Two weeks ago, I interviewed Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and leading figure of the nascent tech right, for the “Matter of Opinion” podcast; this week I interviewed Steve Bannon, the vintage MAGA populist. Both conversations contain enough material for several newsletters, but both are especially useful for illustrating a point I pressed in last week’s column: that there is a surface unity in President Trump’s coalition on the issues of this executive-order-dominated moment, from anti-wokeness to deportations to reshaping the administrative state, but profound philosophical tensions underneath.
And the tech-populist tension is potentially one of the deepest, with implications that extend far beyond one presidential administration. To Andreessen, joining with Trumpism and the right is an opportunity for Silicon Valley to slip free of both the ideological shackles imposed by woke progressivism and, more important, the regulatory shackles that the Biden administration wanted to impose on rapidly advancing frontier technologies, artificial intelligence above all.
To Bannon, the idea of Silicon Valley unbound is, first, a variation on the kind of neoliberal globalism that Trump campaigned against in 2016, and second, a potentially dystopian path to a post-human future, where the elite aspires to a cyborg existence and machine intelligence makes ordinary human beings increasingly obsolete.
I think you can tell which vision feels more secure about its influence in the Trump White House right now by the fact that Andreessen conspicuously declined my invitation to pick fights with other right-wing factions while Bannon entered our interview spoiling for a battle with the tech “oligarchs” and their “technofeudalism.” For now, the populists are having their way on various issues, but not on anything related to reining in Silicon Valley. The Trump inauguration may have paraded the lords of tech like defeated generals in a Roman triumph, but Trump himself seems eager to work with all of them, and to push more and more chips (so to speak) into the A.I. race especially, whatever post-human perils it might hold.
How this dynamic changes will depend on many factors, but above all on the question of just how far and fast A.I. can go. And without definitely answering that question, it’s really important for lay readers to understand that many of the people intimately involved with A.I. expect it to go very fast and very far indeed, toward a godlike superintelligence and some sort of marriage of human and machine. Bannon’s dystopian warnings may sound paranoid, but they point to possibilities that are actually close to what a lot of very smart people in Silicon Valley confidently expect.
These expectations may turn out to be mistaken; my own sense is that there’s deep misunderstanding about consciousness at the core of a lot of A.I. work. But just the fact that such wild expectations exist is a notable fact about our moment, and almost certainly A.I. is going to have some big reshaping influence on the next four years and far beyond them. For that reason, the questions about the human future that you see dividing Andreessen and Bannon — and potentially dividing the wider tech right from other Trumpist constituencies, populist and religious and the crunchy/holistic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faction — deserve at least as much attention as all the more immediate fights the Trump White House is picking over ordinary forms of policy.
I will be giving these questions more attention in the near future, after this newsletter spends a few weeks on religious matters, arguing through some of the issues raised in my new book on why you (yes, you) should be religious. For now, though, I just want to say something about why, despite the obvious gulf between these two podcast interviewees, I still believe in some kind of synthesis — tech with trad, Muskian with Vancian, vaulting techno-futurism with a defense of humanism and the common man — as an alternative to existential conflict.
Right now, two premises guide my sense of the human situation. First: The virtual age and its advances are making a lot of normal human ways of life and cultural forms seem obsolete, and this sense of obsolescence is only going to increase with the spread of A.I., regardless of whether it achieves some sort of machine-god breakthrough.
That obsolescence is not, emphasis not, manifesting itself first and foremost in a crude economistic fashion, where robots take everybody’s jobs. That stage may come, but for now the dangers are more sociological and spiritual: People are still working (albeit perhaps with less enthusiasm), but increasingly they aren’t dating and marrying and having children, making real-life friends and forming communities and experiencing and transmitting culture in the ways that were normal even 20 or 50 years ago. The fertility crash around the world has many causes, but at a deep level I suspect it reflects a sense that normal ways of human life, whether in Chile or South Korea or Seattle, are now somehow unimportant or foredoomed.
But second: The same virtual and A.I. age is also connected to the major forms of dynamism in human affairs, the aspirations to go to Mars or build a new supersonic jet or figure out a cure for cancer, and attempts to create sealed-off zones that protect older ways of life from the threat of obsolescence just don’t seem to work. Whether the sealing off is socialist or populist, secular-humanist or Catholic, it still yields stagnation and decline, empty cradles and emptying provinces, at best a cozy form of anomie and at worst outright despair.
Separation can work if you really seal things off: The Amish, at least, aren’t going to become obsolete. But Europe as a social-democratic fortress of traditional architecture, good food and short work weeks probably isn’t going to make it. Hungary and Poland as redoubts of nationalist Christianity probably aren’t going to make it. My own New England as a hygge home for aging liberal humanists who don’t much care for tech is going to diminish and be overshadowed by the more Promethean America of the Sun Belt.
So what does this mean for the human race? Let me steal, not for the first time, an idea from Frank Herbert’s “Dune” saga, in which his morally complicated messiah figures discern with psychic powers what he calls a “Golden Path” for humanity — a perilous road between extinction and stagnation, a narrow way into a better future.
That’s what I feel like we’re groping for as a species, and that America and Americans are probably most likely to discover: a way through this perilous social-technological moment, in which the digital age is accepted in some form but also tamed, mastered, humanized; in which the dynamist impulse is honored, not rejected, but also somehow channeled toward better ends than what some of the Silicon Valley post-humanists envision; in which the old ways of being human are remade in forms that are more resilient against both virtual blandishments and competition from machines.
More, as they say, to come.
Breviary
Jon Askonas and Michael Toscano on technology and the American family.
Leah Libresco Sargeant on pro-life laws and maternal deaths.
Bethel McGrew on left-brained religion.
Hamilton Craig discerns a literary-world shift.
Adam Nayman rescues the movies of January.
Noah Millman hates “The Brutalist.”
Advertisements for Myself
I’ll be doing a number of events related to my new book over the next couple of months, the first one a discussion with Spencer Klavan and Chad Pecknold at the Catholic University of America on Thursday, Feb. 6, at 7 p.m. The theme is the possibility of a religious comeback. You can register here.
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