Tech Policy’s Libertarian Hangover

Rediscovering conservatism on AI, the internet, smartphones, and tech.

For the cadre of conservatives working in tech policy, the past 24 months have been a wild ride, with once-unthinkable policy ideas like online age verification becoming mainstream and the rise of artificial intelligence forcing us to reimagine the social contract between Washington, Silicon Valley, and the American citizen.

Outside of this narrow circle, however, it can feel like much of right-leaning Washington is stuck in 1999, mouthing meaningless mantras to avoid the tough political choices presented by the most powerful technologies in history. Conservatives were trapped for decades in a dogmatic slumber of reflexive libertarianism, and while most are waking up to the new world of techno-feudalism, they’re still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.

Among Capitol Hill and White House staffers, at D.C. cocktail parties and salons, on X and Fox News, you can still hear the echoes of the 1990s, like a Backstreet Boys chorus repeating in a neverending fadeout. The same tired cliches substitute for serious thought about the hard choices of governance.

Three stock phrases in particular highlight the continued poverty of what passes for tech policy among many conservatives—and, spoiler alert, none of them are authentically conservative.

“Didn’t Socrates Warn Against Writing?”

The implication is clear: tech criticism is as old as civilization itself, and if we had listened to the naysayers, we might never have had civilization at all. Socrates was the first hand-wringer, stoking the first “technopanic” over the invention of writing—but here we are 2,400 years later doing just fine, and we should remember that next time someone tries to get us worried about smartphones or AI.

A good example of this thinking comes from the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis, who had the gumption to mock chatbot suicides as just another technopanic after the first Character.AI teen-suicide lawsuit was filed in the fall of 2024—a take that has not aged well. When a Los Angeles jury ruled this March that Meta had designed its platforms to addict children, the Wall Street Journal solemnly intoned, “from Socrates to social media, society has always worried about protecting the young.” And in a June Substack post titled, “The AI Moral Panic Will Pass, Just Like All The Other Ones,” investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel detailed a litany of technopanics beginning with Socrates in the Phaedrus and continuing through the printing press, the telegraph, and the internet.

Ironically, this unthinking repetition confirms one of Socrates’s greatest fears: that a society blessed with the written word would content itself with thoughtlessly regurgitating facts divorced from context and excuse itself from the trouble of wrestling with living ideas.

Socrates’s real point was not that technology is bad, but that every technology comes with tradeoffs, and only those who have first reckoned with the tradeoffs have a right to make them. Even the invention of writing is no exception; it has facilitated extraordinary advances, but with real costs to memory, imagination, and social cohesion. If we take the time to count these costs, we may well decide they are worth it, but hopefully we will also find ways to mitigate them and invest in practices that the technology might otherwise take from us. Conservatives should understand this well, for we often pride ourselves on taking “tradeoffs” seriously. Why then are some on the Right so unwilling to apply the same calculus to our technologies?

Technological developments that bring about real benefits in their early stages may, when pressed further, quickly reach a point of diminishing and even negative returns. The regular old telephone, perhaps, made us all more connected to family and friends, the mobile phone blurred the boundaries of home and work, and by the time we got to the smartphone decked out with social media apps, we found ourselves “alone together,” to use Sherry Turkle’s memorable phrase.

As C.S. Lewis observed in The Abolition of Man, “it is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all.” Lewis’s warning, too, reflects what was once a basic conservative insight: that in human affairs, there are no one-way streets of progress—that political virtue, like personal virtue, always lies in finding the mean between two extremes. “The most important four words in politics,” George Will famously remarked, “are ‘up to a point.’”

And not just in politics. A plant that thrives in four inches of water may drown in four feet. A society that flourishes through a free press may find itself drowning in a sea of discordant information once everyone has their own soapbox. Prudence is the only principle that can guide us in the right use of technology: a willingness to weigh every proposed innovation and transformation carefully against what we know of human nature, and a recognition that our technologies will in fact shape us and change us.

If we do not enter upon innovation with our eyes wide open to how our tools and machines will reshape us, we will become their slaves, not their masters.

“You Can’t Turn Back the Clock”

This argument holds that worrying is a waste of time anyway: technology will continue advancing whether we like it or not. Forget standing athwart history yelling “Stop”; all we can decide is how quickly to climb aboard the train.

We’re seeing this now with AI. As Jensen Huang boasted, “you’re not going to lose your job to AI. You’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.” Writers across the political spectrum have tried to demonstrate their relevance by celebrating their obsolescence. In a TED Talk titled, “I’ll Probably Lose My Job to AI. Here’s Why That’s OK,” Megan McArdle said that resisting change would be “stealing from our descendants’ future,” and author Stephen King, in an essay welcoming AI-generated writing, declared, “I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.”

No one wants to be called a “Luddite.” Even determined tech industry critics like Bernie Sanders often preface their remarks with “I am not a Luddite,” while tech advocates like Pethokoukis reach instinctively for the insult. Last month, White House tech advisor David Friedberg dismissed worries about AI-related job losses as “a Luddite idea.” Any attempt to arrest technological progress is, it seems, outside the bounds of acceptable discussion.

This is a puzzling stance for conservatives to adopt, for it looks suspiciously…progressive. The Left loves to preach about “the arc of history,” which bends inexorably towards “justice”—defined in terms of ever-more permissive civil rights for ever-more outlandish behavior. Moves to liberalize same-sex unions, redefine marriage, and normalize transgenderism were sometimes defended on the merits, but as often as not, opponents were simply bulldozed out of the way on the basis that they were “on the wrong side of history.” When conservatives protested that their views were considered mainstream just a few years earlier, progressives seemed unmoved: of course that used to be the norm, but we have now outgrown it and cannot possibly turn back the clock.

This appeal to inevitability excuses us the trouble of wrestling with tradeoffs or alternatives. We need not even inquire about new technologies; it is enough that they appear on the scene and, having done so, must simply be accepted.

But in fact there are at least three options available to us besides resignation: we may brake, we may steer, or we may disembark.

Braking used to be a core conservative principle. As Edmund Burke wrote, “we must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees.”

Society’s institutions must have time to adjust, update laws and customs, and integrate into a new synthesis. This is precisely the time we are denied today as radically disruptive new technologies arrive while we’re still adjusting to the last wave of change. It may be difficult (or even inadvisable from a national security standpoint) to put the brakes on the development of emerging technologies, but we can exercise agency over when, where, and how quickly they are diffused.

Where we cannot brake, we can steer. There is a self-serving myth that technologies simply appear on the scene, like so many dei ex machina emerging out of man’s noble quest for knowledge. In reality, nearly all modern technologies of consequence are the result of sustained effort applied for specific aims—often those of national defense. Every company makes decisions about which products to develop based on profit and loss projections shaped by tax policy, intellectual property law, and product liability, following the path of least resistance to profit. The task of policymakers, then, is not unlike that of the Army Corps of Engineers; you cannot stop a river from flowing, but you can channel it to harness its power while protecting the communities in its path.

Finally, sometimes you really can just get off the train. Just because a new technology appears does not mean we have to adopt it. The past century, contrary to what the prophets of progress tell us, contains a long litany of roads not taken or quickly abandoned. We developed horrific chemical weapons in World War I and civilization-ending doomsday weapons in World War II, and soon swore neither to use either again. During the late twentieth century, we reversed course on numerous technologies that had proven useful and profitable but were shown to be harmful: leaded gasoline, DDT and other pesticides, and industrial chemicals like PCBs and CFCs.

When scientists announced the cloning of Dolly the Sheep in 1997, governments around the globe displayed a remarkable will to say “No” to this technology before Pandora’s Box was fully opened. Will we have the same will to say “No” to possible dystopian futures of genetic screening and AI surveillance?

“If You Don’t Like it, Don’t Buy it”

After being told we can’t stop new technology, we’re then assured that we can, at least individually. You don’t want a smartphone? Don’t get one. You find social media degrading? Delete your account. You think AI is from the devil? Fine, don’t use it. In his much-publicized announcement that ChatGPT would begin offering erotica for verified adults (which the company later walked back), Sam Altman climbed on his Millian soapbox to declare, “‘treat our adult users like adults’ is how we talk about this internally, extending freedom as far as possible without causing harm or undermining anyone else’s freedom.”

The reflex here is a deep-seated one for Americans, and although conservatives have opposed its application in specific moral domains like abortion, they have otherwise happily imbibed an ideal of freedom as the maximization of individual choices. Technology is routinely sold as just another multiplier of the option set. Thus in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Marc Andreessen celebrated “the freedom to create our lives that flows from the material abundance created by our use of machines.” He added that technology “is liberatory. . . . Expanding what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive.”

While conservatives often emphasize that children are not ready for this kind of freedom, they nonetheless insist that parents have as much freedom as they could ever want in the digital age. Policy measures like age verification or the Kids Online Safety Act’s duty of care are unnecessary and counterproductive, according to many advocates, because parents should have the right to decide what their kids have access to.

A Washington Examiner op-ed bashing the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act declares that “the solution isn’t government intrusion: It’s parental involvement,” and that “if Congress wants to empower parents and protect kids, it should do what it does best: nothing.” The Cato Institute responded to Senator Josh Hawley’s proposed age gate for AI companions with the headline, “GUARD Act Puts Policymakers, Not Parents, in Charge of Kids’ AI Use.”

These hot takes miss a deeper problem: network effects have stripped families of any meaningful ability to opt out.

Consider: however many choices we now have in the App Store, what we have lost in the digital age is the freedom not to be online. The smartphone debuted as just another consumer choice in 2007, but by a decade later it had become a near necessity. Everything moved online as the internet moved into our pockets. Within another five years, the smartphone had become a virtual “social passport,” necessary to navigate large swaths of even the offline world. If you wanted to park your car, you needed the Parkmobile app; if you chose instead to call a taxi, you had little choice beyond app-based Uber and Lyft. When you got to the stadium, you could no longer present physical tickets for admission, and you had to scan a QR code to order nachos.

“But isn’t this how all technology develops?” some will object. True, if you still wanted to get around by horseback and light your home by gaslight, that would’ve been pretty tough to manage by the 1940s. That said, the compulsive force of new technology becomes more troubling as the cost of tradeoffs mounts. Sometimes competitive markets can generate their own feedback loop dynamics, driving individuals to sign up for products or services the vast majority would prefer to avoid, because it is even worse to be left behind.

We might call this the “Gattaca effect,” after the dystopian 1997 cult classic film starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. Set in a chillingly plausible not-too-distant future, the film imagines a world of pervasive eugenics in which IVF combined with genetic screening allows parents to choose only the very best embryos to implant and bear. Children conceived outside of this process, known as “God-children,” are increasingly excluded from nearly all socially desirable roles and advanced professions.

What begins as a boutique consumer choice soon becomes virtually obligatory. We can see the Gattaca effect today at work in the attention economy for teenage girls, who feel they have almost no choice but to invest hours a day in curating their self-presentation on social media. We can see it at work in the white-collar economy where workers trip over one another to adopt AI agents in order to remain employable. Meanwhile, the companies offering these “indispensable” products have grown into market-cornering behemoths with annual revenues greater than those of most sovereign nations, rendering us passive peasants in their feudal domains.

This is the fundamental challenge posed by our new politics of technology: in the name of greater power, efficiency, and progress, we have traded away meaningful freedom.

“You can just do things” became a conservative mantra in the early days of President Trump’s second term. Perhaps it is time to popularize its corollary: “you can just refuse to do things.” The truly conservative posture should be one of reclaiming agency. We must insist that workers, families, and citizens remain in the drivers’ seat of technological adoption rather than feebly shouting objections from the back. The much-mocked Luddites, it turns out, did not rebel against technological change; they rebelled against being deprived of any say in the matter.

From this standpoint, “Luddite” should be a badge of pride, not shame, for today’s populist conservatives.