Source: Politics<\/p>\n
MIAMI \u2014 The scene at Ampersand Studios, an art gallery in the middle of an otherwise largely industrial area of Miami last week, was a hodgepodge of tech-world thinkers, investors and sponsors gathered for a conference that felt, hip locale aside, like a pretty typical networking event.<\/p>\n
What they were actually up to was hashing out something that looked awfully close to a new kind of American politics.<\/p>\n
For a segment of the tech elite, the industry isn\u2019t just about building billion-dollar companies and cool devices anymore: it\u2019s about rethinking society<\/a> itself, and nudging it toward a distinct new center-right-leaning political ideology.<\/p>\n The \u201cReboot\u201d conference, hosted by the free-market, tech-focused think tank the Lincoln Network, included panels with names like \u201cThe Geopolitics of Industrial Policy: All Carrot, No Stick?\u201d and \u201cThe Future of America: Florida vs. California.\u201d<\/p>\n Want more coverage of the surprising new ways tech is steering politics, and vice-versa? Get Digital Future Daily<\/a> in your inbox.<\/p>\n Over the course of the day, a big picture emerged with potentially big political implications: A nascent, venture capital-fueled ideology that embraces the Reagan era\u2019s optimistic nationalism while jettisoning its allergy to the power of the state.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t long ago that a tech-themed conference like Reboot would have (mostly) steered clear of politics. But Thursday\u2019s slate of conversations coincides with a wave of VC-world players like Balaji Srinivasan<\/a> and Marc Andreessen<\/a> (not to mention a certain rocket mogul<\/a>) getting decidedly more interested in shaping civic life, and even political campaigns that touch those themes like those of tech-world alums J.D. Vance and Blake Masters.<\/p>\n The movement has attracted some former Trump-world thinkers such as Julius Krein, founder of the policy journal American Affairs, who swore off Trump<\/a> in 2017 and now advocates for rebuilding America through a more muscular, nationalistic approach to tech and industry.<\/p>\n \u201cYounger people working in tech or in VC have become increasingly focused on \u2018getting out of software\u2019… [there\u2019s] an increasing interest in hardware, robotics, hard tech, with a growing interest in \u2018strategic sectors\u2019 and rebuilding the United States, and defense-related technology in competition with China,\u201d said Krein, who sat on the conference\u2019s industrial geopolitics panel.<\/p>\n The pivot he\u2019s talking about \u2014 from software to hardware, and away from globalization \u2014 implies a dissatisfaction with the current-day tech giants whose reign has brought the world decidedly virtual, trans-national products like Facebook or Tinder.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s one pervasive mythos that most animates this new politics, it might be that of the \u201cbuilder,\u201d constantly invoked in Web3, crypto and VC circles \u2014 the iconoclastic technologist looking to break free from the stultifying big firms and create a new, world-changing product. Miami\u2019s Bitcoin-loving Mayor Francis Suarez, who not-so-subtly hinted<\/a> at his presidential ambitions at the conference, all but begged them to flock to his city from the stage last week.<\/p>\n This new iteration of \u201cbuilder\u201d politics is a twist on the solitary heroes of Ayn Rand, the libertarian author many of these thinkers still venerate<\/a>. This generation purports to look beyond individual achievement and take responsibility for shaping American civic life amid the country\u2019s de-industrialization and still-unresolved consequences, as well as its heated competition with China.<\/p>\n \u201cThe old way of thinking about open markets and free markets \u2014 it\u2019s not to say that those things don’t matter, but they’re taking more of a backseat to more national concerns,\u201d the tech researcher Will Rinehart told me. \u201cIt feels like there’s this renewed optimism, but there’s also a more realistic understanding of the threats that exist.\u201d<\/p>\n That mindset is neatly encapsulated by a high-profile recent project from the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, the audaciously titled \u201cAmerican Dynamism<\/a>\u201d project, aimed at building \u201ccompanies that transcend verticals and business models in their quest to solve important national problems\u201d and which \u201cview government as a customer, competitor or key stakeholder.\u201d<\/p>\n But for all the excitement among these young, deeply ambitious \u201cbuilders,\u201d there are still a few slightly messy impediments to construction. For those in politics, there are simple political realities, such as what the Republican base is actually looking for in a candidate. That tension is evident in the Senate campaign of Masters, the Peter Thiel protege who would otherwise theoretically fit right into this paradigm \u2014 but is instead running a caustic, doom-and-gloom campaign aimed at currying favor with pessimistic Trump voters.<\/p>\n And, of course, there\u2019s one of the oldest challenges in business, politics or pretty much any other arena in life: The old guard who \u201cbuilt\u201d the world as it is today aren\u2019t planning on going away, and it might be even more unlikely to expect them to change their attitudes any sooner.<\/p>\n In this case, the \u201cold guard\u201d means people with money \u2014 and the bulk of the party that most of these thinkers see as their political home.<\/p>\n \u201cYounger intellectual activists are working for positive new agendas wherever they can find them, but the donors aren’t really that excited about it,\u201d Krein said. \u201cThere’s also all the confusion around the Trump phenomenon, and a lot of people who think the biggest issue is fighting the 2020 election.\u201d<\/p>\n When it comes to the tech world itself, Krein was equally wary, positing that for the \u201cbuilder\u201d agenda to really take off it might require something truly paradigm-breaking for the libertarian-leaning tech world \u2014 active help from the federal government.<\/p>\n \u201cThe problem that I don’t know if the VC world has really thought through is that with hard tech, in general it\u2019s just never going to have the returns on paper that software does,\u201d Krein said, discussing his cautious optimism about the \u201cAmerican Dynamism\u201d project. \u201cThat’s where I think you increasingly will need to have, and one can debate the specifics, but some kind of government policy support for these types of investments.\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe the most telling indicator of how uneasily the \u201cbuilder\u201d agenda fits into the political status quo is the almost total lack of partisan rancor on display at the conference, even amid discussions of hot-button issues like China, crypto policy or state and local governance. Despite the right-leaning tenor of the event, many panelists offered cautious praise for the Biden administration\u2019s tough-on-China policies, or the Democratic Congress\u2019 big investment in research in its \u201cChips plus Science<\/a>\u201d bill.<\/p>\n That could be a blessing and a curse: The \u201cbuilder\u201d agenda might have broad support, but a limited audience among the sharp-elbowed power players who set activist and party agendas \u2014 not to mention actual voters.<\/p>\n \u201c[Reboot\u2019s] overall approach is to identify things where partisanship is less of an issue, which are popular in some section of the left but also in some section of the more populist right,\u201d said Neil Chilson<\/a>, a former chief technologist for the FTC and current senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute. \u201cHow well does that map onto a political environment where sometimes it’s better politics to curse out your opponent than to work with them to get something done?\u201d<\/p>\n