Last week, Joe Biden launched a broadside against the tech industry, accusing the denizens of Silicon Valley of being digital robber barons and constituting a new tech-industrial complex, one that recklessly misuses its monopoly over information. Many, concerned over the dangerous potential of new technologies like AI, and the burgeoning power of digital media, will have found themselves agreeing with the outgoing President.

But what was wrong with this picture? From the perspective of Silicon Valley, there is nothing but exhausted frustration with the decades of attacks on their industry. Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and now one of the leading investors in the Valley, recently explained why he, and many others in the tech industry, are openly or covertly swinging behind Trump and the incoming Republican administration.

According to Andreessen, tech entrepreneurs are not hard-headed capitalists, but do-gooders — optimistic young men with liberal politics and utopian dreams for their industries as engines of liberation. For years, they acceded to progressive demands that they regulate “hate speech” and “misinformation” on their platforms, an enthusiasm that was so extreme that it drove much of the American Right into a stance of active hostility towards the tech industry and social media platforms. With Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Zuckerberg’s pivot back to free speech on Facebook, and serious tech money flowing into Republican coffers, there has been a tectonic shift.

The median Tech entrepreneur is an idealist more than he is a scheming robber baron

As far as those like Andreessen are concerned, their industry did everything they could to be the good corporate citizens that the American Left demanded, from supporting Green policies, to DEI initiatives, to cracking down on hate speech, not to mention stuffing Democratic electoral war chests full of gold. All they got in return were regular congressional humiliations, and a regulatory crackdown on emerging markets in cryptocurrency and AI. Now, they are putting their weight behind the Republican party instead, reflecting a nationwide shift of independents and libertarians away from progressive politics.

Under the surface of moralistic attacks on corporate excess, we really see a covert struggle for dominance over information. Silicon Valley just wants a relatively free hand to, as they see it, innovate, improve the world, and make money doing it, whilst politicians of Left and Right attempt to pressure these powerful digital empires into manipulating data in their own interests.

Is this too rosy a picture of the tech barons however? Yes and no. We should believe Andreessen when he says the median Tech entrepreneur is an idealist more than he is a scheming robber baron. But we should perhaps mistrust idealists, and what they will do in the name of their ideals. The synthesis of a materialistic, instrumental worldview with a universalistic, humanitarian one is potentially very dangerous. Never mind the horrors of Communism, anyone needing a demonstration of this point can look to far more recent, and for America’s tech industry, highly relevant examples: the War on Terror and the rise of China.

Two of the greatest strategic and moral errors of the 21st century were both carried out with the direct collusion of Silicon Valley, and in no small part driven by its idealism. In the first place, deindustrialisation and the off-shoring of American manufacturing to China were enthusiastically backed by an industry that believed the future was the “knowledge economy”, and that capitalism and the internet would inevitably democratise China. The same globalising optimism saw the might of America’s digital capitalism thrown behind efforts to surveil not just America’s enemies, but its own citizens, on a scale never before seen. If a utopian democratic Global Village was just over the horizon, then the War on Terror was the final war for civilisation, the last battle that would clear away the deadly saboteurs and terrorists who resisted the American world order. 

We don’t have to spend long rehearsing the fatal consequences of uniting college campus optimism with a global military-industrial complex. The genocides and civil wars in the Middle East speak for themselves. The thousands tortured, bombed and assassinated. The millions of citizens spied upon. The devastation of ex-industrial communities. The migrant crisis. The emergence of China as an aggressive, anti-democratic counterweight to NATO.

There are no moustache-twirling villains here, but rather capable, intelligent, but often dangerously naive men and women who place excessive faith in both technology and human nature. America’s greatest strengths — its optimism, innovation and appetite for risk — are also its most terrible weaknesses. These historic virtues become vices when unharnessed from the traditional moral disciplines and restraints of its republican and Christian culture. 

Sadly, the liberal establishment is ill-placed to offer that needed counterweight. Joe Biden poses as such a figure, but even if he were not a corrupt machine politician, he is a very old man, his mental faculties failing, and his understanding of emerging technologies highly limited. The centre left has become obsessed with the chimera of “misinformation”, and is superstitiously convinced that it is driven by shadowy manipulators. “Bots”, “algorithms” and “AI” are all invoked as talismans; raised up as fearful spectres by people who have no actual comprehension of what they’re talking about. 

In a democratic, egalitarian age, the evils of digital technology must be couched as authoritarian, manipulative and top-down. A plot against “the people”. The reality is far more uncomfortable — behind both the terrific elite errors of Silicon Valley and Washington DC stood a third villain, one we are incapable of seeing: the people. We are so familiar with the idea of the virtuous masses oppressed by wicked elites, it’s hard to consider the alternative. Paradoxically, it’s a narrative encouraged by elites themselves, generally against rival elites — politicians point the finger at Silicon Valley, whilst tech bosses point the finger at politicians, and promise to liberate the masses from censorship through technology. 

Yet the mass of people in the West have a portion of the blame in the follies and failures of the past decades. It is ordinary people who expect to be perpetually enriched, who lobby for low taxes, but don’t want public services cut. It is you and I whose appetites drive consumerism and commerce. It is the man on the street who pumps poison into the internet. It was ordinary citizens who lobbied for safety over liberty in the face of terrorism and disease.If you are wondering who to blame for misinformation, climate change, consumerism, loneliness, foreign wars, dying industries and open borders, you need only look to the man or the woman next to you.

The great promise of Silicon Valley — that it would remove restraints on the individual — is its most terrible curse. For every person enriched by the free flow of information, a dozen are consumed by their appetites. Pornography is freely available at the click of a button. Fast food can be delivered to your door without the need to get up from your chair. Every prejudice, lie and fetish can not only be freely expressed, but it will find a reinforcing community of expression. Frustrated young men are channeled into an isolating, nihilistic extremism, anxious young women give themselves mental illnesses, sexuality is distorted into a demeaning, masturbatory compulsion, and suspicion towards institutions is transmuted into delusion.

That human flourishing occurs within a narrow zone of stability, in which freedom and duty, hierarchy and democracy, individual and collective, is a basic civilisational insight that has been fully forgotten in the heady rush of digital disruption. Those in a position to govern and shape technological transformation have either refused to do so, or all too often directed it to bad ends when they do. The focus on removing elites, whether in the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley, or the self-serving trust-busting of Biden, misses the point. What is needed is not the removal of elites, but virtuous elites, who act to empower and educate people, rather than profiting from feeding our most addictive impulses. Or to say it more simply: doomscrolling is not a form of liberation. 

Could things be turned around? There is reason to hope it could. Silicon Valley’s alliance with the Trump administration could mean, as many fear, the imposition of their agenda on the new government. But it may well not be a case of one way traffic. Vice President JD Vance was once part of the tech industry, but his politics has increasingly developed towards something far more Catholic and communitarian. As the heir apparent, and with his background in tech, he is a natural interlocutor and mediator between big tech and the populist Right.

Whilst digital technology can be a social solvent, disrupting and destroying relationships and institutions, it can also be deployed to build trust and accountability, and create virtuous communities online and in person. Much of the early promise of the internet reflected a period in which users controlled their own content, rather than being fed a seductive drip-feed of ever-shifting spectacle. The way websites like Wikipedia work, or systems like Community Notes, for all their flaws, are largely a success story based on spaces in which virtue is rewarded and bad behaviour disincentivised by design.

Seeing people-power more sceptically isn’t about throwing out democracy — it’s about genuinely empowering people by giving them responsibilities along with freedoms. China shows how an authoritarian society is in many ways the mirror image of a libertarian one — a digital capitalism in which the population is free to pursue its appetites but denied the responsibilities of self-governance.

Rather than ill-informed, partisan attempts to control information, or libertarian unleashing of information, we need a kind of digital republicanism, in which there are self-governing digital citizens. An online polis rather than a pure virtual marketplace. The tech barons of today must be forced, like the feudal robber barons of old, to accept noblesse oblige, and become good stewards of their digital domains.