Rewriting the Californian Ideology

In January of this year, JD Vance, a former venture capitalist, took the oath of office as vice president of the United States. His, and President Donald Trump’s, inauguration marked a critical inflection point in the relationship between tech and public institutions.

Tech has been building up to this moment for a while. In recent years, its members took an active role in shaping local government through advocacy efforts like yimby California and GrowSF, which scored decisive wins in San Francisco’s city elections for the Board of Supervisors, as well as the School Board and City College Board. There are now tech-minded think tanks in Washington, D.C., such as the Institute for Progress (IFP) and Foundation for American Innovation, which advocate for policies that encourage us to build and move quickly. And President Trump announced, shortly after his election, that he would create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk at the helm, tasked with improving “governmental efficiency and productivity.”

The last of these initiatives has become a source of endless fascination—and consternation—in the media, as Musk seems intent on speedrunning his way through downsizing the United States government. DOGE’s members have set their sights on auditing and overhauling activities at key federal agencies, ranging from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to the Social Security Administration (SSA). Others may not approve of what tech wants to do with the government, but it is increasingly difficult to find evidence for the claim that tech scorns engagement with public institutions altogether.

If Silicon Valley is poised to make its mark on our institutions in the next four years and beyond, it’s worth revisiting our prevailing assumptions about what drives its behavior. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called tech’s core values the “Californian Ideology” in a landmark 1992 essay of the same name. They described it as “a fatalistic vision of the natural and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market,” whose politics appeared to be “impeccably libertarian.”¹ More than thirty years later, echoes of these phrases still reverberate through cultural commentary on Silicon Valley, like a halo of hornets it can’t shake off. But for those of us who identify with tech, this ideology feels increasingly out of step with the world we live in. Tech is not the libertarian bastion it was once imagined to be, if it ever was.

Liberty Versus Progress

Back in the 1990s, Barbrook and Cameron’s “Californian Ideology” thesis resonated because it explained the peculiar fusion of countercultural libertarianism and capitalist ambition driving Silicon Valley’s rising prominence after the Cold War. For decades, American political and economic thought had been shaped by the conflict with the Soviet Union. Following the collapse of communism, this ideological tension vaporized, leaving the United States with an unprecedented sense of self-assurance. Against a backdrop of deregulation, entrepreneurialism, and a growing belief that markets could solve problems better than governments, Silicon Valley became the ideal emerging industry upon which happy capitalists, glowing from their recent triumph, could pin their dreams.

Barbrook and Cameron offered up tech as an enticing cocktail of pro‑business and libertarian values that was also culturally progressive. Their framing resonated with a generation that had grown up skeptical of authority, thanks to political controversies like the Vietnam War and Watergate, but which was also enamored with the seemingly limitless potential of the internet. Glimpsed through the veil of the Californian Ideology, Silicon Valley was seen as transcending politics, while simul­taneously shaping the future of society through the companies it created. Barbrook and Cameron’s legacy is still evident in modern critiques of tech exceptionalism, where journalists and scholars often assume that tech’s behavior can be explained by either a capitalist’s love of making money or an engineer’s myopic obsession with technology. Neither explanation adequately captures what tech is really about.

The early Californian Ideology reflected the post-Cold War era in which it was conceived, rather than the contours of tech culture itself. Silicon Valley has never really been libertarian in the purest sense of the word. In a study of political attitudes published by former journalist Greg Ferenstein and Stanford researchers David Broockman and Neil Malhotra in 2017, at the tail end of tech’s “disruption” era, tech elites at the time were found to be far less likely than either the Republican or Democratic-leaning general public to say they wanted a hands-off government (24 percent of tech elites agreed with this statement, compared to 44 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans).²

The study suggested that tech does strongly believe that citizens can be trusted to solve their own problems, but not for the sake of liberty alone. Rather, they are preoccupied with unlocking individual ambition for the collective good. In a 2016 interview with American Enterprise Institute fellow James Pethokoukis, Ferenstein remarked that, “Silicon Valley’s ideology is pro-market, but it is not pro-liberty . . . they are highly, highly, collectivist.”³

Tech believes that every individual can uniquely contribute to the betterment of society. They do not want to remove regulation for the sake of it, the way libertarians do. Compare, for example, the stated vision of libertarian think tank Cato Institute (“a free and open society in which liberty allows every individual to pursue a life of prosperity and meaning in peace”) to that of tech-minded think tank IFP (“accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress”). While the latter organization may advocate for removing or reforming regulation, it is always in service of accelerating social progress, rather than preserving personal freedom. IFP, like others in tech, wants a government that can do things. These are collectivist values, not individualistic ones.

Nor does the oft-repeated narrative that tech is currently undergoing a “rightward shift” square with history. Tech may have historically voted overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party, but there was always a simmering tension between these two groups. From the same 2017 study by Broockman et al., the tech founders and leaders that they interviewed did have largely liberal political views, especially on social issues, that reflected the Democrats’ values. They supported gay marriage and immigration, and they even favored higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, and increased spending on federal programs for the poor.

On the other hand, they also tended to oppose a lot of government regulations. They were skeptical of government-regulated consumer protections, as well as worker protections like labor unions. Of those surveyed, 82 percent thought that it was too hard to fire workers, and they wanted the government to make it easier to do so, which aligned much more squarely with the researchers’ Republican political sample.

Broockman and his colleagues concluded that tech represented what they called “an entirely new political category.” No other political sample they analyzed favored both greater wealth distribution and less regulation. As New York Times journalist Farhad Manjoo commented at the time, “It is genuinely difficult to think of any politician who aligns with that mix,” perhaps inadvertently foreshadowing the political backlash against tech that soon followed.⁴

The story, then, is not necessarily that tech was previously aligned with the Democratic Party, and that some pockets of tech are now shifting their support elsewhere. An alternative explanation is that tech has never been fully aligned with the Democratic Party’s political agenda—not even under the Obama administration, which had strongly supported tech.

At the time, Broockman and his colleagues speculated that tech’s growing wealth might start to tip the Democratic Party’s agenda toward its views. But this isn’t what happened at all, and the subsequent tech backlash can be at least partly explained by these irreconcilable differences between the values of a rising tech elite and those of the Democratic Party.

Tech’s critics aren’t entirely imagining things. Tech was, in prior eras, more narrowly focused on business as the primary means of enacting social change. Start-ups were how they believed they would fix the world. But those who aren’t close to tech don’t seem to have noticed how things have changed.

Public criticism, followed by the threat of regulation, often catalyzes a deeper search for meaning among entrepreneurial elites. This was the case during the Gilded Age. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie published “Wealth” (1889) against a backdrop of growing public criticism over labor conditions and wealth inequality that erupted into the Homestead Strike, an infamous multiday worker protest. His essay formed the foundation of modern American philanthropy, in which he exhorted his wealthy industrialist peers to take their social responsibilities seriously. Ida Tarbell’s critical coverage of Standard Oil precipitated the 1911 antitrust Supreme Court case Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, which broke up John D. Rockefeller’s corporate activities—but was followed, just a couple years later, by the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Tech is no different. Its transition from a business industry with a homogeneous worldview, to a burgeoning—albeit fragmented—social movement began midway through the 2010s, as public sentiment began to turn against it. The public and regulatory backlash that tech experienced, from the 2013 Google bus protests, to its perceived influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, to the regulatory scrutiny triggered by Meta’s 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, forced an entire generation of tech to ask itself, for the first time, why they deserved to be there.

While current media narratives about tech fail to capture the full picture, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down what tech does stand for today. Tech leaders don’t always seem to agree with each other’s public positions, and sometimes, as in the case of artificial intelligence, find themselves openly in conflict with each other. Tech’s political and social influence is growing, but toward what ends?

Tech’s Hundred Schools of Thought

On the eve of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, my collaborator Tim Hwang and I convened a small group of people who work in tech media, policy, and philanthropy to explore these questions. The topic was the “Silicon Valley Ideology”: where it came from, what it means today, and where it’s going. In the room were philanthropic funders, operators, writers, and academics who work in and around tech, representing a diverse set of perspectives.

We started with an observation: after the backlash in the mid-to-late 2010s, “tech” as a cohesive social bloc cracked apart into a rich assortment of subcultures. Now, we see movements like: progress, which focuses on the economic and technological drivers of social progress, and began with an editorial piece written by Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison and economist Tyler Cowen; abundance, a cousin movement that tends to emphasize social well-being and distributive outcomes, driven by the likes of media figures Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein; the New Right, who prioritize family, local communities, and strong leadership, and whose views influenced Vice President Vance; American dynamism, which emphasizes reviving public infrastructure and institu­tions that strengthen American values, spurred by a growing community of aerospace, defense, and manufacturing companies in Los Angeles and Orange County; effective altruism, a carryover from the early 2010s, rooted in rationalist and utilitarian approaches to giving; tech ethicists, who fight algorithmic bias and misinformation; and the network state, incubated by entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, who advocates for building new, digital-first nation-states.

Our discussion of these movements, and the commonalities and differences between them, turned out to be one of our most spirited. While there was widespread consensus that such movements are driving the formation and expression of tech values today, we diverged on how to classify them taxonomically. Several dimensions emerged from our conversations:

(1) Beliefs about human nature. Borrowing from economist Thomas Sowell’s terminology, some movements—like the tech ethicists—seem to believe that people are fundamentally flawed and can’t be trusted, so we need systems and processes to keep them in place (constrained vision), while others—like American dynamism and progress—advocate for a small set of visionaries to lead our institutions (with unconstrained vision).

(2) Preserving versus innovating. Some movements, like the New Right, seem to have an idealized vision of the world that they are trying to preserve, while others—like progress and abundance—believe that constant innovation is a sign of a healthy society.

(3) Relationship to the state. Effective altruists and tech ethicists tend to be more collaborative with the government and believe it is fundamentally working, while others—like the New Right and abundance—are more focused on institutional reform.

Each of these movements lays at least some claim to tech culture, yet they often deviate sharply in their specific visions for the future. Their members also draw from a wide range of skills and disciplines, which suggests that the definition of tech itself is expanding.

Gone are the days when working in tech simply referred to slinging code for an overfunded software-as-a-service company. “Tech” no longer singularly equates to being a software engineer or even working with technology at all. Today, tech counts academics, policymakers, journalists, and scientists among its ranks. Even those who work in private industry might call themselves “tech” while building rockets, decoding our genes, or building clean energy solutions.

Tech’s recent forays into government, too, feel strikingly different from Obama-era initiatives such as the United States Digital Service (USDS) or Code for America, when it was believed that tech’s greatest contribution was building software for government employees. Instead, tech leaders who are granted a seat at the political table today are recruited not for their coding skills, but for their perspective on the world: embracing individual talent and potential; enthusiasm for shaping the future; demanding results and accountability; thinking from first principles, etc. The old image of tech as the “leave me alone” libertarian hacker-businessperson feels out of step with the “roll up our sleeves” version we’re seeing today.

It was once thought that tech’s impact would be limited to the world of software. Barbrook and Cameron explained that West Coast technologists wanted “information technologies to be used to create a new ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace.” Venture capital, which dominates tech funding but is a relatively niche slice of the finance sector as a whole, was well-suited for supporting high-margin, asset-light products like software. Tech had found its “product-market fit”: an unusual funding model, perfectly suited for an unusual business model, that created a flywheel in which digital cities could spring up overnight, potentially eclipsing the relevance of the physical world.

But this dream of what Barbrook and Cameron called a “digital utopia” was never realistic. While our online world ballooned beyond expectations, its impact stretched across industries and governing institutions, and these endeavors increasingly demanded real-world infrastructure. As tech seeks to expand its influence, it has unsurprisingly begun to reappraise how it cultivates the political and financial backing needed for highly capital-intensive, long-term public projects.

Venture capital has evolved as an asset class—distilling into fewer, more established funds that can marshal larger amounts of capital from institutional investors. In 2024, just nine venture firms accounted for nearly 50 percent of all capital raised by U.S. funds.⁵ Tech companies are also staying private for longer: notable companies like Uber, Palantir and Airbnb took more than twice as long to go public compared to predecessors like Amazon, PayPal, and Salesforce.⁶ Rather than being pushed by investors along the old seven-to-ten-year path to exit, tech firms now seek funding from banks, hedge funds, and crossover inves­tors to support their growth in later stages.⁷ There is greater liquidity in secondary markets—which grew from an estimated $11 billion in 2011 to $60 billion in 2021—allowing founders, early employees, and investors to reap returns without an IPO or acquisition.⁸

Beyond its changing financing needs, tech has come to understand that in order to realize its goals—whatever those may be—it needs allies. Specifically, political allies. It is the classic marriage of public and private sectors, in which the flexibility and freedom of being a private citizen collides with the juggernaut scale and influence of the state.

A Work in Progress

Tech may not be ready to put its stamp on a revised, modern-day manifesto. Instead, it might be more accurate to say, as one attendee at our convening suggested, that Silicon Valley is currently developing a class consciousness—meaning, an awareness that their cohort is somehow different from the rest of the world.

In their newfound positions of political, cultural and economic primacy, tech has realized that they aren’t interchangeable with elites from older legacy establishments and industries. But this sense of difference is still fuzzy and in need of refinement. Tech elites don’t all agree on how they want to present themselves to the world. And the sheer number of tech investors, founders, and employees who saw massive financial upside from their business efforts has unleashed a greater proliferation of competing ideas than in, say, Carnegie and Rockefeller’s time. There are no longer just one or two billionaires leading a generation of entrepreneurial wealth, but dozens of them. This explosion of wealth creation has, paradoxically, created a vacuum of elite leadership. Everyone has money to back their ideas, but no one—not even the public or media—knows whom to pay attention to.

And yet, Silicon Valley is ambling, however slowly, toward something off in the horizon. Today, it may still be in its adolescent stage as it blunders through an awkward, and occasionally off-putting, transition to adulthood. Just as a teenager experiments with different identities before converging on a more stable perspective, tech, too, is figuring out who it wants to be.

Elon Musk knows he doesn’t want to be Bill Gates, but he vacillates between supporting effective altruism in 2022, to Ron DeSantis in 2023, before fatefully betting on Donald Trump in 2024. Mark Zuckerberg shed his clean-cut look last year, letting his curls grow out and donning baggy designer T-shirts and a gold necklace. In an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience in January, Zuckerberg described himself as having been “on a journey” for the last ten years, reflecting on how far he’d come since the 2016 U.S. presidential election: “At the time I was really sort of ill-prepared to kind of parse what was going on.” But, he added later, “I feel like I just have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be. And this is how it’s going to be going forward.”

Tech’s lack of certainty isn’t a sign of indecisiveness. It’s a sign that they are still hashing out their identities as the next heirs of social and political power. While it’s not yet ready to adopt a cohesive political agenda, tech is testing boundaries and developing new norms, just as prior elite generations have done. (Rockefeller, for example, a devout Christian and lifelong supporter of the temperance movement, abruptly changed his stance on Prohibition after seeing the harms it caused.) While these efforts might appear confusing or contradictory, they hint at a deeper cultural transformation underway. Tech isn’t any less mature or fit to lead than prior wealth classes. We’re just watching their position unfold in more granular and excruciating detail today, thanks to our real‑time social feeds. While its institutions and support networks are still forming, as tech crystallizes its identity, it will start to move quickly—and perhaps, finally, rewrite the stereotypes that have long defined it.

Prior generations of tech philanthropy, still unsure of their own worldview, frequently copied the globalist Davos playbook of giving. They were preoccupied with measuring outcomes using spreadsheets and cost calculations, instead of rewriting the system itself. Today’s tech elites, on the other hand, see themselves as creating new paradigms that are anti-incrementalist. Rather than maximizing numbers, they want to solve problems that are “big if true.” It is not enough to simply increase the number of visas issued to high-skilled immigrants; they want to overhaul the visa process entirely. It is not enough to fund the creation of a new university research center; they want to change the speed of scientific research itself. Nor do they accept the anemic calls for “sustainability” when it comes to addressing the climate crisis—instead, they envision a world of abundance, where we no longer need to ration energy use at all.

In the second Trump administration, some tech leaders have finally been given a perch from which to enact their agenda. But if tech fails to converge on a coherent vision, its reactionary attitudes could be interpreted as a form of nihilism masked as blind techno-optimism: the philanthropist’s equivalent of Peter Pan syndrome. A sweeping distrust of institutions, combined with an overly stubborn focus on efficiency and individualism, will fail to win over the American public. Tech would suffer from a lack of roots and reach: disconnected from established institutions, yet equally unable to spread its iconoclastic views in a meaningful way, it might cease to exist as a meaningful class at all.

Yet it is too early to declare that tech will get stuck in this way of thinking. Those working alongside—or now serving within—the White House represent only one faction among tech’s broader ambitions. As tech steps into adulthood, Silicon Valley stands to create something that is both old and new again: in the most optimistic scenario, a restoration of the American Dream, which champions the expansion of opportunities for the benefit of its people.

Floating Downstream

There is a growing ideological divide today between those who believe our institutions need reform, and those who still cling to them. These aren’t just tech’s views; Silicon Valley is not imposing this framework on the rest of the country. It is the primary tension facing America right now, more than the old labels of Left versus Right. Nate Silver called it “the river” versus “the village” in his latest book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (2023). The River embraces constant change, unpredictability, and adaptability, while the Village adopts beliefs that are more rigid and fixed—they tend to resist change.

America is restless: like tech, it doesn’t yet know what it wants, but it clearly wants something different. The old version of the Californian Ideology was a reaction to the collapse of the Cold War—techno-libertarianism born from post-hippie idealism, combined with Reagan-era capitalism. Its modern form, however, reflects a very different political mood: the faded optimism of the Web 2.0 social era. The widespread adoption of social media broke apart our institutions, rewrote our norms around dating, work, politics, and friendships, and curdled into broader cultural anxieties, for which we are now casting about for a solution.

There’s a shared sense in America, across the political spectrum, that our institutions are no longer serving the people who need them. The stories we used to reach for to reassure ourselves about the future have started to feel dangerously out of sync with reality. And tech elites could be the force that shapes the public’s brewing desire to be a country that moves and builds and dazzles as no other country in the world can do. Tech’s rising political influence is a vanguard for a broader, growing cultural zeitgeist in America, even if they haven’t yet figured out how to speak to the general public in language that resonates.

The post–Cold War dream was meant to be a victory lap for capital­ism, marked by borderless globalization and frictionless networks. The dream today is more wistful, trying to capture a sentiment that’s been lost: revitalizing domestic production, building resilient and functional institutions, and restoring a sense of national direction and influence. It is amidst these desires that we can find the seeds of a new, emergent Silicon Valley ideology.

Tech is not post-political or anti-political. It is profoundly political—not in the partisan sense, but in the sense of trying to figure out how best to contribute its talents in service of society. We can disagree with its proposed solutions, but we can’t accuse tech of being beyond politics anymore. Tech built its empire on an obsession with figuring out how things work, and this mindset, too, applies to government, as they now try to understand how power flows, how institutions ossify and evolve, and how to build better ones from the ground up.

As the scholar Tanner Greer once put it, Silicon Valley is built upon the cultural pillars of both intellect and action: “This is a culture where insight, intelligence, and knowledge are treasured—but treasured as tools of action, not goods in and of themselves.”⁹ The proliferation of tech subcultures today can be explained, perhaps, as itself a reflection of these values: a relentless commitment to experimentation in hopes of bringing forth a better future, just as America’s founding fathers embraced federalism, which enabled states to serve as laboratories of democracy.

There is a mutual respect in tech, even among those with divergent political beliefs, for a fellow builder. This combination of intellect—endlessly combing the world’s knowledge in search of new ideas—and action—the thrill of bringing fresh new ideas to life—forms the basis for a more stable and mature Silicon Valley ideology. It transcends the constraints of the digital worlds and software business models that defined tech in the 1990s, while still staying true to tech’s history.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance (2024), for example, is an unmistakably progressive call-to-arms whose missive is directed at the Democratic Party. Yet their language—with its focus on speed, experimentation, and iteration—is deeply influenced by tech culture. Klein and Thompson don’t flinch from the message that our institutions are no longer adequately serving Americans’ needs, but they are also unwavering in their faith that our politicians can find a way to improve. Rather than arguing for restraint or austerity—as incumbent Democrats might have once done—they want us to scale up. In Abundance, Klein and Thompson advocate for initiatives like nuclear power, geothermal, and transmission line buildout; upzoning and permitting reform in cities; and expanding certain immigrant visa programs and streamlining green cards for advanced degree holders. They want to solve for bottlenecks by unblocking supply, not constraining demand.

JD Vance and the New Right might not share the same political views as Thompson, Klein, and the abundance movement. Rather than invoking the optimistic language of progress, New Right conservatives are more populist in tone, focusing on the failures of elite leadership and cultural decline. Vance supports initiatives like expanded child tax credits, tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing, and streamlined permitting for fossil fuel development. But despite its differences in policy agenda, the New Right is still building toward a better future—even when it is building to preserve a way of life it doesn’t want to lose.

When Vance wrote in a tweet outlining his worldview: “I like growth and productivity gains, and this informs my view on tech and regulation,” his statement could just have just as easily been claimed by a number of other tech subcultures.¹⁰ When he added, “I dislike substituting American labor for cheap labor,” he echoed a long-standing rever­ence in tech for viewing individual talent contributions as unique and nonfungible.

Those at the helm of the progress movement, abundance’s more technocratic, center-libertarian cousin, are less prone than either of these groups to sentimental rhetoric about reviving America, and more likely to get misty-eyed over an Our World in Data chart showing literacy rates squiggling up and to the right. But beneath their wonkish pragmatism is a similar set of collectivist values. The Institute for Progress has partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to test new funding and evaluation mechanisms for research, as well as advocating for NEPA and FDA reform to speed up environmental review and clinical trials. At the heart of these proposals, too, is a genuine desire to improve institutions’ capacity to make decisions quickly and effectively.

Even Balaji Srinivasan—tech’s mercurial wild card—and his proposal for network states, while ostensibly a rejection of America-the-nation, reflects an unshakeable desire to build when things aren’t working, rather than abandon governance altogether. His proposal to seed new, internet-first states throughout the world is not really a libertarian vision—escaping government control altogether—than a grand civic experiment.

These movements may not ever converge on a single political party or agenda. Tech elites still clash loudly over immigration, tariffs, and government funding for research. In the first few months of the new Trump-Vance administration, multiple tech factions have expressed their concern, and even vocal rejection of, many of the White House’s actions thus far. But when we look beyond their specific agendas, there’s a shared belief that stagnation—whether bureaucratic, technological, or cultural—is the enemy. There’s a shared belief that America, and the values it represents, has greater potential that can be unlocked through smarter policy and stronger institutions. There’s a shared belief in supporting high-agency individuals and the systems that let them build. And there’s a great sense of hope that, yes, the status quo might be broken—but it can still be salvaged through reform.

In this sense, tech today is less Jeffersonian than the first Californian Ideology suggested, celebrating the hacker, the dropout, and the lone builder, with the profound skepticism of centralized power entailed by these archetypes. It is arguably more Hamiltonian, focused on building state capacity at the national level. Whereas the old Californian Ideology captured the liberating power of technology, the new one affirms its constructive power.

Tech’s social capital may be uneven, but its intellectual capital is growing. It is generating new ideas faster than most institutions can absorb them. Its ideological adolescence may still be bumpy, but the outlines of maturity are clearly visible, and only getting sharper as they are battle-tested in the political arena. Tech is well-positioned to usher in a new era of thinking and working: Ferenstein and his colleagues found that tech elites were nearly twice as likely as the American public to believe that “all change is good in the long run,” and nearly three times as likely to say that they saw no inherent conflict between citizens, corporations, and the government. In tech’s model of the world, change is assumed to be a constant, and individuals are prized for their ability to invent and build us out of any crisis.

The adolescent phase is chaotic, contradictory, even messy. But as tech’s identity evolves, Silicon Valley’s influence will continue to extend far beyond the business world and into the public sphere to amplify the values that have always been at its core: a genuine pursuit of collective human flourishing, reinforced by a belief that society—like technology itself—can always be reinvented.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 2 (Summer 2025): 209–21.

Notes