically sings in San Andreas Fault, "Go West - paradise is there". California was originally a fictional creation, as a magical paradise in the works of the Spanish writer de Montalvo, and it has retained that image ever since. The pioneers trekked west in search of freedom, space and liberation - after all the Village People could hardly have co-opted Go West for their own own audience if there was no powerful cultural image of western freedom to begin with.

In the 1840s California promised a gold rush, at the turn of the twentieth century an oil boom and in recent decades the dream of effortless IPOs and Silicon Valley millions. Whether or not these dreams really existed is almost beside the point. What matters is that people thought they did. "Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one" (Einstein).The personal development and self-actualization industry reached its peak in California. The dream of pure potential lives on.

2. Media as illusion.

Hollywood defined the ideas, looks and images of the twentieth century. It bequeathed the enduring stereotypes of California beaches, freedom and inner turmoil - from the Beach Boys to The Hills, from Clueless to Magnolia. California is almost impossible to appreciate as a real place simply because it has already been written and re-written infinite times over in the movies.The local geography of southern Californian has, by a process of synthesis and osmosis, become part of the global imagination. Beverly Hills, Mulholland Drive and Venice Beach are less real locations than concepts that exist in the minds of billions.

The huge cultural power of California remains intact, even as "the Long Tail" of media allegedly erodes the power of blockbusters through the digital revolution that began in... California. The soft power of the Golden State works in myriad ways. The San Fernando Valley produces a staggering percentage of global "adult" output. Music is another powerful cultural export.There are probably millions of bored German or French teenagers who listen to West Coast old school G-Funk and wish they were living in Compton (again, a triumph of fantasy over reality). Globally, societies have absorbed West Coast cultural norms at a rate that few anthropologists would have believed possible just decades ago.

3. The cradle of technology.

The modern world began in California. From Apple to Google to (of course) Hubpages, the majority of breakthrough developments have had West Coast roots. The unbroken history of innovation that leads seamlessly from the first integrated circuits to the microblogging service Twitter is unique to the West Coast. The venture capitalists of Sand Hill Road probably have more economic power than most national governments. The modern internet - decentralised, free and spontaneously self-aggregating - is primarily a northern Californian creation.

Let me end on a personal note. I first visited San Francisco at the age of twenty one, a foreigner who had journeyed three thousand miles across America. As I approached the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my life and waded in the cold surf, my European cynicism began to melt away. At that moment I caught a glimpse for the first time of what California still represents - despite dreary reality - in the imagination of billions.

(c) J Rozel 2010

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