Thank you so much, Tony, for that kind introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here today at the American Enterprise Institute to speak about the opportunity in front of us to rethink technology’s relationship to the family. When I say relationship, many of us think of the screens we hold in our hands or the amount of time our toddlers spend watching Cocomelon. And those are all important debates. Today, I want to discuss a deeper, philosophical alliance between technology and the institution of the family.
We recently watched the Vice President head to France where he discussed the importance of American dominance in artificial intelligence, and I’ve been struck by the new administration’s focus on innovation. Those of us listening to the inaugural address just last month couldn’t help but notice references to colonizing Mars, the split atom, holding all the world’s knowledge in the palm of our hands. It’s refreshing to see technology celebrated as the engine of American economic growth after years of Washington denigrating it. And we’re now finally seeing enthusiasm for how government can leverage our technology sector to promote American Dynamism by unleashing limitless energy, deterring conflict, and manufacturing abundance of all kinds.
And indeed, investing in American Dynamism my day job, my life’s work and my calling. But today, I want to talk about my other job. My most consequential job according to the Ordo Amoris, a job that is deeply tied to building American Dynamism in the most concrete way. And that is my job and my duty as Mother. For all the talk of Technology and the State, there should be much more talk about that other institution that is perpetually at war with it.
The Institution of the Family.
All of history is a war between the family and the state. Any college student studying Plato’s Republic learns quickly of this conflict, though it’s often only discussed in political theory classes. But in practice, it’s clear these two institutions are often incompatible in their quest for control over how we live, what we believe, what we worship, our history and our daily reality. If this sounds a bit hyperbolic because the family now seeminglysits comfortably inside the state, that is because the state has been winning this civilizational war against the family for decades.
The long 20th Century should teach us this. It is a story of American growth and excellence, but it can also be accurately told as a story of the weakening of the family. It begins with thefundamental transformation of industry, where mothers and fathers are pulled from the home to work in factories, then companies. It proceeds with two atrocious world wars in Europe, where millions of families are decimated. The strength of states is greatly intertwined with war—states grow stronger in war while families are literally destroyed. It’s no coincidence that as we look to our European neighbors, we now see a continent subsumed with regulation, censorship, green authoritarianism, and a birth rate that predicts their demise.
A very strong state, yes. But very anemic families.
We then move to Communism and the Cold War, where we see Communism’s brutal attack on the family for both political and psychological reasons. The one-child-policy that ravaged China with forced infanticide wasn’t just to remind mothers that the good of society matters more than the good of her home. It was a reminder that the family is not, nor will ever be powerful enough to compete with the Chinese Communist Party.
Authoritarian regimes always attack the family first. Christian imagery was removed in the Soviet Union for this reason: the core institution at the heart of the Christian Church is the Holy Family. Our myths and stories in the Judeo Christian and Western tradition are ones of tribes, families, lineage, and the authority that comes from them. It’s no surprise then that the Christian story begins with conception and childbirth. And the Holy Family’s lineage ends with a mother watching in horror as the state tortures and murders her son.
I’ll say it again— all of history is a war between the family and the state. The greatest enemy of the family is authoritarianism.
Now, what does all this have to do with Technology?
The adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” always rings very true in Washington. Coalitions are built by identifying the most serious threat and finding common ground from that. Strange bedfellows are sometimes necessary, and to paraphrase Peter Thiel, what does a general, a businessman and a priest have in common except for their shared hatred of communism? For a good half century, the conservative movement in America was a tenuous alliance of business owners, social conservatives and hawks who came together to defeat the 20th Century threat of authoritarianism.
But we are now faced with a new authoritarianism. The Tech Industry, once able to peacefully bury its head in the golden sands of California, has woken up to its most important choice: to ally with the powers of the State— as Big Tech did during theCovid era, becoming the useful pawn of an authoritarian censorship apparatus — or to rapidly course correct and ally itself with decentralized authority.
There is no greater decentralized authority than that of the family, and the philosophy of the early Internet is at its nature, too, one of decentralization. It prizes creative destruction– birth and death and birth again– of ideas and companies, and the freedom that comes from ensuring no central authority can ever control, stifle, or break the long arc of creation and innovation. This is fundamentally the philosophy of technology, and one we must ensure is embedded in our most consequential technologies going forward.
In recent decades, tech has moved away from its natural inclination to support decentralization and open-sourceauthority. Marc Andreessen has called this movement to squashopensource innovation in AI a greater threat to freedom thananything tech has ever experienced, including the most recent social media censorship wars. Indeed, the open-source debate is not merely a heady debate of how the nerds in San Francisco will architect artificial intelligence. It is a political debate of control, and one the family is very familiar with. The same calls for “safety” and “harm avoidance” that regulators use to attack innovators have been used to decimate family rights in education, healthcare and religious freedom for decades, and we should recognize these rhetorical attacks for what they are:disingenuous power grabs.
Much is now being written of the nascent alliance between the so-called Tech Right and this administration, and how weird it is for the transhumanists of Silicon Valley to find common ground with a MAHA mother in Missouri. Except that they have identified a common evil: they know the gravest threat to the flourishing of their business, their industry, their family’s health,and their freedom is a censorious and authoritarian state.
We are now living through a generational political shift, whereby an industry of builders can choose to ally with the most organic, nurturing, and future-focused institution that nature has ever created, the family. And I believe it's in the best interest of both tech and the family to do so.
Nov 8, 2024 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
My HOA has miscalculated.
They don’t know how prepared I am for war.
Headed to Home Depot right now to buy a bigger Santa.
May 24, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
One of my more controversial beliefs on raising children is that you probably want to raise theater kids. Theater, debate, speech, song, something that requires performance in front of a room full of people, alone with a spotlight, where if you fail you fail alone.
Learning the embarrassment of forgetting a line or your notes as a kid— and moving on from it —is a valuable skill that’s harder to learn and gets more painful with age. Sports won’t teach a kid this.
Fwiw, you can often tell the founders, politicians and leaders that did debate and theater growing up from the ones who didn’t. There’s a reason for that. Comfort in front of an audience comes from practice.
It’s my son’s first birthday so in true millennial fashion I’m going to talk about me:
A few days after my son was born, I started writing “Can Zoom Save the American Family?” It turned out to be the roadmap for our lives, where we’re working on Zoom, socializing in the metaverse and physically living near family in a corporate family model. boyle.substack.com/p/can-zoom-sav…
Dec 3, 2021 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
To those at Reagan National Defense Forum #RNDF, if there’s one BLUF you take away from the weekend, you should know: Time is running out with Silicon Valley.
After five years of DOD saying “we want to work with the best startups”, we have, at most, two years before founders walk away and private capital dries up. And many, many startups will go out of business waiting for DOD to award real production contracts.
