Many conservatives understand themselves to be waging a one-front war against a single opponent, the Left, over the future of the country. If we can finally defeat liberalism, the thinking goes, America’s prosperity will be assured. A sizeable contingency on the Right, however, understands the fight for conservatism to involve two fronts at once: against the Left in the realm of politics, but also against modern technology, which is less clearly political but no less corrosive to America’s traditions and virtues. A society mediated entirely by screens and apps, from this perspective, is no place to raise the next generation, even if Republicans win every election.
But what if these are just two sides to a single conflict? What if progressivism and what Neil Postman called technopoly — the organization of all of society along the lines of technology and its imperatives — are really the same thing? In that case, conservatives would need to seriously reassess both their political strategy and their engagement with tech in both policy and everyday life. There are good reasons to take this disturbing possibility seriously, warns the English writer Paul Kingsnorth in his recent book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. For Kingsnorth, liberalism and tech boosterism are two faces of a single totalizing ideology he dubs “the Machine.”
At their purest, both liberalism and tech accelerationism seek “progress” at all costs, an always-out-of-reach utopia that might be achieved if we just move a bit more quickly and smash a few more conventions. Both contrast that future utopia with the stagnation, parochialism, and mediocrity that have characterized all of history up to the present. Within both politics and technology, Marx’s “permanent revolution” is the key to bursting through all remaining limits — limits on our identity in the first case, and on our physical power in the second. Neither wishes to be held back by custom, nature, or the messiness of reality.
