Tech-world insiders are getting more involved than ever in national politics this year — and it’s not just Elon Musk. But as the presidential election looms, there’s a major disconnect between American politics and Big Tech when it comes to their visions of America’s future. On the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris talks about the risk of “more chaos,” incipient fascism and a quick, steep slide back to the gender politics of the 1950s. Meanwhile, the retrograde cultural assumptions of former President Donald Trump’s platform were on full display at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. On both sides, fear and nostalgia — whether for the depolarized nation of Bush-Dukakis ‘88, or an America before civil rights law — are the defining themes of this election. Meanwhile in Silicon Valley, AI entrepreneurs promise a world where there’s little to be afraid of (except maybe overregulation) — and nostalgia is nothing but a brake on a future we should be ushering in as quickly as possible. For all the skepticism Americans may feel about where technology is going, the industry’s vision is as utopian as ever: Its products “elevate humanity” by boosting productivity (and leisure) to unimaginable heights; robots will save workers from backbreaking labor; and an off-world future for humanity is just around the corner. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son recently predicted “artificial superintelligence” 10,000 times more intelligent than humans as soon as 2035, meaning it as more of an optimistic promise than a warning. The mismatch between the mindset driving tech — the engine of America’s prestige and global economic dominance — and the mindset driving American politics has never been sharper, and it’s upending technopolitics on the campaign trail. Will Rinehart, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Dispatch’s Techne newsletter, described this campaign season as a “wasted opportunity” for both parties to surf the utopian wave currently swelling in Silicon Valley. “It’s not all that surprising that backward-looking tropes catch on, because people across the world largely believe in the illusion of moral decline and negative news tends to disperse faster on social media,” Rinehart told DFD. “On the other hand there have been a lot of successes in the tech world recently, like Nvidia, OpenAI and SpaceX. So although our politics is dominated by nostalgia the commanding heights of U.S. capitalism are dominated by future-focused tech companies,” he said. Harris and Trump have each tried to square this circle in their own way, to occasionally confusing effect. Trump recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and bashed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act as an undeserved gift to “rich companies,” despite its massive investment in American industry, otherwise one of his main campaign priorities. In the same interview he pledged to protect Big Tech from European Union and United Kingdom regulations, saying that “all of those companies will be set free if you have the right president.” The Harris campaign’s stance of strategic ambiguity on tech is well-documented, most prominently in her ambivalent treatment of antitrust crusader Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. Harris has also aggressively courted Big Tech donors as part of her historic fundraising efforts, and made overtures to the crypto industry as part of her pitch to Black voters and other moderate Democrats. But in the crush of a presidential campaign centered around life-and-death issues like reproductive rights, asylum policy and the cost of living, both candidates have left the futurist mantle on the ground in favor of warning about the perceived consequences of their opponent’s victory. In that spirit, America’s biggest tech firms are largely hedging their bets. Elon Musk might be Trump’s biggest and most prominent booster (no rocket-related pun intended), but The Washington Post reported Monday that anonymous Trump advisers have fielded calls from a pack of tech CEOs eager to get in the campaign’s good graces should the former president win another term in the White House — including Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Andy Jassy of Amazon and Sundar Pichai of Google. Tech CEOs (not to mention their über-progressive, well-educated employees) are traditionally the constituency of Democrats like Harris, not least given her roots in the Bay Area. But given the coin-flip nature of this election, tech and politics seem to be taking the same wary approach toward the future despite their respective optimistic and fearful tones: We’ll figure it out when we get there.
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