The Tech–Trad Alliance: R.I.P. (2025⁠–⁠2025)

The memorable sight of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sundar Pichai standing in a line behind President Trump at his second inauguration evoked an ancient image: once-hostile chieftains brought to heel by the might of Rome, taken to the capital to pay homage to Caesar.

The scene marked the capstone of a striking political reversal. For years, Republicans had railed against Big Tech’s alleged sins, from the hosting of child abuse material to suppressing disfavored speech to collusion with the Biden administration. And then the tide turned.

What was coming into being was a strange new synthesis: a second-term Trump coalition running the gamut from tech elites — the wealthiest people in the world — all the way to working-class Americans and social and religious conservatives. Katherine Boyle, a prominent partner at leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, captured this synthesis in a February 2025 talk in Washington, D.C., later published in Tablet as “The Great Tech–Family Alliance.” A new partnership was possible, she argued, between pro-tech and pro-family stakeholders, rooted in the conviction that “tech must help fundamentally reshape the culture by making America pro-family again.” In Boyle’s telling, tech could make it easier to work from home, drive down the cost of education, and amplify pro-social content online — all of which could benefit the family.

The most ambitious expression of the new fusion was DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency — a strike force of tech talent, working with no preconceived notions about the way things are supposed to be done in the administrative state, that could shrink it and modernize a system mired in technological desuetude. In principle, it was brilliant: a means of bridging traditional conservative concerns about executive-branch overreach, waste of taxpayer dollars, and deep state entrenchment with longtime industry frustrations over pointless red tape and the shackling of American innovation.

But a year on, the tech–trad alliance has already collapsed. In the executive branch, and in our politics and culture broadly, tech sector priorities are now firmly in the driver’s seat, while social conservatism sits in the back. A new eugenics is on the rise in Silicon Valley. Access to abortion pills has expanded. Online gambling technologies proliferate. There are persistent reports of “extraordinary ability” visas being sought by influencers and OnlyFans “models.” And beyond all this looms the immense frontier of artificial intelligence — an issue on which the public and its government could hardly be further apart.

The collapse of this alliance was not accidental. It was inevitable: the two sides’ rival visions of human personhood couldn’t long coexist. In many debates over technological progress, this conflict can be ignored or neglected. But AI accelerationism has forced it to the fore.

Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued in the late 1800s that America has always been defined by its push toward the frontier — or what Oswald Spengler, describing Western culture, called the “Faustian soul”: a great striving to probe and test all limits in a hunger for the infinite. In its workshops and laboratories, America’s great leaps forward in science and technology have awed the public and the world, from the harnessing of electricity to controlled flight to the landing on the Moon. This same sense of mission suffused the early days of the digital revolution: What was the word “cyberspace” but a transposition of the old categories into the electronic realm? Cyberspace, like outer space, was simply another frontier.

American social conservatism has always struggled to make peace with this impulse by directing it into ordered channels. Rightly conceived, the frontier was not the violent playground of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, in which all boundaries dissolve. Rather, it was an opportunity for the expansion of an existing moral order. It was to be settled by families, who would build towns and churches and schools — a settlement that was, of course, often beset by its own forms of violence toward people already occupying the land.

This tension within American conservatism between progress and refinement, expansion and cultivation, runs down through the decades to the present day. Its resolution has always been predicated on the notion that, in many cases, technology is something we can discipline, something we can direct toward humane ends. Engines can be used for war or for transportation. Planes can be used for surveillance or for crop dusting. Recent breakthroughs in genetic engineering could result in eugenics, cloning, or any number of other horrors — but they do not have to. Laws and norms could carve a better course, as they must.

At the heart of conservative thought is what Thomas Sowell has described as a “constrained vision” of human personhood. Human capacities are not infinitely open-ended: to be a human being is to be a finite body across the course of a finite life, knotted from birth into a particular family composed of similarly finite human beings. Further, to be human is to be raised in a particular place, according to particular traditions, in service of a particular way of life governed by particular laws. These constraints inform how technological progress should be oriented toward humane ends — and, indeed, give meaning to the idea of humane ends in the first place.

This conservative disposition has always fit poorly with Silicon Valley’s distinctive ethos of experimentation, rapid change, and radical disruption. With apologies to Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm, much of West Coast tech culture is a world focused more on what can be done than what should. Why hold back for seemingly arbitrary reasons when the future awaits?

No technology better exemplifies an unconstrained vision of human personhood — the opposite of the conservative lodestar — than today’s artificial intelligence systems. Curing cancer or optimizing missile defense is one thing, but the kind of “disruption” foreseen by AI evangelists goes far beyond any of that.

Many facets of the traditionalists’ constrained vision of personhood stand to be eroded by AI. Why heed the wisdom of an elder, when all the world’s information is available on demand? Why develop a skill, when mastery is just a function of processing power? Why submit to a particular kind of formation, when you can become whatever you want? One day you are a filmmaker, the next a painter, the third a poet.

For AI’s cheerleaders, this is a dream. For many conservatives, it is a nightmare. The tension is rooted in rival views of human personhood and flourishing.

In the past decade, it was possible at times to ignore this conflict. The two most recent technological “hype cycles” before AI were the metaverse and the blockchain. From a traditionally conservative perspective, neither trend seemed particularly auspicious for long. The metaverse with its bulky headsets teased the possibility of physically dissociating from the embodied realities of human life and retreating into a Matrix-like digital netherworld. It amplified the atomizing effects of social media and the smartphone. For its part, blockchain technology, according to advocates like Balaji Srinivasan, offered a decentralized mechanism for breaking the political monopoly of the nation-state. Individuals might opt out of any particular vision of the political common good, forming independent “network states” accountable to themselves alone.

Both the metaverse and the blockchain take us very far from the classical polis. And yet those hype cycles petered out. They did not, in fact, transform society and remake the nature of sovereignty. So when modern AI emerged on the scene, many approached it with deflationary expectations. And even if big changes were afoot, perhaps they wouldn’t be all bad.

New voices in Silicon Valley were emerging, with an interest in rapprochement between traditionalists and technologists. Perhaps AI could even serve conservative ends. Katherine Boyle, for instance, saw AI as a tool for making “infinitely patient and extremely knowledgeable tutors for every child in this country,” giving families more control over their children’s education.

But there was a crucial twist to Boyle’s argument. As she saw it, technologists and traditionalists were on the same side, united against the potential threat of uncontrolled state power. This was the same sensibility shared by DOGE and its supporters, with their mission to “starve the beast” of federal government. Government was a problem, not a solution.

This is a somewhat dated, libertarian-inflected vision of “conservative” political thinking. Other technologists adapted their visions more seamlessly to the current political moment, with remarkable results.

In their audacious book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska — leaders at big data company Palantir — contend that America’s tech sector has lost its moral compass. Innovation is being pursued for innovation’s sake without an end beyond itself. Against this aimlessness, Karp and Zamiska call for a realignment of tech-sector priorities toward the American national interest, a shift that would likely involve closer and more centralized partnerships with the state, and the defense sector in particular. The book suggests directing the whole tech sector, including AI development, toward “close collaboration” with the state in service of distinctly human-scale priorities: medical research, defense, and so on.

From a conservative perspective, that goal sounds very appealing. It speaks the language of constraints — of particular human beings and a particular nationality. But it is also, on closer review, self-serving.

As compared to the metaverse and the blockchain, artificial intelligence was a far better candidate for a “nationalist” technology project, with all the associated federal support. The building of a world-class AI sector required up-front government investments in data centers and infrastructure, and a steady supply of top-tier semiconductors.

But the justifying term “national interest” is famously expansive, and in recent months it has mostly entailed a blank check for the technology sector to pursue its own priorities. On the other hand, “national interest” is also prone to the government’s endless redefinition, as is so aptly illustrated by the clash between the Pentagon and Anthropic over how far AI can be used to fight wars and surveil citizens. There is no reason to assume that an AI policy originally justified to serve ordinary people will do so over the long run.

Today, AI accelerationism dominates administration policy, manifesting in both expansive executive orders and repeated efforts to prevent states from imposing even the mildest constraints on AI systems or development. These efforts are ceaselessly justified by the goal of “competition with China” and the need to “win the AI race.”

Those phrases obscure more than they illuminate. The new series of AI breakthroughs was driven in part by the ever-advancing scale of the systems — hence the massive buildouts of data centers and the ongoing war for ever-greater pools of training data. There is no reason to assume these physical constraints will evaporate. The “AI race” appears to be a call for endless resource investment with no clear condition for what counts as a win, unlike the race with a lunar finish line in the 1960s.

These problems are compounded by the inability, or unwillingness, of those driving AI policy to answer urgently important political questions. At the level of practical politics, the tech–trad alliance has fallen apart over a very basic question: What are people losing their jobs to AI supposed to do instead?

Last year, I sat in a meeting with a prominent Silicon Valley investor who waxed eloquently about the future ahead, stressing how AI would unleash an amazing flood of small businesses. Afterward, I did something I’ve never done before or since: I chased him down in the hallway to ask him to say more about what kinds of businesses he was talking about. For a moment he looked nonplussed. Then he clarified that he was talking about AI-based replacements for call centers.

It was an extraordinarily revealing — and ominous — moment. The single mother of three who loses her call-center job to an AI tool cannot await a universal basic income that might (or might not) arrive sometime around the year 2040. She cannot spend hours experimenting with Claude to vibe code some stray app that will languish in the depths of the Google Play Store. She needs work now, because her kids need to eat now.

The constrained vision of personhood affirms that human beings need meaningful work: work capable of supporting a family, of course, but also work that provides dignity and purpose. Work is something most human beings crave by nature. They cannot simply switch to a life of perennial leisure funded by wealth transfers. So, too, economic development ought to serve the best interests of young people, which often means insulating them from the worst effects of online life. As ever, the spirit of expansion and conquest must be channeled into the forms and institutions of stable political order — into the contours of the constrained vision of personhood.

These traditionalist concerns do not seem to be meaningfully represented in the administration’s dominant approach to tech policy — despite the fact that they animated the coalition that propelled the administration to power. Pro-family AI policy is, in practice, mostly off the table.

Whether you like it or not, the argument now runs, AI is our future. You will be forced to be “free.”

The collapse of the tech–trad alliance was predictable. But it is nevertheless unfortunate. At its best, it promised a sort of third way beyond reactionary anti-tech activism and full-blown tech maximalism. Maybe innovation could be aimed toward a specific set of designated goals — goals, like curing cancer, that can be advanced at a human scale. Maybe innovation could enrich human lives in hitherto-unforeseen ways.

When it takes the form of concrete promises to make our existence better, technological progress can inspire real joy and wonder: maybe now I’ll live to see my great-grandson take his first steps; maybe that child will go to Mars. But those hopes are a far cry from today’s ever-more-evanescent promises of “everything” changing after the AI revolution. Somewhere along the line, what dropped out of the picture was the idea that the subjects of political power and technological power alike — human beings — operate according to certain fixed limits and constraints, and are not infinitely malleable in the face of disruption. They cannot be remade like lines of code. Nor should they wish to be.

Looking to the future, all that can really be predicted, to a reasonable degree of certainty, is that someone somewhere stands to make a lot of money on AI. And with that, perhaps the most ambitious attempt yet at a “conservative futurism” draws to a close.