The countercultural finish brushed atop tech hagiography produces a vision of “California” that integrates Manifest Destiny narratives with the pseudo-sheen of liberation, which in American revisionism is always the liberation of the individual, not the collective. Like the self-help swindler, the gnostic logic of the techno-hippie turns inward rather than looking at the broader structures within which individuals live. That is, their transcendence is committedly apolitical — as were, in fact, many factions of the 1960s’ so-called counterculture. Brand himself said as much when, in 1998, reflecting on the Catalog, he wrote, “At a time when the New Left was calling for grassroots political (i.e., referred) power, Whole Earth eschewed politics and pushed grassroots direct power — tools and skills.” Such a meek positioning of “power,” as something to be wielded by a singular, heroic individual making, say, a dome for their self-betterment, was always ripe to be swallowed by a ravenous — if fruitarian — capitalist mouth. The colonial starward pivot is just another step in this delirious trek, while the West Coast’s vaunted “nature” is paved over or swallowed by fires, sequestered in glass bubbles, and artfully arranged atop shiny new office buildings.