The Right Needs a Tech Philosophy

Many conservatives understand themselves to be waging a one-front war against a single opponent, the Left, over the future of the country. If we can finally defeat liberalism, the thinking goes, America’s prosperity will be assured. A sizeable contingency on the Right, however, understands the fight for conservatism to involve two fronts at once: against the Left in the realm of politics, but also against modern technology, which is less clearly political but no less corrosive to America’s traditions and virtues. A society mediated entirely by screens and apps, from this perspective, is no place to raise the next generation, even if Republicans win every election.

But what if these are just two sides to a single conflict? What if progressivism and what Neil Postman called technopoly — the organization of all of society along the lines of technology and its imperatives — are really the same thing? In that case, conservatives would need to seriously reassess both their political strategy and their engagement with tech in both policy and everyday life. There are good reasons to take this disturbing possibility seriously, warns the English writer Paul Kingsnorth in his recent book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. For Kingsnorth, liberalism and tech boosterism are two faces of a single totalizing ideology he dubs “the Machine.”

At their purest, both liberalism and tech accelerationism seek “progress” at all costs, an always-out-of-reach utopia that might be achieved if we just move a bit more quickly and smash a few more conventions. Both contrast that future utopia with the stagnation, parochialism, and mediocrity that have characterized all of history up to the present. Within both politics and technology, Marx’s “permanent revolution” is the key to bursting through all remaining limits — limits on our identity in the first case, and on our physical power in the second. Neither wishes to be held back by custom, nature, or the messiness of reality.

For evidence of this tech-progressive union, consider the emergence of today’s elite class of do-gooders, who jet around the world to lecture everyone else on the evils of the nation-state, religion, eating meat, and any pre-twenty-first century understanding of the family. It’s not just that the rise of such a global class, whose members have more in common with each other than with their own nation’s citizens, is made technically possible by modern technology’s instant international communications. There’s also a strong ideological fit here: The class’s efforts to force the same progressive rules and principles on every culture around the world instantiate modern technology’s own selection for efficient homogeneity and boundless freedom. As Kingsnorth puts it, “the Machine is birthing its own ethnicity. It is a globalized, screen-enabled, placeless identity.”

The pandemic offered perhaps the most unsettling evidence yet for this progressive-technocratic fusion. “Living in the pod,” as they say, took on a dual meaning: It was both what progressives demanded of the world during COVID and what infinite digital entertainment subtly encouraged and continues to encourage today.

Unfortunately, it’s also what some extreme AI boosters dream of doing soon, imagining that we’ll finally be able to upload our consciousness to the cloud and leave our broken bodies behind. The message, then, from many progressives and technologists alike is the same: Plug in, and start scrolling the old reality away. What’s more, the utopian mentality within tech managed to emerge from the pandemic more fervent than ever, with the fashionable industry ideology of “effective accelerationism” coming to prominence soon afterward by endorsing a pedal-to-the-metal approach to every technology in every part of life.

Kingsnorth also argues that progressivism and technology are tightly linked in the very origins of our current cold civil war. Healthy, self-confident cultures require solidity and continuity with the past. But, he contends, we have allowed new technologies to erode our cultural touchstones rather than preserve them or update them for changing times. The result is the culture war, with factions fighting over the scraps of a once-coherent society: “… because we no longer have a culture, we have a culture war instead.”

As America’s national — and even more so, regional — traditions and customs are overridden or co-opted by the algorithm, people rightly sense that their identities are being undermined. The resulting anxiety has made us frantic, quick to spar with each other over anything, no matter how insignificant. If conservatives, then, are looking for the engine of America’s deep cultural conflict, perhaps we should pay less attention to the tomes of crackpot professors, and more to the devices in our own hands.

What does all this mean for the Right? It suggests that an effective conservative approach to tech — one that doesn’t just shore up last year’s “progress” — will need to go further than praying that more tech elites start voting for Republicans. We’re stuck in the 2010s, when conservatives’ gripes with tech were often not really about the tech at all, instead amounting to frustration that so many in the industry were on the Left. Now, as prominent tech leaders come around to President Trump’s side, many on the Right are tempted to declare what the president might call “complete and total” victory. That’s not quite correct. The Right needs to offer the world something more than “Big Tech with GOP characteristics.” We’d be wise to champion a genuine alternative approach to tech that doesn’t undermine conservatism’s actual goals.

This doesn’t require a full-scale embrace of the tech-averse mentality that Kingsnorth, at times, suggests. If all we offer the culture is barking “no” at new technologies, the progressive technopoly will remain firmly in place. Americans will rightly reject a version of conservatism that reduces itself to reflexive rejection of newness. Dropping out of society, which is what Kingsnorth seems to propose, can’t be the price of avoiding digital surveillance and “smart” everything. However admirable the Amish might be, few Americans want to go to their extremes to achieve a healthier relationship to tech. They shouldn’t have to, either. 

A more constructive approach to the tech debates of the day would have the Right rallying around, and explicitly articulating, its own set of positive goods worth preserving. To this end, Kingsnorth suggests “the Four Ps” of Past, People, Place, Prayer. Anchored in principles like these, conservatives could craft a shared rubric by asking, case by case, whether a given technology strengthens those goods or erodes them, providing a practical way to decide which innovations merit advancement and which should be set aside.

There is an entire class of technologies we should be working to build and promote — programs, for example, that could return agency to American citizens and away from bureaucracies, foreign governments, and corporations that wish them ill. These products cover a wide range — privacy-preserving messaging apps, national-security-enhancing drones at the border, and parent-empowering customized AI tutors — all of which can be advanced through policy or private industry. Such pro-tech efforts are perfectly compatible with “anti-tech” action against, say, online porn, central bank digital currencies, and betting apps. In contrast to the all-technologies-all-the-time mindset of “effective accelerationism,” conservatives might call this approach “selective accelerationism”: advancing new technologies where they support the family and nation, and drawing back where they don’t.

Of course, conservatives will disagree about which specific technologies actually further conservative ends, and even about what those ends should be. But that debate would be far more fruitful than either embracing every technology across the board or retreating to our analog bunkers. Too often, conservatives settle for pointing to this week’s political outrage, or to the latest malevolent app, without presenting anything better in their place. But you can’t beat something with nothing. If conservatives don’t offer a positive, empowering approach to tech, America will remain victim to the progressive-accelerationist cult of progress — but no closer to utopia.