As much as I want a post-scarcity future, it’s hard to imagine technology (progress) alone getting us there given that we can’t solve basic problems with the abundant resources we have today.
“Failing to specify will not prevent prioritization tradeoffs from happening; it’ll just cede that decision to speed and profit alone.” I want to shout this from the rooftops. Adjacently, I’m looking forward to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s forthcoming book. I have been feeling pretty dubious toward supply side progressivism for the reasons you laid out here but I am sure I’ll learn a lot from them.
I am still really excited about that book! from a policy POV I actually feel quite aligned with the "abundance liberals," I'm just slightly worried about their political prospects / getting run over in the coalition basically. but it's the direction I'd like to see democrats go
My guess is the rise of the Tech Right can be explained by three factors.
First, the Democratic party has moved to the left on economic issues (e.g. proposing a wealth tax, proposing a tax on unrealized gains, increase in Bernie-style populist rhetoric, much much stricter antitrust enforcement). In particular, you'll constantly hear people in Silicon Valley complain about Lina Khan, but the average person doesn't know anything about her. My guess is that Silicon Valley billionaires finally began to feel the material impact of these enforcement decisions, influencing their move to the right.
Second, the Tech Right heavily emphasizes excellence and meritocracy, which is directly opposed to the identity-based grievance politics embraced by the Democratic party over the last decade. I imagine a lot of people in the Tech Right fundamentally find those values to be aesthetically abhorrent. Marc Andressen's personal views may have shifted slightly to the right over the past decade, but I would reckon that the parties have shifted more.
Finally, I think there's the element of pure opportunism. For instance, the Trump administration seems pretty open to corruption, as shown by his reversal on the TikTok ban. No doubt Elon is pinning his hopes on Trump to help clear legal and regulatory hurdles in his quest for robotaxis.
Great piece. Really loved the point about an ethic of pure progress evolving equally to all domains, including the dubious and predatory ones.
Innovating endlessly and without bounds has always seemed odd to me. It’s sort of like the idea of being a perfectionist vs satisficer. At a certain point a technology is good enough (ie a bus) that it should necessitate government involvement in order to make it accessible to all who need to use it, not just those whom it can make a lot of money off. Not to say we can’t innovate to make buses faster, safer, etc. but more to say there comes a point when realizing a better world involves working with what you already have.
yeah! this makes me wonder whether—for all the enthusiasm around government R&D—the role of government re: tech should primarily be spreading its benefits, expanding access, etc
Really like the ins & outs, especially Faye Wong. Chungking Express is like one of my all time favorite movies. Also, that cocaine and assassination are in, while cancel culture is out, feels like a good reflection of the current times 🤦
'whether the more important division is not left/right but rather accel/decel.'
I don't know much about the history of 'left' / 'right,' but in so far as 'left' means 'progressive' and 'right' means 'conservative,' they are technically synonyms for 'accelerate' [progress, as a verb] and 'decelerate' [conserve]. (Left and right, that is, arrows pointing left and right on a line representing time...) I think the interesting political-historical question behind this is then: when did the right start to imagine the future (as a positive good, as something for its own sake), since I think from its inception, the left has been the party of the future; it may be simply that the party for the future is always 'the more unhappy one,' and that for the first time in history the right was, at a certain point, more unhappy than the left - I think that moment was in about 2012.
My read from this mini-exploration is actually that there are two separate spectrums: 1) left/right, about equality vs. hierarchy, and 2) progressive/conservative, about change vs. tradition — which is how you end up with modern phenomena like "right-wing progressives" and a technophobic left. (Obviously people, myself included, use these terms to mean all sorts of things in real life)
But I think you're onto something re: a big historical shift, where the right recently begins to embrace the future/technology more. Another friend pointed out via text that being really pro-tech was more of a leftist thing (russian cosmists, cybersyn, etc) for a long time.
My gut says it's gotta have something to do with capitalism / the sudden realization that tech exacerbates inequality rather than reducing it... but that's a 2-second reaction.
> the “Tech Right”’s lack of a moral compass (of the Christian sort)
Here’s one update I suggest for you: The Christian/Nietzschian divide definitely runs through the tech right, and tbh even through the hearts of many key figures on the tech right.
If you aren’t talking to some people who think it’s both time to build and time to accept Christ you’ll be missing a fascinating part of what’s going on.
Chris is fucking baiting me with this one! And I want to deliver a psycho reply to reward it.
I haven't encountered many Christian tech people that I'm aware of, and not in the relevant sense of their Christianity informing to any real degree "how they think about tech." I think you could argue that the many fans of Ivan Illich in the scene are downstream of his Catholicism, but Illich's work (and that of those fans) suffers from a fundamental preference problem: he can describe why his values or world might be better than what we tend to create, but he has no solution that I'm aware of for the fact that the overwhelming majority of people seem not to agree. But I've known many fans of his books who spend years trying to make software aligned with his thinking nevertheless (to, perhaps sadly, no real effect).
I am sure many institutionalists and "fans of society and civilization" would disagree with me —and ably, persuasively, well— but for my part I see almost no way to connect my own sense of Christianity with our work, beyond the local dimensions of e.g. "how I think we should treat one another" or "how we should think about the frame surrounding our lives, the cosmos in which we live." I am just deeply skeptical that Christ —or Buddha, for that matter— can be guides to scaled, institutional, non-radical efforts in any sense; that is, I do not consider religion to be at all political, and I don't care what people say about this point. To be a real Christian, I think you have to leave almost all of this world behind; and to build a "better" world in the world's terms, you have to leave Christ or Buddha behind, or to the side. I am sure, again, that smarter and better-read people have answers to this claim, but to date I haven't been able to believe the ones I've read.
In arguments about the meaning or reality of progress, for example, people often fall back to infant mortality: "You can debate social networks all you want, but you're insane if you don't think reducing infant mortality is worth the many trade-offs involved in constructing systems that incentivize the deployment of capital into education, R&D, the rule of law, and so forth required to produce medicines and hospitals and factories that save infant lives."
I think Christ (and, again, Buddha) might well have been "insane" in this sense. To take Jesus seriously is to believe that the soul is immortal and eternal, the flesh in this fallen world is "not the real game," and that to trade-off a single person's life or well-being against a statistical reduction in "harms" or "evils" is to make a total moral error. It's Faustian; it's how the devil gets into the mix; we are not to have power of this kind; etc. And it is not, in that world of belief, the case that "physical death and suffering are anathema to the Good." In other words: no, reducing infant mortality does not "prove" that "progress is good." It may well be how we delude ourselves that our Mammon-oriented world is acceptable; indeed, it may ironically feed Moloch.
I credit arguments that "God wants us to use our gifts," and I do not believe my own beliefs on this front very deeply, I should say; I don't live them, that's for sure! I am open and indeed behaviorally committed the idea that we should, in fact, be laboring to build "the best possible world." But these beliefs are not really very coherent with any of Jesus' actual words, and immediately open the door to precisely the sort of engagement with "what is" that I probably wouldn't care about if I had more direct confidence in the super-reality of the Kingdom of God. I myself am a compromised and milquetoast man, and defend it by thinking it's wise for a mentally ill person not to adopt any radical positions. But if this is a fallen world, and if sin is sin, and if God wants us to "be Christ-like," I doubt seriously whether "running modern capitalism to get medicines" is what he has in mind. I do not know how to resolve any of this.
There are of course many Christianities, many of which are pro-social, institutional, oriented toward "the Good" in more common senses. I think it made great sense —in civilizational terms— for the Catholic Church to prohibit believers from reading the Bible, because Christ himself seems fully uninterested in anything like progress, order, productivity, stability, prosperity, health, etc. Paul does little to soften this, in my opinion. Any of the early Christians might have said, contemplating potential martyrdom, "but think of how many more utils I could generate alive, knowing the truth as I do!" But the truth they felt they knew was precisely that utils mean nothing, and are actually dangerously misleading, in the face of the real Truth. The transition from "radical religion of martyrs" into "peaceful religion of society-builders" occurs largely through a fusion with the very Pagan (and political) strains of human belief that Nietzsche favored. And likewise, the transformation of those strains from "generating constant war" to "achieving something at least seemingly beautiful" was likewise a result of this fusion, IMO.
I do not trust myself to doubt that fusion, or that God works through these dynamics. But if a Christian said to me e.g. "I'm building a social network with Christian values," I'd be very skeptical. I think of religions generally, and Christianity specifically, as being about the individual and her or his conduct and thinking above all; as soon as they become "about the world," I think they are highly likely to become something else entirely. That "something" else may be good or awesome in many ways, or to many people. Again: how would I know? But I think this will always restrain the degree to which "true believers" will be agents of consequence in social history. At most, I think such a believer —and they do exist in positions of power, politics, tech, elsewhere— will muddle through, trying to be "the best Christian or Buddhist or Muslim or Jew I can be" within a framework that itself has complete indifference to the implied applications of their beliefs (at best). I render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; I ask myself if it is "for the Good"; I try my best on the individual level to be moral, as I understand it; I feel I will have to answer for everything, and indeed must answer for everything even if just to myself daily already; and that's as far as I've gotten with it.
What makes the matter so tricky, in my opinion, is that, as soon as it comes to elections and political decisions, the exciting inner complexity of political discourse is sharpened into a binary opposition – especially in a two-party system. This is partly due to the logic of political communication, but not exclusively. An interesting question for me is, therefore, How can a political order be designed to open up discourse in concrete decision-making processes rather than closing it off? How can it promote case-by-case decisions that are less about following an absolute guiding principle (e.g., innovation) and more about considering the impact of a specific decision on people's lives, asking whether it makes life better?
One thing that strikes me about the “tech right” howsoever defined is that this must be (bc: tech) a group of people who are very comfortable playing God to a certain extent: writing software to create perfect, functioning, closed worlds, in which humanity is abstracted.
Add to that a shoulder-shrug acceptance of human collateral, ideological fervour that disruption is essential to progress to a post-scarcity (read: fewer humans) future and (this is new!) potential access to authoritarian military government power structures?
“Tech right” starts to sound far too mild and grey-washing a term.
As much as I want a post-scarcity future, it’s hard to imagine technology (progress) alone getting us there given that we can’t solve basic problems with the abundant resources we have today.
there's a Matt Yglesias line I like how if we lived in a world without elevators, we'd assume that elevators would've solved the housing crisis
“Failing to specify will not prevent prioritization tradeoffs from happening; it’ll just cede that decision to speed and profit alone.” I want to shout this from the rooftops. Adjacently, I’m looking forward to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s forthcoming book. I have been feeling pretty dubious toward supply side progressivism for the reasons you laid out here but I am sure I’ll learn a lot from them.
I am still really excited about that book! from a policy POV I actually feel quite aligned with the "abundance liberals," I'm just slightly worried about their political prospects / getting run over in the coalition basically. but it's the direction I'd like to see democrats go
My guess is the rise of the Tech Right can be explained by three factors.
First, the Democratic party has moved to the left on economic issues (e.g. proposing a wealth tax, proposing a tax on unrealized gains, increase in Bernie-style populist rhetoric, much much stricter antitrust enforcement). In particular, you'll constantly hear people in Silicon Valley complain about Lina Khan, but the average person doesn't know anything about her. My guess is that Silicon Valley billionaires finally began to feel the material impact of these enforcement decisions, influencing their move to the right.
Second, the Tech Right heavily emphasizes excellence and meritocracy, which is directly opposed to the identity-based grievance politics embraced by the Democratic party over the last decade. I imagine a lot of people in the Tech Right fundamentally find those values to be aesthetically abhorrent. Marc Andressen's personal views may have shifted slightly to the right over the past decade, but I would reckon that the parties have shifted more.
Finally, I think there's the element of pure opportunism. For instance, the Trump administration seems pretty open to corruption, as shown by his reversal on the TikTok ban. No doubt Elon is pinning his hopes on Trump to help clear legal and regulatory hurdles in his quest for robotaxis.
I can def buy these theories! I didn't go too deeply into the reasons for the tech right's ascendance, but all super interesting
Great piece. Really loved the point about an ethic of pure progress evolving equally to all domains, including the dubious and predatory ones.
Innovating endlessly and without bounds has always seemed odd to me. It’s sort of like the idea of being a perfectionist vs satisficer. At a certain point a technology is good enough (ie a bus) that it should necessitate government involvement in order to make it accessible to all who need to use it, not just those whom it can make a lot of money off. Not to say we can’t innovate to make buses faster, safer, etc. but more to say there comes a point when realizing a better world involves working with what you already have.
yeah! this makes me wonder whether—for all the enthusiasm around government R&D—the role of government re: tech should primarily be spreading its benefits, expanding access, etc
Really like the ins & outs, especially Faye Wong. Chungking Express is like one of my all time favorite movies. Also, that cocaine and assassination are in, while cancel culture is out, feels like a good reflection of the current times 🤦
I looooove Chungking Express!!!
Very good read.
'whether the more important division is not left/right but rather accel/decel.'
I don't know much about the history of 'left' / 'right,' but in so far as 'left' means 'progressive' and 'right' means 'conservative,' they are technically synonyms for 'accelerate' [progress, as a verb] and 'decelerate' [conserve]. (Left and right, that is, arrows pointing left and right on a line representing time...) I think the interesting political-historical question behind this is then: when did the right start to imagine the future (as a positive good, as something for its own sake), since I think from its inception, the left has been the party of the future; it may be simply that the party for the future is always 'the more unhappy one,' and that for the first time in history the right was, at a certain point, more unhappy than the left - I think that moment was in about 2012.
My read from this mini-exploration is actually that there are two separate spectrums: 1) left/right, about equality vs. hierarchy, and 2) progressive/conservative, about change vs. tradition — which is how you end up with modern phenomena like "right-wing progressives" and a technophobic left. (Obviously people, myself included, use these terms to mean all sorts of things in real life)
But I think you're onto something re: a big historical shift, where the right recently begins to embrace the future/technology more. Another friend pointed out via text that being really pro-tech was more of a leftist thing (russian cosmists, cybersyn, etc) for a long time.
My gut says it's gotta have something to do with capitalism / the sudden realization that tech exacerbates inequality rather than reducing it... but that's a 2-second reaction.
> the “Tech Right”’s lack of a moral compass (of the Christian sort)
Here’s one update I suggest for you: The Christian/Nietzschian divide definitely runs through the tech right, and tbh even through the hearts of many key figures on the tech right.
If you aren’t talking to some people who think it’s both time to build and time to accept Christ you’ll be missing a fascinating part of what’s going on.
Chris is fucking baiting me with this one! And I want to deliver a psycho reply to reward it.
I haven't encountered many Christian tech people that I'm aware of, and not in the relevant sense of their Christianity informing to any real degree "how they think about tech." I think you could argue that the many fans of Ivan Illich in the scene are downstream of his Catholicism, but Illich's work (and that of those fans) suffers from a fundamental preference problem: he can describe why his values or world might be better than what we tend to create, but he has no solution that I'm aware of for the fact that the overwhelming majority of people seem not to agree. But I've known many fans of his books who spend years trying to make software aligned with his thinking nevertheless (to, perhaps sadly, no real effect).
I am sure many institutionalists and "fans of society and civilization" would disagree with me —and ably, persuasively, well— but for my part I see almost no way to connect my own sense of Christianity with our work, beyond the local dimensions of e.g. "how I think we should treat one another" or "how we should think about the frame surrounding our lives, the cosmos in which we live." I am just deeply skeptical that Christ —or Buddha, for that matter— can be guides to scaled, institutional, non-radical efforts in any sense; that is, I do not consider religion to be at all political, and I don't care what people say about this point. To be a real Christian, I think you have to leave almost all of this world behind; and to build a "better" world in the world's terms, you have to leave Christ or Buddha behind, or to the side. I am sure, again, that smarter and better-read people have answers to this claim, but to date I haven't been able to believe the ones I've read.
In arguments about the meaning or reality of progress, for example, people often fall back to infant mortality: "You can debate social networks all you want, but you're insane if you don't think reducing infant mortality is worth the many trade-offs involved in constructing systems that incentivize the deployment of capital into education, R&D, the rule of law, and so forth required to produce medicines and hospitals and factories that save infant lives."
I think Christ (and, again, Buddha) might well have been "insane" in this sense. To take Jesus seriously is to believe that the soul is immortal and eternal, the flesh in this fallen world is "not the real game," and that to trade-off a single person's life or well-being against a statistical reduction in "harms" or "evils" is to make a total moral error. It's Faustian; it's how the devil gets into the mix; we are not to have power of this kind; etc. And it is not, in that world of belief, the case that "physical death and suffering are anathema to the Good." In other words: no, reducing infant mortality does not "prove" that "progress is good." It may well be how we delude ourselves that our Mammon-oriented world is acceptable; indeed, it may ironically feed Moloch.
I credit arguments that "God wants us to use our gifts," and I do not believe my own beliefs on this front very deeply, I should say; I don't live them, that's for sure! I am open and indeed behaviorally committed the idea that we should, in fact, be laboring to build "the best possible world." But these beliefs are not really very coherent with any of Jesus' actual words, and immediately open the door to precisely the sort of engagement with "what is" that I probably wouldn't care about if I had more direct confidence in the super-reality of the Kingdom of God. I myself am a compromised and milquetoast man, and defend it by thinking it's wise for a mentally ill person not to adopt any radical positions. But if this is a fallen world, and if sin is sin, and if God wants us to "be Christ-like," I doubt seriously whether "running modern capitalism to get medicines" is what he has in mind. I do not know how to resolve any of this.
There are of course many Christianities, many of which are pro-social, institutional, oriented toward "the Good" in more common senses. I think it made great sense —in civilizational terms— for the Catholic Church to prohibit believers from reading the Bible, because Christ himself seems fully uninterested in anything like progress, order, productivity, stability, prosperity, health, etc. Paul does little to soften this, in my opinion. Any of the early Christians might have said, contemplating potential martyrdom, "but think of how many more utils I could generate alive, knowing the truth as I do!" But the truth they felt they knew was precisely that utils mean nothing, and are actually dangerously misleading, in the face of the real Truth. The transition from "radical religion of martyrs" into "peaceful religion of society-builders" occurs largely through a fusion with the very Pagan (and political) strains of human belief that Nietzsche favored. And likewise, the transformation of those strains from "generating constant war" to "achieving something at least seemingly beautiful" was likewise a result of this fusion, IMO.
I do not trust myself to doubt that fusion, or that God works through these dynamics. But if a Christian said to me e.g. "I'm building a social network with Christian values," I'd be very skeptical. I think of religions generally, and Christianity specifically, as being about the individual and her or his conduct and thinking above all; as soon as they become "about the world," I think they are highly likely to become something else entirely. That "something" else may be good or awesome in many ways, or to many people. Again: how would I know? But I think this will always restrain the degree to which "true believers" will be agents of consequence in social history. At most, I think such a believer —and they do exist in positions of power, politics, tech, elsewhere— will muddle through, trying to be "the best Christian or Buddhist or Muslim or Jew I can be" within a framework that itself has complete indifference to the implied applications of their beliefs (at best). I render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; I ask myself if it is "for the Good"; I try my best on the individual level to be moral, as I understand it; I feel I will have to answer for everything, and indeed must answer for everything even if just to myself daily already; and that's as far as I've gotten with it.
What makes the matter so tricky, in my opinion, is that, as soon as it comes to elections and political decisions, the exciting inner complexity of political discourse is sharpened into a binary opposition – especially in a two-party system. This is partly due to the logic of political communication, but not exclusively. An interesting question for me is, therefore, How can a political order be designed to open up discourse in concrete decision-making processes rather than closing it off? How can it promote case-by-case decisions that are less about following an absolute guiding principle (e.g., innovation) and more about considering the impact of a specific decision on people's lives, asking whether it makes life better?
I still sense psychedelics have more upside than cocaine, but who am I to ruin a good party
One thing that strikes me about the “tech right” howsoever defined is that this must be (bc: tech) a group of people who are very comfortable playing God to a certain extent: writing software to create perfect, functioning, closed worlds, in which humanity is abstracted.
Add to that a shoulder-shrug acceptance of human collateral, ideological fervour that disruption is essential to progress to a post-scarcity (read: fewer humans) future and (this is new!) potential access to authoritarian military government power structures?
“Tech right” starts to sound far too mild and grey-washing a term.