A Family-First Technology Policy
Conservatives leaders chart a new course on tech
By Jared Hayden, policy analyst with the Institute for Family Studies, and Michael Toscano, executive director of the Institute for Family Studies
There’s no mistaking that President Trump’s Silicon Valley supporters held primacy of place at his Second Inauguration. Seated on the dais next to Trump’s podium were tech billionaires, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and X’s Elon Musk. Apple’s Tim Cook and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew were also in attendance.
The irony of the scene is undeniable—and not just because Trump’s election was won by the working class (many of whom are concerned that tech may take their livelihoods), but also because Trump’s Second Inaugural Address was full of populist rhetoric about protecting workers from top-down technological mandates.
Over the past decade, Americans from across the country—and the political spectrum—have become increasingly concerned about the effects of technology on the home. From smartphones and social media to artificial intelligence and automation, families are realizing that today’s technologies are vastly different from the relatively benign machines of the past. For all their convenience, today’s technologies threaten to erode not only Americans’ attention spans, but also their livelihoods, their marriages, and their children’s well-being. For many, the oligarchs on stage represent just a few faces of a hydra too big for the American family to beat on its own.
That said, the mere presence of Silicon Valley billionaires at the Inauguration does not mean as much as the President’s critics suggest. Unlike its predecessor, the Trump administration may be prioritizing the development of technologies like artificial intelligence, but that doesn’t mean the Trump administration is the handmaid of Big Tech. As Americans saw last month and heard at the Inauguration, Trump is willing to restrain tech where it comes into conflict with the family, as when automation threatens the livelihoods of longshoremen and EV mandates do the same for auto workers.
Ultimately, Trump’s techno-populist fusion, though perhaps delicate, uncertain, and somewhat ironic, marks a long-overdue era of political opportunity for conservatives.
Now 25 years into the new millennium, it is clear (today more than ever) that our world has drastically changed. Gone are the days of dull desktop computers and benign machines. Today, handheld screens constantly chirp for our attention, corroding even the most basic human interactions. The rise of artificial intelligence is swiftly undermining academic integrity. And artificial reproductive technologies are being co-opted for transhumanist and eugenic purposes reminiscent of the film Gattaca.
Of course, being creatures of intellect and students of history, many conservatives have tended to balk at such dramatic characterizations of our age. Yet as traditions and values have eroded at an unprecedented pace, leaving conservatives with less and less to conserve, their ideas have continually failed to be of consequence. As one preacher put it, it’s hard to admonish men and women to be good Christian fathers and mothers, not because they don’t know the ideals of Christianity, but “because they have next to nothing in their heads about what being a plain father or mother looks like in this day and age.” No matter how many great books seminars conservatives may run, moral, social, and political change, by means of immaterial ideas, remains elusive.
As it usually does, such defeat has prompted self-examination. No one seems to have put it better than Jon Askonas in his bombshell Compact article, “Why Conservatism Failed”:
The modern conservative project failed because it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology… because it didn’t consider how to build technologies to fortify tradition and advance human flourishing, or understand that it needed to.
Whatever consequences our ideas may have, our ideas are shaped and reshaped by the material world in which we live. And our world is, in the words of Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Brad Littlejohn, “one that has rendered many basic conservative instincts simply nonsensical, especially concerns about family, morality, and sexuality” thanks to new technologies. If conservatives want to affect the societal change they long to see, they will have to consider the role technology plays and aim to develop and govern it in a manner that leads to human flourishing.
Trump’s techno-populist fusion offers the Right the perfect opportunity to harness Americans’ growing demand for tech governance in a way that can serve rather than harm the flourishing of the human person and the human family. A number of leading conservatives have seized this opportunity. Recognizing the new era of technological change upon us, more than two dozen conservative luminaries signed on to a new pro-family tech agenda for the right. Published by First Things, “A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right” is a call for Congress and the administration to see the fundamental connection between a bright future and family wellbeing. As the statement says: “The family plants the seed and forms the foundation of the future, through the begetting and raising of children who will carry the human project forward.” Without the family, there is no future. Without the human person, there is nothing to conserve.
The statement offers policymakers ten guiding principles for how to deploy public policy to “direct technology toward the flourishing of the family and the human person.” This includes actively blocking technology from harming humans and families, but also positively spurring innovative investment in areas that would make healthy families a primary objective of technological change.
The former includes consolidating and advancing conservative wins in reining in pornography, social media, and smartphones, and also entails adopting an approach to healthcare across the federal government that is oriented toward healing chronic disease, rather than seeking to alter human nature itself to bypass Silicon Valley’s perceived shortcomings of human nature. But it also requires that tech developers think big about how they can develop technologies to establish a new home economy in the 21st century.
At the administrative level, carrying out a pro-family tech agenda could look like establishing a task force at the Department of Education to re-evaluate screen-based learning across the board, and tie public funding of schools to limits on smartphones and digital technology in the classroom. Even better would be a Presidential Council on Family and Technology that could help families navigate new technology, and advise the administration in adopting a pro-family vision for technological innovation and regulation.
An electoral coalition that joins pro-family and technological interests together in a single political party has been born. With these two groups suddenly negotiating how to govern together, we are presented with a historic opportunity–perhaps for the first time in modern history–to build a future for the family. Now is the moment for choosing. Will we set our sights on such a sublime task, or will we squander our chances at a future filled with “possibility, invention, and hope”?