Technology Brother Elegy

Who's going to explain the Tech Right to the journalists?

Question

"How the fuck could you vote for Trump?"

Her guess is plutocracy. But she apologizes for the profanity. I'm talking to my aunt at Thanksgiving.

She was in the Weather Underground in her twenties, her father was a communist. To her and my Leftist New York Jewish family this registers as straight betrayal. In fact, they are wrong.

"Because the powerful fuck with the weak, the mandate of the Left—from Christ to Jefferson to Marx, etc.—is to stop you and your narcissistic, neo-industrialist 'tech bro' friends, Max, from stomping your boots on the face of the world."

She passes me the Tofurkey.

"For Trump?

"You—who live in The Bay, where the Free Speech Movement began and Chogyam Trungpa brought Buddhism to America?

"You—whose peers write lapidary tweets about 'technologies of transcendence'—AI, fusion, brain-connection devices, etc.—and drop psychedelic drugs?

"You pick the man who beats the drums of blood-and-soil nativism?

"You talk like a vanguard but vote for a reactionary? How did the Left become Right?"

Here is a personal answer.

New Right

It happened slowly then all at once.

The emotional tenor was like the movie The Truman Show: the dawning apprehension of a lie.

Not like a lie that can be fact-checked. But like staring at a pipe that says "ceci n'est pas une pipe."

Here's that story in four parts.

#1: Chronic Illness

It's 2018 and you're in Ethiopia with some Effective Altruists.

You get stomach bugs, can't shake them, so you're sick all the time now. Doctors don't help, so you turn to experimental pharmacology from India recommended by the chronically ill on web forums, and consuming despair.

You're reading a book on Complexity Theory at the time and the question occurs: if we can't solve the Three-Body Problem—can't forecast the position of three orbiting objects and couldn't if every grain of sand on the beach were a computer—how the hell can we forecast the state of my gut, all ten trillion organisms?

This, oddly, is your path to God. If the ratio of what we can't compute to what we can is astronomical, what phenomena can we confidently exclude from possibility? You become more open to the mystical.

Given unknowability, one way to proceed is to heed what has survived, because at least it was consistent with survival. You become more traditionalist.

You start to see the errors of those who aren't. Nassim Taleb's "Intellectuals Yet Idiots": smart enough to have a model, but too dumb to know their models are radically under-parameterized relative to the dimensions of the systems they seek to intervening upon.

How many of our problems are downstream giving intellectuals-who-are-idiots power? This is closely related to a specific word: Progressivism.

#2: Getting onto Twitter

Everything accelerates when you do. Debates that took pages in college get litigated via naughty memes now.

Maybe fiat currency is doomed, aliens are real, science doesn't replicate, humans are biodiverse, the body keeps score, consciousness is a field, MDMA is medicine, AI is an existential threat, and we're chemically castrating ourselves with the food system?

It's the Pandemic, so you also ask whether Covid came from a lab, masks/vaccines work as advertised, why thousands of experts would say BLM protestors won't spread the disease, and why people who ask these questions get kicked off YouTube?

It turns out there are intellectuals in America in Chomsky's sense: holding truth to power. But if you clutch your pearls too tight and weight respectability too high you are, to quote a phrase, not going to make it.

#3: Beholding the Sistine Chapel

What if you stopped lying to yourself when you looked up and admitted how astonishingly beautiful this is?

Whatever forces gave us this chapel, and all that we map to the word "meaningful"—a family laughing in a field of flowers beside the sea, a black jet in a blue sky, etc.—are by definition good.

Whatever forces profane these experiences are by definition bad. Beauty is beautiful. Strength is strong. How could it be otherwise?

You know one phrase from Nietzsche: "The Last Man."

#4: The Unrealized Capital Gains Tax

You found a tech company and move to California.

In California where: if you want to start an ice cream shop you're choked out by regulations but if you want to sell fentanyl on streets financed by families paying the highest costs in the country they'll make those families give you a welfare allocation nearly twice America's median income. Where they conduct jihad against the names of elementary schools. Where to build a few hundred feet of railroad costs more than all of SpaceX.

Then the Democrats start attacking your friends: de-banking them, prosecuting them discriminatively, and calling for an "Unrealized Capital Gains Tax" that would throw them into net IRS debt for the crime of startup success.

Dissenters

Whatever the cause of the madness—ignorance of the origins of wealth, the ressentiment of specific elites, or just that mass bureaucratic power will reproduce endlessly until self-contradiction—"the purpose of a system is what it does." They're slitting the throat of the golden goose. How can you abide that?

Or to quote a Sixties-era speech that likely moved my aunt: "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious...that you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears...to make it stop."

Ideology

What's our goal? If I had to pick one word it is: growth. Growth is life. Stagnation is death. This is true for individuals—if you're not busy being born you're busy dying. For societies—maximize GDP growth is our highest-bit mandate. For the species—expand the scale of human consciousness is our highest eschatological end.

Growth comes from the freedom to recombine ideas and atoms and from a vital spirit. To serve those who make and constrain those who take is the point of justice and thus politics.

That is our ideology.

Policy

In an irony of history, the policy implications of this ideology cash out to, essentially, Bill Clinton's platform in the 1990s—the original political synthesis, offered by my aunt's generation, of cultural liberalism with entrepreneurial capitalism, of The Sixties with The Eighties: free markets, free inquiry, promote technology, and invest, using the government, in people.

(Not coincidently, the leaders of this movement—Musk, RFK Jr., Ackman, Andreessen, and Trump himself, etc.—were 1990s Clintonites. To invert the phrase of old communists like my grandfather: "real Clintonianism has never been tried.")

First, liquidate the grift. Ray Dalio: "It is now clear that Trump will reform government and country like a corporate raider engaging in a hostile takeover of an inefficient company, making huge reforms by changing people, slashing costs, and infusing new technologies."

Second, thaw the mind control. Constrain cancel culture. Protect free speech. Reward outsider science.

Third, accelerate technology. Re-regulate crypto, AI, nuclear, and biotech.

Fourth, invest in human capital. Recruit talented immigrants. Don't let anyone come in illegal. Rid toxins from everything. Make cities safe by punishing criminals hard. Deflate identity politics when it undermines meritocracy. Make things beautiful.

Rivalry

It's not that tech loves Trump the man. Talking about his character is like fighting the last war. Rather, tech found someone who hates those who hate them as much as they do and has the fire to win. To quote Henry Kissinger: "Trump's one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its pretences. It doesn't necessarily mean that he knows this."

Power will transfer. The Establishment effectively managed the rise of its rival elites on the West Coast since the new millenium—Gates spent the '00s ingratiating himself with the Davos set and Zuckerberg spent the '10s apologizing to The Times—but then the Pandemic cut down its credibility and shot steriods into the tech sector's economics and now the rivalry's explicit. History's turned on the last man.