Look at what technologists do, not what they say
A new alliance between tech and the family?
This article is a reply to Katherine Boyle’s
“The Great Tech–Family Alliance.”
“All of history is a war between the family and the state,” Katherine Boyle told her audience at the American Enterprise Institute. She came to pitch social conservatives on an alliance with the forces of Silicon Valley to battle the forces of the state. It’s certainly not an obvious alliance — the family is a naturally conservative institution. You can’t move fast, break children, and start over with a new iteration (though Elon Musk is trying).
At its best, the dynamism of the coders and builders blends playful curiosity and optimism. Startup founders are people who think they see a glimmer of a possible, better future, and are willing to scramble to bring it into being. In my own approach to family life and community tending, I’ve tried to bring some of that cheerful “minimum shippable product” spirit to allow me to try to do the next right thing, not waiting for a five-year plan.
But Boyle’s pitch lacked the semi-rational exuberance that families and founders can share. If there’s a war on, and the only weapons are the ones she proposed, then the family is going to get rolled.
She proposes three battlefields: the structure of work, the design of schooling, and the cultural cachet given to families. But her suggested tactics are: Etsy side hustles for stay-at-home parents, AI homeschooling tutors for their kids, and renaming “carpool lanes” to “family lanes” to lend romance and prestige to parents.
The AI suggestion is the most jarring. The goal of many homeschooling parents is not to design their own cram school and to pack their kids’ heads full of facts, but approach education as the formation of character and preparation to live and die well. That requires a relational life — one spent in conversation with the human beings who have lived and died long before us, and left us their artistic and philosophical work, as well as with our peers in the present. Turning to AI as primary interlocutor is a kind of intellectual onanism.
It’s tech that has played a major role in obstructing marriage and setting the sexes against each other. Boys see the Tate brothers brutalize women online and lecture their protégés that love is for suckers. Girls get fed aspirational anorexia on auto-scroll, plus the suggestion they could opt out of sexism by abandoning their sex.
Neither the state nor tech is a perfect partner for the family. The state can be an ally in requiring age verification for pornographic sites, and tech can be an ally in surfacing formerly obscure (or carbonized) texts. The state more often serves to set limits, tech more often opens doors. Knowing which to do requires education in discernment and a community of co-discerners.
What we need is less time in the HOV lane, by whatever name, and more time in humane, face-to-face pursuits. In my neck of the woods, that’s amateur play readings, religious processions, and phoneless Postman Pledge field days. Whether we’re gearing up to fight state overreach or the intrusive algorithm, we need time drilling in our little platoons.
