Tech Policy is the New Family Policy

Why I'm cautiously optimistic about J.D. Vance--and proud to be a Virginian

Jul 23, 2024

Amidst the landslide of earth-shaking political news the past two weeks—the new GOP platform, the assassination attempt, the RNC, and now Biden’s departure—it’s feeling hard to stay on the trail I was planning to blaze for this Substack. And indeed, I’ve had lots of folks asking me to share my thoughts on what the new GOP platform means for social conservatism, and what I think of J.D. Vance. For the most part, I will leave such reflections to others more practiced in such punditry (see the “Recommended Reads” below for a few samples); however, I do hope to answer these questions in my own roundabout way in due course.

Here's the hypothesis I want to venture for you, which I’ll be expanding upon in the coming weeks: tech policy is the new family policy. And whatever else you may think of him, J.D Vance deserves credit for being one of the first to realize this, and one of the most consistent to articulate this over the past few years.

At the first National Conservatism conference in 2019, Vance captivated me with his speech, “Beyond Libertarianism,” in which he singled out Silicon Valley as the clearest demonstration of what was wrong with the free-market “conservative” status quo:

“What I'm going after is the view that so long as public outcomes and social goods are produced by free individual choices, we shouldn't be too concerned about what those goods ultimately produce. For example, in Silicon Valley, it is common for neuroscientists to make much more at technology companies like Apple and Facebook—where they quite literally are making money addicting our children to devices and applications that warp their brains—than neuroscientists who are trying to cure Alzheimer's.”

For years, conservatives have been at best apathetic bystanders, and at worst, enthusiastic cheerleaders, as this new form of “limbic capitalism” has run amok through our communities, schools, churches, and families. This is just the market doing what it does best, they’ve said: rewarding innovation and maximizing choice. Any negative byproducts, we’ve been told, are simply the unavoidable side-effects of freedom: if you give people more freedom to make their own choices, sometimes they’ll make bad ones; but whatever harms may result from their choices are dwarfed by the harms of trying to limit choice through law. Huh, that’s funny…sounds almost pro-choice, doesn’t it?

Vance, in any case, wasn’t having it:

“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. If people are spending too much time addicted to devices designed to addict them, we can't just blame consumer choice. We have to blame ourselves for not doing something. If people are killing themselves because they're being bullied in online chat rooms, we can't just say that parents need to exercise more responsibility.
We live in an environment that’s shaped by our laws and public policy, and we cannot hide from that fact anymore. I think the question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: 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.”
(read the full text here)

Now, it remains to be seen just how much a Vice-President Vance will make tech policy a priority, but his record in the Senate thus far is promising. Many conservatives may be lamenting the sudden hushing of pro-life rhetoric, but I would say this at least: I would rather have a conservative who is committed to actually tackling the upstream technological developments that have rendered pro-life priorities quaint and implausible, than a conservative who fulminates from his soapbox about the rights of the unborn while encouraging a culture among those already born that teaches them that their bodies are alienable commodities.

It was always rather strange, after all, that conservatives should be so worried about public school teachers but so happy to welcome Silicon Valley oligarchs into their kids’ bedrooms, given the aggressive social progressivism of most tech leaders and most social media influencers. But of course, the harms of Big Tech go beyond content—as poisonous as that has been in many cases. As Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message”—the form of a communication technology shapes us as deeply as the content it communicates. In the case of digital media, this form was liquid, plastic, and evanescent, and encouraged its users to remake themselves in its image.

Conservatives, then, have been willing accomplices in their own destruction till now, and if there’s going to be any turning of the tide (of which I am not overly sanguine, but then again, see my first post, about the Clapham Sect), we will need to swim much further upstream to tackle the sources of our undoing. Again, if you’re intrigued or skeptical by these brief remarks, look for much more to come on this theme.

The Commonwealth Takes the Lead

Some of you may have wondered whether, in titling this Substack “Commonwealth Dispatches,” I wasn’t making a pun on my new home, one of four US states to proudly style itself a “commonwealth.” I confess, a bit shamefacedly, that the thought never crossed my mind—but now that it has, I enthusiastically embrace the double-entendre, as I have enthusiastically embraced my new home state (where I was, in any case, a loyal citizen previously from 2018-21). In particular, I was extremely proud of the Commonwealth of Virginia a couple weeks ago when Gov. Glenn Youngkin took the lead on tech policy by announcing a new statewide initiative for phone-free schools. The Executive Order didn’t beat around the bush, stating,

“The necessity of implementing cell phone-free education in Virginia’s K-12 public schools is increasingly evident. Parents, public health professionals, educators, and other stakeholders across the Commonwealth are expressing concern over the alarming mental health crisis and chronic health conditions affecting adolescents, such as depression and anxiety, driven in part by extensive social media usage and widespread cell phone possession among children.”

I was grateful for the opportunity to participate in a “faith leaders’ briefing” about the Executive Order last week, and extremely encouraged by the commitment of the state policy leaders overseeing its implementation. As things stand, the policy is fairly open-ended, allowing each of Virginia’s 131 school districts to decide how best to implement phone-free education. Some no doubt will take only the half-measure of banning smartphones during instructional time—it boggles the mind that we would need an executive order for that!—but as they will be rigorously collecting and collating performance data to determine best practices going forward, the flexibility on implementation will provide a valuable public-policy learning opportunity.

Before Jonathan Haidt made this issue a household conversation item, my colleague Clare Morell and I wrote an article for National Affairs calling for forceful public policy action—especially at schools—to reduce smartphone dependence. In our conclusion, we argued, “Some problems are simply too widespread, have gained too much momentum, or are too nearly inescapable for individual families, community institutions, or businesses to overcome them on their own. The soft tyranny of the smartphone is one such problem.”

Newly Published

“Dispatches from the Anxious Generation”: My reflections on Jonathan Haidt’s very important new book, The Anxious Generation, is finally up at WORLD Opinions, and is sure to be of interest to anyone interested in today’s Substack. (Hopefully, that’s all of you, because I will be amplifying its three main observations in three upcoming Commonwealth Dispatches!)
“Settle Only for the Truth”: My reflections on the assassination attempt, and our reflexive reactions to it, appeared at WORLD Opinions last Wednesday. This column touched on some similar themes to those of last Monday’s Substack, so if you appreciated that, you may enjoy this column too, and find it a helpful one to share with friends and family trying to make sense of these historic events.
Richard Hooker and the Christian Virtues: I spotlighted this last week, but it wasn’t technically released until Thursday, and in any case, it’s a book! Pricey, I know, but it will look beautiful on your shelf, and will provide a great introduction to Richard Hooker’s thought within the great Christian moral tradition. My contribution is entitled, “‘Shall These Fruitless Jars and Janglings Never Cease?’: Richard Hooker’s Critique of Curiosity,” addressing a theme I’ll be returning to from time to time in the coming months.

Coming down the Pipe

My next column at WORLD Opinions reflects on the scandal created by porn star Amber Rose taking the stage at the RNC last week, and why we shouldn’t be at all surprised by it. Unless conservatives re-assess their priorities in a hurry, we can expect digital prostitution to become about as quotidian and unremarkable as cable news.
I’ve been talking a bit about on this Substack about James Davison Hunter’s very important new book Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, and so I’m now pleased to report I’ve been asked to review it for the University Bookman. I imagine it’ll be a little while before it appears, but I’ll let you know when it does, and you can expect to read more about it here as I organize my thoughts these next few weeks.
This is still a few months out, but I want to go ahead and start teasing it here, as it will be my most important publication to date, distilling more than a decade’s reflections on the intersection of theology, ethics, politics, and indeed economics and technology. Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License is available for pre-order now!

On the Bookshelf

Patrick Deneen, Regime Change (2023): In keeping with my general habit of never participating in a new fad until it’s no longer cool, I’m reading this book a year later than all the cool kids did. But, with many friends and foes both convinced that Trump/Vance are planning to implement a postliberal regime change in January, I figured I’d better go ahead and familiarize myself.
Yuval Levin, American Covenant (2024): Should be finishing this up today or tomorrow. It makes for a very interesting counterpoint both to Hunter and to Deneen—not nearly so dramatic or exciting; in fact, perhaps downright anticlimactic in its obstinate focus on the un-sexy work of repairing broken institutions. But a much-needed counterpoint for just that reason. Again, look for my review in FusionAIER before too long.
Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (1996): Ok, I actually finished reading this several days ago, but my goodness—I’d forgotten just how extraordinary the final chapter, “The Redemption of Society” is. Its reflections on the Christian origins and subsequent deformation of political liberalism shaped my own arguments in The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty, and The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed, but I had forgotten just how indebted I was to it.

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If you have any questions or comments or pushback on anything you read here today (or recommendations for research leads I might want to chase down), please email me (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com). I can’t promise I’ll have time to reply to every email, but even if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sure I’ll benefit from hearing your thoughts and disagreements.