For eight full hours yesterday in Washington, at the trendy, all-exposed-brick Union Market event space AutoShop, the intellectual vanguard of the right gathered to hash out the future of American conservatism — and how its institutions might harness the disruptive forces that are shaping it, both technological and otherwise. The center-right Lincoln Network, which hosted the event — all-day live version of its "Realignment" podcast — is one of the Washington policy outfits most laser-focused on the intersection of future tech and political ideology. The idea was to hash out how the tech-minded "New Right" might keep its own project of "disruption" going as the fervor of the Trump era cools off ever so slightly. The conservative wonks and thinkers who gathered in D.C.'s northeast yesterday are deeply interested in building the future in both a literal and philosophical sense. (See also: an essay published in the most recent issue of The New Atlantis, titled "Can There Be a Conservative Futurism?") So it was particularly notable who attended from outside the right-wing tent — namely the anti-monopoly maven Matt Stoller, who joined former Trump administration official and editor-in-chief of the policy journal American Affairs Julius Krein onstage. Is there really common ground here? Stoller and Krein opined together on the future of the event's titular "Realignment," specifically the bipartisan shift toward both antitrust and domestic-minded tech and manufacturing policy represented respectively by Lina Khan's FTC chairship and the CHIPS and Science Act. They both want to usher in an era of resurgent American industry, but their feelings about tech and business could be as conflicted as their party politics — not to mention what, to them, is a stubbornly persistent status quo in Washington. "When you get a Lina Khan at the FTC it's great, and she's doing a lot of the things conservatives demanded the FTC do," Stoller said. "But then the Wall Street Journal will just write 15 articles about how Lina Khan is a woke Marxist. And then all of a sudden in Congress all the Republicans are like, 'She's a woke Marxist!'" "I think that the 'Realignment' agenda does work," said Krein, "And I think you can see that with J.D. Vance's win… But I would agree that at this point right-wing populism is not particularly credible because it's a lot more sort of MAGA noises than anything." While think-tank rock stars like Stoller and Krein spoke with candor about the realpolitik necessary to reshape government's approach to tech, one speaker from the tech world argued that conservative philosophy is actually embedded in certain technologies, or at least the blockchain. Danny O'Brien, senior fellow for the blockchain-storage-focused Filecoin Foundation, made a case to the assembled audience that's usually made in much more vociferous terms by maximalist libertarian Bitcoin boosters — that blockchain is a fundamentally conservativetechnology in how it protects individual rights from venal and vulnerable centralized organizations. It also became clear that not everyone is on board with the version of tech governance that people like Krein and some of the Lincolneers have in mind. The conservative world is ideologically diverse on tech and nearly everything else. Will Rinehart, a tech researcher at Utah State University's Center for Growth and Opportunity, outlined his critiques in a Twitter thread about the conference (along with, to be sure, some compliments). When I spoke with Will he critiqued in particular Stoller's explanation of the political reality around Khan's FTC chairship, saying, as he also tweeted, that the process of her nomination itself was to blame. It might seem like small potatoes, but it's a neat reminder of what stands in the way of the sweeping changes and innovations planned by many of the convention's attendees: The bureaucratic vagaries, machinations, and plain old grudges that still make things go in Washington.
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