“Thanks to digital technology, Americans live in a new world,” write the nationalist-populist authors of the Claremont Institute essay “For Real American Greatness, A Tech New Deal.” And they greatly fear this “new world” and the continuing direction they see it heading. It’s a world where right-wing speech about race and gender is suppressed, Big Tech is an unproductive monopoly, robopocalypse means men are all caregivers or jobless, and AI-controlled humanity is fast-evolving into posthumanity.
So, yeah, it’s a lot. And Silicon Valley is to blame. At the heart of the supposed problem is what the authors call the Four Antis of the “woke tech vanguard”: anti-constitutionalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Western attitudes, and anti-human philosophy. And just as FDR’s New Deal was a big-government response to economic collapse and today’s Green New Deal is a big-government response to environmental collapse, the Tech New Dealers want a big-government response to societal collapse.
Of some sort. The essay doesn’t present any sort of specific policy agenda. Rather, the authors try to establish a philosophical framework for policymaker action. And it’s not like their fellow nationalist populists aren’t already batting around some pretty specific ideas such breaking up the tech titans, robot taxes, and anti-bias regulations. And I’m sure there’s a lot more to come, especially in the area of gene editing.
As such, I see the Tech New Deal as an attempt to counter existing pro-market, techno-optimist impulses on the right and create an ideological permission structure for massive government intervention to support cultural right-wingers of a certain type. Mercatus tech policy scholar Adam Thierer put it this way in a tweet storm: “What Claremont wants is a radical, paternalistic, Washington-knows-best regime that lets bureaucrats in the Swamp completely remake the future according to some grandiose central plan for what constitutes ‘American Greatness.’ There’s nothing remotely ‘conservative’ about it.”
Indeed, one of the least conservative aspects of the Tech New Deal is its rejection of reality. Is conservative speech being suppressed? Only if conservative speech now includes white supremacism. Sure hope not. A recent Wall Street Journal analysis found “Google’s results in organic search and news for a number of hot-button terms and politicians’ names showed prominent representation of both conservative and liberal news outlets.” And fears of “woke capital” must sound terribly silly to LGBTQ YouTubers currently suing YouTube over alleged discrimination. Perhaps they are now thinking up their own big-government Tech New Deal.
Once again, Thierer: “As @vpostrel taught us 20 years ago in ‘The Future and Its Enemies,’ there are those who believe in dynamism and those who believe in stasis. Party and ideological affiliations are meaningless when it comes to thinking about the future, innovation, and progress.”
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