New Book in Process: iThink Therefore iAm

Conserving the Human Person in a Digital Age

To all my subscribers, let me extend my heartfelt apologies for an unprecedented three-week hiatus. Last weekend was American Compass’s big annual Members Retreat, which has been sucking up all the oxygen in my mental rooms. Work won’t exactly be slow for the next few weeks, but it should be slow enough to give me a chance to start putting into writing a number of ideas I’ve had fermenting for the past few months.

The biggest thing I’m going to be putting into writing, though, is *drum roll* a new book: iThink Therefore iAm: Conserving the Human Person in a Digital Age (working title only for now, but seriously, how are you going to top that? Title credit goes to Oren Cass). If you’ve been reading me for awhile, you’ll recognize this from the title of an essay published at American Compass last September. I wondered if that essay might be just the tip of a much larger iceberg waiting to be explored, and it turns out, so did Tom Spence at Basic Books. But I knew I wasn’t up to the task of unfolding the whole argument at book-length, so the idea languished until I had lunch again in December with Jared Hayden, the brilliant young policy analyst who incepted the idea for the initial essay in my head last summer. I asked him if he’d like to co-write it, he did, and here we are a few months later with a contract.

The Big Idea

For decades, conservatives have fought for family, community, tradition, social order, and human nature against what they thought to be the barbarians at the gates: progressive elites peddling permutations of Marxism on college campuses or in public school curricula. All the while, more insidious threats were entering through the back door, weakening our will and clouding our vision. Most conservative thinkers and statesmen have given only passing attention to the role of digital technology in reshaping our society’s sense of what it means to be human and what is the purpose of political life. The radical individualism and identitarianism of contemporary culture can only be fully understood as the product of digital formation; and a conservative vision of social order grounded in human nature can only be restored if we can rediscover how to govern our technologies, rather than allowing them to govern us.

Our book, then, aims to be the first broadly-accessible analysis of digital technology by conservatives, for conservatives. It will offer a “how we got here” narrative that complements the influential analysis of Carl Trueman’s wildly popular The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, suggesting that transgenderism is as much the product of our devices as our ideologies. It will explain why conservatives must care about technology if they are to remain true to their principles, showing how digital formation undermines essential pillars of conservative thought. And it will explain what we can do about it—not in the mode of another “twelve habits for a tech-wise household,” but from the perspective of public policy and culture-shaping institutions.

A Road map for the Book

Currently, our aspirational table of contents looks like this (subject to change dramatically in the course of writing!):

Part I: How Conservatism Failed

Chapter 1: The Landscape: This chapter will look at just how much the electorate has moved leftward on key social issues based on polling data and popular media. We’ll also look at data on how these changing attitudes correlate with changing lifestyles—lower rates of marriage and child-bearing, declining social capital, etc. Note that “the resurgence of the Right” evident in Trump’s recent victory contradicts little of this; the reality is that Trump moved left to find the voters, not that the voters moved right—“barstool conservatism” replaced “social conservatism” as the coalition’s enter of gravity.

Chapter 2: The Standard Storyline: In this chapter, we’ll rehearse the story that conservatives usually tell themselves about why we keep losing. It is a Richard Weaver-style “ideas have consequences” narrative in which a few villains play an outsized role: the universities, Hollywood, and “the mainstream media.” We’ll offer a few thoughts on why this is an unpersuasive account of historical causation.

Chapter 3: The Real Story: In this chapter, we’ll give a high-level overview of some of the most culturally important changes in technology over the past century, with particular attention to the developments in digital technology over the last 30 years. We’ll highlight the disruptions they caused to a conservative way of life and the concerns raised by conservative thinkers along the way—mostly ignored by conservative political leaders.

Chapter 4: Finding the Blind Spots: In this chapter, we’ll consider why it is that conservative leaders have been so blind to the role of technology in destroying their own values. We’ll show how the persistence of a Cold War mentality over the relationship of government and industry, along with a distorted understanding of freedom, hampered serious thinking about matters of political economy. We’ll also look at how the judicial system was exploited by tech lawyers to create a framework that turned technology against the family.

Part II: Dissolving the Pillars

We will have a brief transition in which we introduce the six pillars of a conservative worldview—limits, tradition, patience, dependence, embeddedness, and embodiment—and set up the argument of the next six chapters as to how digital technology has helped dissolve them.

Chapter 5: Limits: In this chapter, we’ll consider how the digital realm is constituted by the absence and transcendence of limits. We’ll discuss how conservatism is predicated on the grateful acknowledgement of our God-given limits, without which no one can hope to make sense of the world. We’ll show how, from streaming services to the cloud, digital tech strikes right at the heart of our humanity by reshaping our conception of the wider world and ourselves as fundamentally formless.

Chapter 6: Tradition: In this chapter, we’ll explore how the internet age has rendered the accumulated wisdom of ages past irrelevant. We’ll show that conservatives have long recognized that tradition is to be embraced because learning to flourish within limits is a lesson that takes many lifetimes; however, in a world where limits have been eroded, and information and influence can be easily acquired with just a few taps of the finger, the wisdom, norms, and taboos of tradition no longer hold any authority.

Chapter 7: Patience: In this chapter, we’ll discuss how the capacity for patience, or (per the Latin) suffering, has waned thanks to the frictionlessness of digital technology. We’ll show how, by freeing us from limits and constraints, our dopamine-dripping digital devices have so rewired our hearts for instant gratification that any experience or thought of friction in life, whether good or bad, becomes unbearable.

Chapter 8: Dependence: In this chapter, we’ll consider how digital technology, by making us more autonomous, erodes our dependence on others. We’ll outline how, in contrast to the conservative recognition that all are born into hierarchical networks of dependence in which we rely on others and are relied on by others, digital life offers a disordered self-sufficiency and control that erodes the fabric of these networks.

Chapter 9: Embeddedness: In this chapter, we’ll show how digital space has not only eroded “vertical” networks of dependence, it has also dissolved the “horizontal” relations that give us a sense of belonging and identity. We’ll discuss how, for all its apparent convenience, our digitally fabricated autonomy has left us “alone together” (in the words of Sherry Turkle). We’ll explore how this aloneness is present even when we are in person, how it affords us the freedom to define ourselves, and how it creates a self-first approach to relationships that recast even the closest relationships in transactional, instrumentalized terms.

Chapter 10: Embodiment: In this chapter, we’ll unpack how digital technology has displaced the body—perhaps the most significant marker of our embeddedness, dependence, and our limits—from our social imaginary and self-understanding. We’ll show that while there may not be en masse conversions to ancient heresies like Manicheanism, the digital age has made us all functionally Manichean, teaching us to view our bodies as impersonal commodities that can be molded at will rather than gifts to be received or temples to be honored.

Part III: Rebuilding the Foundations

Chapter 11: It’s the Political Economy, Stupid: In this chapter, we will make the argument that the path taken by technological innovation is not inevitable, but is a response to market signals and incentives that are themselves politically shaped and guided. We will argue that digital technology is capable of taking many different forms, some much more conducive to human flourishing, if our policies made an effort to do so.

Chapter 12: A Policy Playbook: In this chapter, we will give a brief outline of the directions that a new conservative technology policy might take, with a handful of specific proposals, along with broader principles to inspire the next generation of conservative leaders.

Chapter 13: Rebuilding the Little Platoons: In this final chapter, we will argue that top-down policy, while certainly part of the solution, must be accompanied by a broader cultural renewal in defense of a more authentically humane way of life. In this renewal, the little platoons of church, school, business, and family have essential roles to play. We will outline here some of the practices that such institutions might adopt to fight back against the digital deformation of our humanity.

Timeline, etc.

Hopefully the description above has whetted your appetite, but don’t get too hungry: a book like this takes time, so we’re shooting for a midsummer 2026 manuscript submission, with publication to follow another year after that. The danger of any book like this is that intervening technological and cultural developments (*AI has entered the chat*) will make it feel a bit obsolete by the time it comes out, but we hope to dig deep enough to get under the surface waves of the latest innovations and dislocations—while still being concrete enough to make it really practically useful for everyone from pastors to policymakers.

Thankfully this is the sort of book that lends itself to some measure of serializing—that is, getting initial versions of a lot of the ideas out there in shorter or longer essays as the book comes together. So look for a lot of my Substacking and published writing to revolve around these themes in the year ahead.

And of course, it’s the sort of book that benefits from lots of feedback along the way—starting with your comments right now on this very post! If you have thoughts about angles Jared and I should be exploring, and books and articles we should be reading, please let us know!

Three Things You Should be Reading

• “The Age of Extinction” (Ross Douthat, New York Times): Perhaps you’ve already read this and am wondering how I just now did. But goodness me, if you haven’t, stop everything you’re doing and read it now. A fierce, eloquent, brutally honest analysis of our current techno-cultural predicament, and a clarion call to embrace the only forms of resistance that will give what's most human about humanity a chance at survival:

  Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward.

• “Meta’s Digital Companions will Talk Sex with Users—Even Children” (Wall Street Journal): A great companion piece (see what I did there? :-D) to Douthat’s essay from an investigative reporting angle. You may have seen the clip going around in which Mark Zuckerberg opines that, now that Meta has succeeded in depriving most Americans of all but three real friends, and we’re all “alone together,” he feels a great weight of social responsibility to sell us back virtual friends in their place. Anyone who knows anything about human nature should have zero surprise that one of the preferred uses for such virtual friends is erotic, and anyone who knows anything about the incentive structures of tech companies should have zero surprise that they’re designing their digital companions to be up for anything—even if the user is a minor. With a massive public backlash underway against the tech companies for their “move fast and break your children” approach to social media design 15 years ago, you’d have thought they learned something. Apparently not.

• “Antitrust’s Conservative Future” (Mark Meador, Commonplace): If the above two essays make you want to just throw in the towel, don’t give up quite yet. Conservatives, it seems, have finally woken up to the fact that concentrations of private power are every bit as dangerous to the individual citizen and to the body politic as concentrations of public power—indeed, perhaps more dangerous, inasmuch as they are less accountable. Thankfully, our Republican forebears took steps to ensure they were not wholly unaccountable, and the agency chiefly tasked with bringing them to heel, the Federal Trade Commission, is now staffed with two absolutely rock-solid commissioners—Andrew Ferguson and Mark Meador, not to mention Gail Slater as AAG for Antitrust at DOJ—all of whom fully understand the threat that Big Tech especially now poses to our way of life. In this simultaneously fiery and deeply learned speech outlining his vision for antitrust policy, the newest commissioner, Mark Meador, points us back to a much older form of conservatism that understands “free markets are not self-perpetuating—they require law enforcement to protect and maintain them.”

Two Things I’ve Published Recently

I’ve had precious little time to write lately, but I have put out a couple of columns worth your time.

• “Where Have All the Babies Gone?” (WORLD Opinions): A few weeks ago, I was in Budapest for the Danube Institute’s conference on “Family Formation and the Future.” Dire predictions and diverging diagnoses abounded, with a general consensus that the birth dearth was an urgent civilizational crisis but one that would be devilishly hard to solve. I offered a summary and synthesis of some of the key takeaways in this column.

• “Will the Trump Tariffs Work? A Word of Support” (WORLD Opinions): Everyone’s talking about the tariffs, but few seem to understand the logic behind them. That’s certainly understandable, given the chaotic rollout and conflicting signals from within the administration. But the basic idea certainly isn’t crazy, and we can’t have a fruitful conversation about how best they can be adapted to secure and strengthen the American policy unless we grapple with just how disastrous the last few decades of free trade have been.

One Thing to Put on Your Radar

If you were reading this Substack back in January, you’ll recall that I was closely involved in the coalition to fight back against children’s access to pornography, an issue currently before the Supreme Court in the case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. Although we never know exactly when the Court is going to hand down their opinions, we know that it will have to be sometime in the next two months, and could in theory be any day now. Based on oral arguments in January, we are quite optimistic for some kind of good result, though the devil is very much in the details as to how exactly the Court decides to handle the case. It could mark a revolution in the history of the internet, or a modest tweak to existing case law. Either way, our coalition will be making a lot of noise about it, to continue to push policy-makers to tackle the crisis of youth pornography exposure. I’ll be sharing key essays in this Substack as soon as there’s something to share.

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