The Great Tech-Family Alliance

Listening to President Trump’s inaugural address, I couldn’t help but be struck by the references to colonizing Mars, splitting the atom, and holding all the world’s knowledge in the palm of our hands. After years of denigration by Washington, it’s refreshing to see technology again celebrated as the engine of American economic growth in an administration focused on innovation. Finally, we’re seeing enthusiasm for the myriad ways that government can leverage our technology sector to promote American dynamism—building companies that support the national interest—by unleashing limitless energy, deterring conflict, and manufacturing abundance of all kinds.

This excites me because American dynamism is my day job, my life’s work and my calling. But it also makes me think about my other job—which is also, according to the ordo amoris, my most consequential job. This job, too, is deeply tied to building American dynamism in the most concrete way. And that job is my work and my duty as a mother. For all the talk of technology and the state, there should be much more talk about the other institution that is perpetually at war with it: the institution of the family.

All of history is a war between the family and the state. Any college student studying Plato’s Republic learns quickly of this fundamental conflict, though it’s often only discussed in political theory classes. But in practice, it’s clear that these two institutions are often incompatible in their quest for control over how we live, what we believe, what we worship, our history, and our daily reality. If this sounds a bit hyperbolic at a time when the family now seemingly sits comfortably inside the state, that is because the state has been winning this civilizational war against the family for decades.

The long 20th century should teach us this: that time tells a story of American growth and excellence, but it can also be accurately seen as a story of the weakening of the family. It begins with the fundamental transformation of industry, where mothers and fathers are pulled from the home to work in factories, then companies. It proceeds with two atrocious world wars in Europe, where millions of families are decimated. The strength of states is greatly intertwined with war—states grow stronger during wartime while families are literally destroyed. It’s no coincidence that as we look to our European neighbors, we now see a continent subsumed with regulation, censorship, green authoritarianism, and a birth rate that predicts their demise. A very strong state, yes. But very anemic families.

That century then moves to communism and the Cold War, where we see communism’s brutal attack on the family for both political and psychological reasons. The one-child-policy that ravaged China with forced infanticide wasn’t just to remind mothers that the good of society matters more than the good of her home; it was a reminder that the family is not, nor will ever be, powerful enough to compete with the Chinese Communist Party.

Authoritarian regimes always attack the family first. Christian imagery was removed in the Soviet Union for this reason: The core institution at the heart of the Christian Church is the Holy Family. Our myths and stories in the Judeo-Christian and Western traditions are tales of tribes, families, lineage, and the authority that comes from them. This is why the greatest enemy of the family is always authoritarianism, and why there are so many clashes between the state and the family system.

Now, what does all this have to do with technology? The adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” always rings very true in Washington. Coalitions are built by identifying the most serious threat and finding common ground from that. Strange bedfellows are sometimes necessary, and to paraphrase Peter Thiel, what do a general, a businessman, and a priest have in common except for their shared hatred of communism? For a good half century, the conservative movement in America was a tenuous alliance of business owners, social conservatives, and hawks who came together to defeat the 20th-century authoritarian threat.

But we are now faced with a new authoritarianism. The tech industry, once able to peacefully bury its head in the golden sands of California, has woken up to its most important choice: whether to ally with the powers of the state—as Big Tech did during the COVID era, becoming the useful pawn of an authoritarian censorship apparatus—or to rapidly course-correct and ally itself with decentralized authority.

There is no greater decentralized authority than that of the family. And the philosophy of the early internet is at its nature, too, one of decentralization. It prizes creative destruction—birth and death and birth again—of ideas and companies, and the freedom that comes from ensuring that no central authority can ever control, stifle, or break the long arc of creation and innovation. This is fundamentally the philosophy of technology, and one we must ensure is embedded in our most consequential technologies going forward.

In recent decades, tech has moved away from its natural inclination to support decentralization and open-source authority. Marc Andreessen has called this movement to squash open-source innovation in AI a greater threat to freedom than anything tech has ever experienced, including the most recent social media censorship wars. Indeed, the open-source debate is not merely a heady debate of how the nerds in San Francisco will architect artificial intelligence. It is a political debate of control, just like the battles affecting families throughout history. The same calls for “safety” and “harm avoidance” that regulators use to attack innovators have been used to decimate family rights in education, health care, and religious freedom for decades. We should recognize these rhetorical attacks for what they are: disingenuous power grabs.

Much is now being written of the nascent alliance between the so-called “tech right” and this administration, and how weird it is for the transhumanists of Silicon Valley to find common ground with a MAHA mother in Missouri. These arguments miss a core truth: These people have identified a common evil. They understand that the gravest threat to the flourishing of their business, their industry, their family’s health, and their freedom is a censorious and authoritarian state.

Accordingly, we are now living through a generational political shift, whereby an industry of builders can choose to ally with the most organic, nurturing, and future-focused institution that nature has ever created: the family. And I believe it’s in the best interest of both tech and the family to do so.

While this ideological alignment is important, it doesn’t help a mother with her child care. It doesn’t lower the cost of education and building a future for our children. The question mothers and fathers care about most is how technology can make their lives easier, safer, and more prosperous.

I want to focus today on three concrete things tech can do to support and strengthen the family. One, we must change the way we work. Two, we must change the way we educate our children. And three, we must work to radically transform the culture by making families a priority again. If we can build trust through these common goals, I believe we’ll see a thriving alliance between tech and the family for generations.

Let’s start with work.

Every major technological innovation fundamentally reshapes both work and family, whether through a physical innovation, like electricity spurring the second Industrial Revolution, or a biological innovation, like a single pill allowing millions of women to enter the workforce in the 20th century. Digital innovation will be similarly transformative, which is why we must ensure that it truly brings benefits for the family.

At the height of COVID and a few weeks after I gave birth to my first son, I wrote an essay titled “Can Zoom Save the American Family?” At the time I was hopeful that working from home would be a transformative shift to knowledge work, by removing the morning commute a few days a week, letting parents be more present in the family home, and allowing the “always on” culture of the internet to replace the 9-to-5 rigidity of sitting at one’s desk. I still believe this is the best model of white-collar work for the 21st century.

But recently, we’ve seen many leaders in corporate America turn against the work-from-home idea, arguing that the experiment in their companies has failed. I will certainly concede that work from home isn’t a universal success. It’s not right for companies building in the physical world or for a company—and yes, even a government—focused on downsizing or reducing headcount. But I believe that work from home remains a crucial benefit for the working mothers of young children.

The white-collar workforce is becoming increasingly dominated by women, who are entering and graduating college at higher rates than men (an obvious problem for anyone who believes in biology and is watching macro trends in the Western world: the declining birthrate, the increasing age of new mothers and fathers, men dropping out of the workforce entirely). There are some in tech who hope that the deus ex machina of economic productivity will be artificial intelligence and automation, but tech must not make accelerationism its singular contribution to this moment.

We must also normalize working from home as a benefit for mothers of young children. Not a right, but a benefit. It is more important than fertility benefits, maternity benefits, child care benefits. I single out mothers here because we can’t ignore the trends showing that women workers are essential to the growth of the American economy—and we desperately need more of those working women to become mothers.

On top of this, work from home is not the only way that technology is supporting the family. It is also making the family more entrepreneurial. Etsy, Shopify, payments technology, and small-business software have made it possible for anyone anywhere in America to turn their hobbies into storefronts, starting countless small businesses across the country. For all the denigration of the influencer economy, there are countless mothers and fathers who’ve used the tooling of the internet to sell their ideas and their goods from the comfort of their kitchen table. This means a mother can now earn income from the school parking lot or while her children nap. And it means she has much more opportunity to support a family while remaining present in her home.

The second way technology can support the family is by improving and reducing the cost of education. We are currently experiencing an education revolution, wherein many states are promoting education choice through programs like education savings accounts, which return tax dollars to parents so they can make the best school selections for their children. Technology is the backbone of this movement: from instant verification to compliance software to the payment layer that provides cash to parents, to new products and for tutoring, homeschooling, and lessons. And we must continue to fund education innovation in the private sector to ensure that this technology reaches parents faster.

Beyond school choice, artificial intelligence is on the verge of fundamentally transforming how our kids learn, and it should be utilized to build infinitely patient and extremely knowledgeable tutors for every child in this country. Bloom’s 2 sigma problem, for example, which tells us that one-on-one instruction is the best way to educate children, should now be the right of all children in America. The learning revolution that’s beginning will reshape elementary education. And it should allow us to fundamentally rethink how children and parents prepare for life in the 21st century.

The final thing tech can do is both the most important and the most overlooked. Tech must help fundamentally reshape the culture by making America pro-family again.

I was recently asked how I would make motherhood high status if given the opportunity, and many people were surprised by my suggestions. I didn’t mention tax incentives, reducing the cost of childbirth, or increasing the housing supply—all important parts of a pro-family agenda that others are better equipped to discuss. Instead, my suggestions were small, focused on seemingly insignificant changes to the culture, which can have an outsize impact on altering the status hierarchy of daily life. We are living in an age of memetic power and memetic war. Meme it and we will be it, the operating principle goes. This means that we need a society that praises the family in little ways, both on screen and off.

I would argue that technology is already doing a better job of this, as many platforms and popular influencers now celebrate motherhood, homeschooling or family-centric ways of living. But the physical world can help signify these priorities as well, through things like changing the name of “carpool lanes” to family lanes, making it a norm that families always board first in all forms of transportation, and ensuring that parking lots have family-reserved parking for the safety of mothers and children.

These are small tweaks, yes, but memes are powerful signifiers—and can have a tremendous impact on how a society communicates its priorities. All culture is downstream of technology. Any founder understands that tweaks to an algorithm can have an outsize impact on how the culture evolves. Sometimes a single influencer on Instagram can have greater effect on collective behavior than the smartest tax policies. This means that we must establish our priorities and build them into the culture, on screen and off, to create the downstream effect of stronger families.

I don’t want to end by focusing on the enemies of tech and the family, but rather the common values that tie us together. Many have asked me over the years to describe the core philosophy of American dynamism, which some see as aligning tech with the state by bringing technology into government. As I mentioned in the beginning of this talk, it is essential that the technologists help unleash dynamism in America. But this movement is not statist—it is first and foremost a philosophy of creation and growth in support of the national interest—or, in other words, the nation of the American people. There is no nation without the family. And I believe that the family—not the state—is the true institution at the core of building American dynamism.

Many in tech have turf wars about atoms versus bits, or which companies are truly doing the most good for society. But the philosophy of American dynamism is that building in and of itself is a good thing. And building a family is the ultimate good. There is nothing that focuses us more on the future, because no company can compete with the longevity of the family; it is the institution built for scale, for infinity, that will continue for long after we’ve left this earth. There is no growth, no arc of human innovation, and frankly no America without the family. It is our duty as those who recognize this civilizational truth to always build in service of it.