iThink Therefore iAm

Steve Jobs named his company “Apple” after a pleasant trip to an apple orchard. The bite mark in the logo was added to give the silhouette a sense of scale, lest someone think it a cherry. Yet that name and that symbol, evoking consumption of the forbidden fruit for which man was expelled from the Garden of Eden, must be inadvertently the most perfect metaphor in corporate history. Our age-old striving to “be as God” has never seemed more achievable than in the age of the iPhone and its accompanying social media ecosystem, which promises not only to put the world at our fingertips, but also to remake our sociality and liberate us from the constraints of time and place. The digitization of our lives is transforming human existence in ways incompatible with conservative conceptions of flourishing.

“Ideas have consequences,” conservatives admonish one another, pouring more money into think tanks and great-books conferences. Sometimes, however, consequences also have ideas; our behaviors determine how we think. If Marshall McLuhan is right, and “the medium is the message,” what is the message of the smartphone era? It is one that has rendered many basic conservative instincts simply nonsensical, especially concerns about family, morality, and sexuality. In the age of TikTok, the Judeo-Christian tradition is not just becoming discredited, but altogether inaccessible.

The social acid of the smartphone era is dissolving six fundamental pillars of conservatism: Limits, Tradition, Patience, Dependence, Embeddedness, and Embodiment. In stressing these themes for centuries, conservatives have sought to tether human action to the limits of human nature, insisting that individuals and polities alike cultivate the virtues of self-restraint.

Increasingly, however, our fellow citizens cannot see the point. If technology promises a transcendence of natural constraints, why should we shackle ourselves with social and political ones? Younger generations in particular see less and less reason to tie themselves down with marriage or children. If they do marry, it is on their own terms, in a culture promoting a choose-your-own-adventure lifestyle where sexual partners and pregnancies can be mixed and matched through open relationships and surrogacy. “Hookup culture” already existed, of course, but apps like Tinder have made sacred acts of intimacy as easy as placing a GrubHub order (minus the tipping—for that, there’s OnlyFans). With the normalization of online porn, even the one-night stand is more work than it’s worth for many young people; sex itself no longer requires embodied presence. This mindset is inseparable from the one that has little compunction about legalizing drugs, performing mastectomies on healthy young girls, and, when our battered bodies no longer serve their use as pleasure-maximizing machines, quietly euthanizing them.

The recent implosion of the pro-life movement powerfully illustrates the challenge. Within two years of Roe vs. Wade’s long-awaited reversal, the Republican Party excised abortion restriction from its platform. Many activists felt stabbed in the back by political operatives, but the leadership in Milwaukee was just doing what party leadership does: trying to win elections. Opposition to abortion no longer found a place in the GOP platform because it no longer had a place in the minds of most voters. Just 35% of voters now think abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. Nor was the culprit elite universities force-feeding Marxism and post-structuralism to our best and brightest. From 2012 to 2022, support for abortion on demand surged from 36% to 56% among Americans with only a high-school education. After Obergefell recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the fashionable claim held that the law was a moral teacher, helping to normalize the behavior it legalized; but after Dobbs reversed Roe, support for abortion increased further. The constant was radical autonomy. Is it really surprising that a generation conditioned to escape an unwanted relationship by tapping the “Block” button or simply “ghosting” someone cannot see why a woman should be compelled to carry an unwanted fetus to term?

With each passing year, a new class of high school graduates enters the electorate—marinated in the digital culture, and increasingly anxious and lonely, as Jonathan Haidt has documented in The Anxious Generation and his Substack, After Babel. On almost any measure of youth mental health, graphs have a hockey stick shape with an inflection point around 2010. Graphs of young adult support for progressive causes have a similar shape. After declining for a decade, support for abortion on demand among Americans aged 18 to 34 started rising in 2006 and had more than doubled by the time of Dobbs. A similar trend appears in opinion among young Americans about marijuana legalization: support falls from 2000 to 2006 but then doubles by 2018. The share identifying as something other than heterosexual or straight rose from 4% in 2010 to 25% in 2022. After remaining more or less unchanged for decades, the share saying that divorce should be easier to obtain nearly doubled.

These trends are intimately linked to each other and to the technological transformation of the culture. Young people do not vote pro-life because they do not feel pro-life: more and more suffer with suicidal ideation, and fewer and fewer seem able to take up the burden of giving life to a new generation. Without disruption of the technological “progress,” social conservatives are facing not only political extinction, but also a collapse of the conditions for human flourishing.

This may seem a fatalistic message, for who can hope to stand athwart technology yelling “stop”? But the silver lining is this: If the road to political renewal for social conservatives must run through tech policy, this is a road on which we are likely to meet unexpected allies. If tech policy is the new family policy, conservatives may have a chance to build a bipartisan coalition for the first time in a generation.

A Universal Acid

The conservative vision of human flourishing rests on six basic acknowledgments: We live in a world of limits or constraints and must learn to navigate these by the wisdom of tradition, cultivating patience amidst time and suffering, and acknowledging our dependence on authorities, our embeddedness in particular contexts and relationships, and our embodiment within earthen vessels that, according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, are divine images. Since the thirst for progress came to dominate our political imaginations more than two centuries ago, it has been the task of conservatives to quietly remind society of the need to stay anchored in reality. With virtual reality increasingly becoming our default, that reminder grows harder to hear with each passing year. 

Limits

Conservatism is predicated upon the grateful acknowledgement of limits. As finite beings with a determinate nature, we must recognize and navigate boundaries to make sense of the world and make our way within it. These boundaries define the contours and set the constraints of every living thing or social organism, imposing barriers or at least speed bumps on our wills and imaginations. Thus economic conservatives stress trade-offs and debt limits, while social conservatives insist that gender must be rooted in biology; we cannot simply wish away these limits in pursuit of our desires.

The digital realm, though, is constituted by the absence and transcendence of limits. We see this in our very language for it: to be online is to be in “the cloud,” forever “streaming.” Each new phase of digital development seems to take the impulse one step further. The advent of the smartphone—always connected, always within arm’s reach—abolished the boundary between being offline and being online. The oncoming wave of virtual reality devices aim merely to complete this process. Even a tweak to the user interface like infinite scroll succeeded in dissolving a subliminal boundary that gave reason a fighting chance to reassert itself over restless desire.

This preference for boundlessness does not remain confined to our digital lives, but relentlessly spills over to shape our conception of the wider world. It might be too cute by half to blame the rise of open floor plans on the wide-open experience of cyberspace, but the rise of open relationships, unbound by any expectation of commitment or fidelity, is clearly shaped by the expectations of digital life, which catechizes us to move restlessly onward to each new object of desire.

Tradition

Learning to flourish within limits is a lesson that takes many lifetimes, so conservatives insist on deference to accumulated wisdom. It is certainly fallible, but usually less so than individual judgment. It should not have to prove itself at the bar of each individual’s reason before commanding respect, because life is too short for every question to be settled at the pace of a debating hall. We must be able to take some things on authority if we are to make any progress on the path of wisdom. Thus it takes the form of prejudice and taboo, offering norms so that we “just know” something is a bad idea, even if we aren’t sure why. The old are tradition’s bearers and the young its respectful recipients.

The internet, however, is a place with no taboos, a universal temple of self-worship where nothing is sacred. In particular, the norms imposed by age and tradition have no force there, because the digital has no history of which age could be the guardian. “Move fast and break things,” declared Mark Zuckerberg, inscribing the fantasies of a ten-year-old boy as the motto of one of the world’s most powerful companies. The young have always chafed against the demands of the old, but never before with much prospect of escape. “OK, Boomer” is the impious but eminently understandable dismissal of a generation of analog fossils by a generation of digital natives.

If past practice has no authority in the online world, it is hard to see why it should in the rest of the world, especially as the two increasingly shade into one another. Why shouldn’t our political lives, like our digital lives, center on “what can be, unburdened by what has been”?

Patience

Living in a world with limits means living in a world of friction, as we bump up against these boundaries, and it means accepting the limits of our own ability to overcome this friction. Conservatism, accordingly, teaches us to expect things to take time, and to put up with suffering in the interim. Patience comes from the Latin meaning “to suffer:” suffering the imperfection of the world, the consequences of our own choices, and the frustrated longing for a quick fix. It preaches an unpopular creed of incrementalism and waiting.

But if time past has no hold on us in the digital realm, we will not allow time future to, either. Each new hardware or software upgrade sells itself on its ability to reduce waiting time. Instant gratification has become almost the only kind of gratification we can imagine, and the suffering of patience the most unbearable form of suffering. Ironically, though, this instant gratification never gratifies, nor can it. As my colleague Clare Morell has emphasized, the chemical activated by digital experience, dopamine, generates a perpetual sense of anticipation, “a constant craving for more and more and more” that never comes to rest. But the breakneck pace of digital life has reshaped our expectations of the analog world, where app-mediated mobile orders obviate the need to stand in line, where telehealth provides painkillers on demand, and where anything slower than Prime’s two-day delivery warrants a refund.

Dependence

None of us came into the world as autonomous Lockean individuals. We were born and raised in a state of radical dependency, return to such a state for the final years of our lives, and spend the years in between in forms of more subtle dependence on authorities and hierarchies, however much we pretend otherwise. Relationships of hierarchy and dependence structure the lives of every being; living well means cultivating gratitude and deference toward those above, and sacrificial care toward those below. For pro-life advocates, the radical dependence of the unborn child does not detract from its humanity, but reminds all of us of our own dependence.  

But if the essence of religion is, as Schleiermacher wrote, “the feeling of absolute dependence,” it should be no wonder that ours is the most irreligious age in history. The internet is designed to offer us the feeling of absolute autonomy, fully in control of what we see, hear, and experience. The smartphone made this promise tangible, putting all of us in the place of Caesars, our thumbs endowed with the power of social life and death, our forefingers sufficing to summon any pleasure or diversion to our presence.

The very structure of digital space serves to flatten out hierarchies or render them invisible; one expects to be able to zoom in or out, swipe backward and forward, flip or crop at will, unconstrained by the ordered relations of three-dimensional space. The same goes for relationships of authority: on X, Elon Musk’s feed or President Joe Biden’s is visually indistinguishable from yours or mine. Online, children by default have been allowed all the same rights and access as adults, and as they’ve used this access to “explore their sexuality,” calls have intensified to grant children rights of radical sexual self-determination in the offline world as well. Data indicate a “sharp rise” in transgender identity concentrated among young people.

Embeddedness

Each of us finds ourselves not merely situated in vertical hierarchies, but embedded in a horizontal web of relations that shape and determine our own identity. I know who I am in relation to my family, my colleagues, my place, and my time, and that’s how I get to know you as well (the first question of any new acquaintance is likely to be, “so where are you from?”). Indeed, for the conservative mind, this is a general epistemic principle: to know anything is to know it by its context.

Digital space has dissolved the horizontal relations of our lives as relentlessly as the vertical, leaving us all “alone together,” in Sherry Turkle’s phrase. Although platforms constantly hold out to us promises of “community” and “connection,” the very use of such nostalgic words, as Anton Barba-Kay argues, belies the absence of any real bonds. One can always opt in or opt out, mute or block, delete an account or create a new one: Why waste time talking to a bore? No longer defined by a community of belonging, we are free to define ourselves, curating and creating our own identities through the content we post, the filters we apply, the avatars we adopt. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” was a principle of the medium as early as 1993, when the New Yorker published it as the caption under what is now its most reprinted cartoon of all time.

We can remain anonymous or pseudonymous if we like, trying on multiple personas, male or female, like Shakespearean actors. Indeed, gender distinctions dissolve into irrelevance in digital space; “the genius of Tinder,” observes Barba-Kay, “is that it equalizes consent in dating: One gender need no longer be tasked with the presumptive burden of approaching the other.”

Again, what starts online doesn’t stay online. The arms-length logic of online relationships has increasingly colonized the rest of our lives, recasting customers, co-workers, neighbors, and even family members in transactional, instrumentalized terms. Instead of chatting with the barista, we place a mobile order; instead of bumping into neighbors on a walk, we breeze by in AirPod oblivion; instead of living near grandparents, we schedule Zoom calls. Back to the New Yorker again—if nothing else a reliable indicator of a certain zeitgeist—this time from last week: “Why So Many People Are Going ‘No Contact’ with Their Parents.”

Embodiment

We are embedded above all by being embodied: My mind inhabits this particular bounded, weak, suffering, dependent bundle of flesh, and must act in and through it. The acceptance of all other limits begins with the acceptance of this most maddening and inescapable one. For the Judeo-Christian tradition that has shaped conservatism in the West, however, our bodies are more than constraints to be stoically accepted; they are sacred vessels of the divine, bearers of a transcendent dignity. To misuse them is not merely foolish, but profane.

Up until now, religion alone promised an escape from the chafing limits of the body. The digital realm has changed that at last, providing each of us with abilities formerly associated only with glorified saints or fairy-tale magicians: to see, hear, and act upon anyone anywhere in the world without bodily presence. Pathetically—but perhaps unsurprisingly to any readers of Greek mythology—we have decided to use this godlike power above all for the indulgence of sexual appetites. Pornography now makes up a staggering 30 to 35% of all online traffic, and services like OnlyFans that provide live, interactive, virtual prostitution are growing rapidly. What does it mean that we have now raised an entire generation habituated to experience and perform the most intimate of all bodily experiences without bodily presence?

Even much less morally fraught digital recreations suggest a profound transformation of our relationship to our bodies. Video games simulate the thrills of being an Olympic athlete or a Navy SEAL without leaving one’s couch; of killing, dying, and switching bodies in numbing repetition. Instagram’s filters—not to mention AI image modification—turn one’s body into a mere canvas for artistic experiments in self-presentation. Together, all these experiments catechize us—and especially young minds who have never known another world—in a Gnostic creed: my body is a mere instrument or commodity of my will, a malleable appendage of my true self.

* * *

Technology has always been a disruptive and progressive force, especially since the Industrial Revolution. If we’re going to point fingers at technology, some may retort, we might have to start with the steam engine, not the iPhone. There is something to this, and yet the digital revolution marks a phase shift. “We asked for flying cars, and instead we got 140 characters,” lamented Peter Thiel. The contrast is significant: But for two centuries, technological innovation sought to improve the material world, harnessing friction to generate motion. For all their disruptive impacts, technologies kept us grounded in the laws of physics and in our own bodies: we might aspire to move from place to place faster, but we were still bound to one place at a time. With the advent of the digital, we abandoned the diminishing returns of transportation technology and challenged its basic premise: Why accept the bondage to place at all? Why operate within the constraints of materiality rather than at the speed of light? Why not abolish friction rather than harnessing it?

To the digital denizen, the pro-life cause is indecipherable. The case for marrying and raising children is “weird.” To be sure, progressive elites may attack such norms in bad faith. But the attacks resonate broadly throughout the electorate because, for more and more Americans, once commonplace conservative intuitions no longer have any anchor within their daily experience. If limits and hierarchy are irrelevant and tradition and patience is passé in the digital realm, the call to sacrifice and suffer on behalf of the most vulnerable among us seems a violation.

Tech Policy is the New Family Policy

The onward march of progressive social norms is not a historical inevitability, nor the result of superior ideas. It is at least in part the result of changes in our technological environment. Of course, there is no closing Pandora’s Box. Digital technology is here to stay. But thankfully we don’t need to abandon it; we just need to start subjecting it to the kinds of norms and laws we take for granted in other domains. Change the environment, remove the artificial stimulants, and human nature—a remarkably stubborn and resilient thing—may reassert itself.

We don’t allow kids access to addictive and mind-altering substances if they come in cartons or bottles, but we do if they come in sleek white “Designed by Apple in California” boxes. We have bouncers that turn minors away from strip clubs and prosecutors that shut down prostitution rings, but online, we invite children into virtual strip clubs and allow pimps to set up shop on Instagram. We don’t give kids keys to a car until they turn 15 or 16 and pass a battery of safety tests, but we give them the passcodes to the latest set of powerful and dangerous devices starting at eight or nine. Manufacturers are required to install dozens of safety features on vehicles, while smartphones ship with parental controls that are optional, difficult to use, and riddled with notorious loopholes.

The result for children’s mental health has been disastrous, leaving low-hanging fruit all over the legislative landscape. Measures to limit children’s opportunities for digital deformation enjoy widespread bipartisan support. States are now tripping over one another to get smartphones out of schools and protect kids from pornography—Texas’s bill age-gating adult websites, set to go before the Supreme Court this winter, passed 141 to 0. Even the most progressive activists cannot help but notice that low-income and minority children are disproportionately victimized by Big Tech, for the sake of generating unprecedented corporate profits.

We can also change the digital landscape for adults, without insisting that we all go analog. Devices and platforms could foster human ingenuity and connection, rather than enslaving human attention to maximize consumption. Many brilliant hardware and software designers have created such products, but they are crowded out of the market by perverse incentives that reward the data harvesting of surveillance capitalism and immunize Big Tech against product liability commonplace in other industries. Our problem is not lack of policy options, but lack of will to pursue them.

The hour thus demands a mindset shift from conservative lawmakers. To date, they’ve grumbled about the “woke” priorities of Big Tech, but treated these as unrelated to the industry’s basic business model, asking why the CEOs can’t stop the preaching and get back to profit. But the profit model is inherently progressive, persuading users to adopt a disembedded, disembodied, de-natured vision of themselves as mere bundles of desire. Conservatives need the courage to call out the business model of Big Tech as inherently exploitative, Sackler-style capitalism.

As Senator JD Vance argued in 2019:

If you think children killing themselves is a problem, if you think people not having families, not getting married, and feeling more isolated are problems—then you need to be willing to use political power when it’s appropriate to actually solve those problems….Whom do we serve? Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish those things? My answer is simple: I serve my child. And it has become abundantly clear that I cannot serve two masters. I cannot defend commerce when it is used to addict his toddler brain to screens, and to addict his adolescent brain to pornography.

Social conservatives cannot afford to be economic libertarians any longer, if that means ceding the political landscape to Apple and Alphabet. Culture may be upstream of politics, but technology is upstream of culture, and it is in those headwaters that we must make our stand.