Demystifying The Tech Right

Rather than champion transhumanism, it melds business interests with New Right signaling

The so-called “Tech Right” generates a lot of attention. Not so long ago, the entire tech industry was seen as a woke behemoth committed to the destruction of Donald Trump and conservatism. Now the tech industry is seen as cozy with the Right. Figures such as Elon Musk are conservative leaders, with growing interest in what these tech titans believe.

Many conservatives worry that “transhumanism” lies at the heart of the Tech Right. This apparently terrifies them and convinces them to see this force is as much of an enemy as the Left. Transhumanism is mostly a strawman to encourage support for an idiotic form of right-wing populism. These conservatives need to believe that the Tech Right wants to promote eugenics and encourage man-robot combinations so they can advocate for Ludditism and crypto-socialism.

The Tech Right, mostly, believes the same things as the rest of the Right. Even a lot of Tech Right people are susceptible to transhumanist hysteria. They’re certainly not invested in an atheistic, robot dystopia. What differentiates them from other conservatives is that ech bros are more online and try to combine ideology with business strategy.

Rather than imagining a tech bro strawman who wants to turn himself into Frankenstein’s monster to defeat death, observers should look elsewhere for representatives of this movement. The New York Times provided one in a profile of Katherine Boyle, a millennial tech investor. The Times’ dubbed her the Tech Right’s own Phyllis Schlafly. Her politics are far more aligned with the late conservative pioneer than it is with transhumanism. Boyle’s main concerns are economic stagnation, the fertility crisis, the woke left, excesses of government bureaucracy, and the apparent spiritual crisis in this country.

The profile explains her view of America’s woes:

Her “spiritual crisis” diagnosis explains many of the problems she sees in our country: Our young boys are overmedicated. Millennials are stuck in a prolonged adolescence. Irony has helped kill American innovation. For many of these problems, she blames the leftist ideologies that she claims dominated the last decade. She believes most would be helped by a return to the nation’s Western, Judeo-Christian roots.

The profile mentions that her childhood taught her a “deep reverence for armed service members, God and country.” She’s a devout Catholic, not an atheist.

This is pretty standard conservative stuff. She’s far from transhumanist. She even warns about the dangers of transhumanism on X. If anything, there isn’t anything “new” about the Tech Right. These opinions would have found a home in National Review in the pre-Trump era.

What makes it different is who voices these opinions, how they’re combined with tech’s business interests, and the eagerness to work with Trump.

In the not-so distant past, the Tech Right would’ve been seen as a libertarian thing. These tech bros just wanted the government to leave them alone to build new phones and apps. They were socially liberal and economically conservative. Elon Musk blew up that image in his embrace of several far-right proposals. Much of the Tech Right is still committed to libertarian economic policies, but they no longer advocate for the social views of the Cato Institute.

These types, as mentioned above, were previously associated with the worst excesses of Woke. Big Tech rigging the internet to favor Joe Biden in the 2020 election and James Damore’s famous letter exposing Google’s left-wing bias are just a few examples. While much of the industry is still committed to progressive politics, a number of its leaders are now trying to work with Trump and conservatives. Four years of Biden convinced many of them that Democrats are bad for their business.

That brings up a distinguishing part of the Tech Right: its desire to fuse ideology with the interests of the tech industry. Katherine Boyle probably truly believes what she says. But it’s also combined with the desire to sell her business. Her venture capital fund aims to solve America’s problems through “building companies that support the national interest.” It’s political ideology as a marketing pitch.

Not all Tech Right political positions are determined by business interest. Elon’s various enthusiasms have even hurt his businesses. But most of these figures do center their politics around their private enterprises. These are business people after all, not pundits and influencers.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s certainly better than the corporate execs who tried to combine woke and business. It’s just something to keep in mind when analyzing the Tech Right’s ideology. It’s primarily motivated by business interest and often resembles a marketing strategy.

That’s not very different from traditional GOP donors. These businessmen primarily supported causes and candidates that were good for their economic interests. The difference is that they were very offline and didn’t try to become pundits themselves. They left that to other people.

The extremely online nature of the Tech Right makes them susceptible to adopting the memes and talking points of the New Right. Elon, once again, exemplifies this. But there are limits to this. Musk infamously defended Indian immigration and opposes tariffs, two issues he’s found himself on the opposite side of the New Right.

The true politics of the Tech Right isn’t as threatening or as interesting as transhumanism. It’s a lot more benign and, well, duller. For the most part, it’s standard conservatism. That’s not a bad thing. It’s good that people in power realize wokeness is a bad bet and try to be more right-wing. We should merely mistake it for a revolutionary threat to our way of life.

Conservative skepticism of the tech industry is understandable. Its entwinement with the military-industrial complex and overall power can still be a cause of concern. But we can at least be rest assured the tech titans don’t want to turn us into power sources for robots. They’re not that transhumanist.