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 mother 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. Though in fact, they are wrong.

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

She passes me the Tofurkey.

"And for Trump?

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

You whose peers tweet breathlessly about 'technologies of transcendence' 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's 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 an exaggeration pointing to a truth that can be fact-checked. Rather, like realizing you're staring at a pipe that reads "ceci n'est pas une pipe."

This is 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 pharmacology from India recommended by the chronically ill on web forums and to consuming despair.

You're reading a book on Complexity Theory 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 dumb enough not to see it's radically under-parameterized relative to the dimensions of the systems you're intervening on.

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 now get litigated via strenuously naughty memes.

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 the real threat, and we're chemically castrating ourselves with the food system?

It's the Pandemic, so you're also asking whether Covid came from a lab, whether masks and vaccines work as advertised, why thousands of experts would say BLM protests won't spread the disease, and why questioning all this gets you kicked off YouTube?

It turns out there are still intellectuals in America in Chomsky's sense—those 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 we map to the word "meaning"—a family laughing in a field of flowers and a black jet piercing the blue sky, and so on—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 recall one phrase from Nietzsche: "The Last Man."

#4: The Unrealized Capital Gains Tax

You found a tech company and move to California.

In California if you want to start an ice cream shop you're choked out by regulations but if you want to sell fentanyl on the streets to minors they give you a welfare allocation twice America's median income.

In California if you care about the structural biopower of an elementary school's name they'll conduct a jihad but if you want to build a few hundred feet of railroad it will cost you more than it will take SpaceX to get to Mars.

Then the Democrats start attacking your friends. The SEC prosecutes their companies with frivolously cases that get dismissed on appeal, the Feds freeze their bank accounts ("debanking"), and Biden's Treasury Secretary calls for an "Unrealized Capital Gains Tax" that would throw them into net IRS debt because their companies succeeded.

Dissenters

Whatever the cause of these inversions of reality—whether it's ignorance of the origins of prosperity, the ressentiment of specific elites, or just that mass bureaucratic power reproduces itself to the point of self-immolation—"the purpose of a system is what it does."

We've got a golden goose in America. They're slitting its throat. How can you abide that?

Or to quote a Sixties-era speech that likely moved my mother: "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 is our goal? To pick one word: growth. Growth is life. Stagnation is death.

That's true for individuals: if you're not busy being born you're busy dying. It's true for societies: maximizing GDP growth is the highest-bit mandate, if you have to choose one. And it's true for the species: expanding the scale and scope of human consciousness is our ultimate 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 of politics.

That is our ideology.

Policy

In an irony of history, the policy implications of this ideology cash out to little more than, essentially, Bill Clinton's platform in the 1990s. This was my mother's generation's attempt to synthesize Sixties-era cultural liberalism with Eighties-era entrepreneurial capitalism: free markets, free inquiry, promote technology, and use the government to invest in people.

(Not coincidently, many leaders of the Tech New Right—Musk, RFK Jr., Ackman, Andreessen, and Trump himself—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 illegally. Rid toxins from everything. Make cities safe by punishing criminals. 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. Trump is, in Kissinger's words, "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."

Power will transfer. The Establishment managed the rise of its rival elites on the West Coast since the new millenium successfully. 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 the Establishment's credibility and shot steriods into the tech sector's economics and now the rivalry's explicit. History's turned on the last man.