California’s Techno-Sublime

Those who complain about California from the outside tend to single out its hippies and bohemians. But when Californians complain about Californians, the eye-rolling is more frequently directed at a (supposedly) new class of slick and humorless “techies.” At its worst, tech is perceived as an invasion into traditionally bohemian spaces—buying up buildings, evicting artists, and dulling everything in the process. Though the two imagined demographics couldn’t seem more different, many places in California actually attest to the deep entaglement of entrepreneurialism, counterculture, whimsy, and a kind of technological sublime already present at the origin of the tech boom here. Underneath it all runs the Californian penchant for the weird, the new, and the supposedly impossible.

This retreat along the Russian River (an idyllic area just north of Point Reyes) annually hosts a two-week, secret encampment of powerful businessmen and entrepreneurs. It was formed in the 1800s and hosted the likes of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, as well as visiting Soviet dignitaries during the Cold War. Bohemian Grove meetings still include elaborate rituals, including the “exorcising of demons” before a forty-foot-tall shrine in the shape of an owl, as part of the event’s Cremation of Care ceremony, narrated by a recording of the late Walter Cronkite (a Bohemian Grove member).

The new Facebook campus, which can accommodate 2,800 employees, was designed by Frank Gehry and looks like a cross between downtown Palo Alto and Disneyland’s Main Street USA. All the restaurants are free, and on the main plaza, visible from a plane, is the imperative: hack.

The Google Barge—its purpose never sufficiently clear—was docked in the San Francisco Bay near Treasure Island for a while in 2013 and 2014. (Another appeared briefly on the far coast of Portland, Maine.) Some speculated that it housed showrooms for Google Glass and other products. Eventually fire restrictions required the barge to be taken out of commission, after which it was relocated to the docks of Stockton, California.

The first Burning Man was a small gathering on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986. The cops shut it down in 1990, forcing its founders to move their sticks into the desert. Since then, the week-long, sand-swept bacchanalia has taken place in Nevada, though Californians make up the overwhelming majority of its visitors. And while its reputation was as a mecca for hippies, Burning Man has become increasingly popular with tech CEOs, who compare it to a kind of business retreat or innovation incubator (including Mark Zuckerberg, who has flown in on his private helicopter). In fact, the festival has lately had to contend with a burgeoning service industry, in which people are hired to arrive early and set up camps, then attend to and wait on visitors and revelers.

Situated on a military airfield owned by the NASA Ames Research Facility, Hangar One, an icon of Silicon Valley, is one of the largest freestanding structures in the world. It fell into disuse in 2002. Soon afterward, its outer panels were removed, revealing a surreal, hulking skeleton. Last year, Planetary Ventures, a Google subsidiary, announced that it would be leasing the airfield for the next sixty years, using Hangar One as a research facility for commercial space exploration.

In 2008, a group of local tech enthusiasts took over an abandoned McDonald’s—now nicknamed McMoon’s—and turned it into an improvised mission control, using crowdfunding to help acquire secondhand electronics in order to gain control of a decommissioned satellite (launched in 1978) that had been floating unused in space and bring it back to Earth. Sadly, the group lost contact with the satellite in September 2014.

Currently under construction, California High-Speed Rail, one of...