In my recent interview with former Substack project manager and San Francisco Standard contributor Jasmine Sun, she relayed her experience working in Silicon Valley in the late 2010s and witnessing the tech industry’s progressive lean firsthand.
At the time, Google employees pushed back on the company’s involvement with the Chinese government to suppress search results in the country in such a way as to mock its motto, “Don’t Be Evil.” Data outfit Palantir also came under fire for its alleged contribution to the first Trump administration’s deportation efforts (which now look very mild in comparison). Former TechCrunch contributor Greg Ferenstein wrote of the preference for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by none other than Elon Musk, who is now thought to be joined at the hip with MAGA as a revelation of his true essence.
“I was in Silicon Valley during the Project Maven era, where a lot of employees were signing this pledge that they would never build AI to help the U.S. military because Google had this contract with the Pentagon to build AI for military purposes,” Sun said. “So, it’s been very surprising for me to see where the tech scene has gone since then, with open Republicanism now much more common.”
This brings us to our current moment, which Sun believes was partially informed by former President Joe Biden’s administration, particularly its union and activist-friendly approach to reindustrialization, which spurred a tech industry pivot to Republicans, at least among its major players.
The so-called Tech Right, encompassing figures such as Musk, Marc Andreesen, David Sacks, now the country’s AI czar in President Donald Trump’s administration, and many others, is having a moment. From the creation of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Project Stargate to overturning the Biden administration’s regulatory measures targeting artificial intelligence, the business-oriented, relatively materialist — as opposed to spiritual or religious — Tech Right is seeing a top-down, explicitly political interest in diving headfirst into AI, robotics, and more. This likely would not have existed if former Vice President Kamala Harris had won last year.
Brian Chau is the former executive director of the appropriately D.C.-based Alliance for the Future, which takes an AI-positive view on the technocommercial upheaval we’ve seen since the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. AFF advocates greater deregulation and normalization of AI endeavors in the public and private sectors. It is a “coalition of entrepreneurs, technologists, and policy experts who believe that artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better,” according to its website. Think of it as akin to the Democrat-aligned “abundance agenda” but for AI.
At its launch in early 2024, AFF declared that “AI is the free speech issue of the decade.” This theme rang true in Vice President JD Vance’s speech to Europe at its AI Action Summit in February of this year. He reprimanded the continent for its approach to speech, which is decidedly unlike the United States’s in spirit and execution.
“Repealing the AI Biden executive order was a positive, as was scrapping that administration’s ‘equity’ goals and efforts to curb alleged disinformation,” Chau told the Washington Examiner, while emphasizing the importance of federal preemption and congressional approval to prevent states such as California and Colorado from erecting barriers to AI. (Federalist types may wince at that.)
Chau likewise praised the Trump administration’s disinterest in U.S. involvement in European-style AI governance, in Europe, as it relates to “hate speech,” something the prior administration was quite sympathetic to. As the New York Times observed, under Trump, the difference between the European Union’s approach to individual expression and our love of “free speech” (in quotes, according to the paper of record) is a “gap that’s widening.”
The Tech Right doesn’t quite share the quaint classical liberal, Cato Institute-like perspective of peaceful, international trade. It wears a somewhat muscular nationalism on its shirt sleeves (made of synthetic fabric, of course). A focus on the deleterious actions of peer competitor China is a common theme and fuels the notion that bleeding-edge corporations should be enmeshed in government activity, indeed sanctified by it, on national defense grounds.
Denver-based Palantir is an example of a tech company that is not beholden to any cyberlibertarian philosophy of decentralization and squirming out from under the thumb of the federal government. Economist Arnold Kling, in a review of the book The Technological Republic, co-written by Palantir CEO Alex Karp, observes that the authors “complain that too many Silicon Valley companies are looking to make big profits from solving little problems,” with a preference for shopping and entertainment products.
Karp and company prefer a loftier corporate imperative implicating healthcare, law enforcement, and national defense. They are no hunky-dory defenders of the man-on-the-ground’s trifling consumer freedoms. Kling said the book reads like “something a professor might have written circa 1985, in the middle of the Decade of Greed, lamenting the students’ crass materialism.” In that way, he echoed tech mogul Peter Thiel’s lamentation that while “we wanted flying cars, we got … ” well, Twitter. (Now that it’s X, perhaps he doesn’t mind so much.)
Karp recently suggested that would-be college students delay that move, avoiding the universities’ indoctrination efforts, and opt for a Palantir fellowship instead.
The Tech Right is both “neoliberal” in the sense of being pro-capitalism and technologically domestic, but is more willing to jettison notions of the benefits of international trade at all times and places, thinking it a national priority to shore up — indeed, onshore — core manufacturing capacities for vital industries. Same for immigration, which the Tech Right is largely still supportive of — see the row between Vivek Ramaswamy and Musk and anti-immigrationist Steve Bannon. It’s willing to tolerate a crackdown on it as it either hastens automation across business or is irrelevant to a high-tech future.
The upstart news outlet Pirate Wires is an epicenter for Tech Right thinking. Contributor Trae Stephens believes tariffs are a good start to a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S., but they remain insufficient to spearhead an automation golden dawn.
“Patriotism demands we go all-in on robots and AI in manufacturing,” Stephens said. “More than any treaty or tariff, automation is what will keep us ahead of the world’s foremost authoritarian menace.”
(Chau, on the other hand, took a more skeptical approach to Trump’s tariffs, suggesting they’re capricious and ill-conceived, contrary to the advice of economic grown-ups-in-the-room.)
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All the above said — yes, all of that — it should be noted that tech is still more Democrat-aligned than Republican. Don’t let the minor schism that’s erupted in the last few years, now resulting in this discussion of the Tech Right, lead you astray on the bigger picture.
But it’s also a warning to the next Democratic administration, which will inevitably come about in our two-party, fairly evenly divided presidential-centered system. Whether it’s someone in the mold of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a doyenne of the congressional Left and hater of “oligarchs,” or a more centrist figure such as Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), government censorship of tech is bad politics.
Dain Fitzgerald is a writer and “podtuber” in Diamond Springs, California, in the beautiful Gold Country of El Dorado County. His Substack is @mupetblast.
