The cop in your head is in charge now

Silicon Valley’s proposal to America

Surveillance Camera Players, 2002

I’ve recently become interested in Katherine Boyle, the Andreesen Horowitz partner behind a lot of the defense tech companies that have come to define Silicon Valley’s approach to MAGA. There was a really interesting profile of her in the New York Times this week, where they describe her as a “Phyllis Schlafly of the tech right”. There are some parallels: they’re both religious conservatives, globalization skeptics, highly educated working mothers constantly on the road extolling the virtues of women staying at home.

Boyle is one of the three founding partners of American Dynamism, a fund from a16z that “supports the national interest”. They define the national interest as “aerospace, defense, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, industrials, and manufacturing”. A quick look at their portfolio, past and present, shows some household names: SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril. Mostly defense companies, the most famous of which have an interest in marketing themselves as a lifestyle. They are trying to thread the needle between the techno-optimist right and the populist right, a synthesis that I think is probably the defining characteristic of the second Trump administration.

In his keynote speech to the American Dynamism conference last year, J.D. Vance (a good friend of Boyle’s) made a case for bridging these two sectors of the MAGA coalition together. “We can only win by doing what we always did: protecting our workers and supporting our innovators, and doing both of those things at the same time.” The MAGA project is about protection in the mob sense; you can make sure that you don’t end up the target of American might, but it will cost you, in loyalty or labor.

The philosophy of American Dynamism makes explicit that the entire purpose of America is to project military strength across the world and within its borders. It’s a project of unfettered violence. It’s all they have going for them. The modern conservative coalition is made up of groups that are so disparate from each other that they have very little in common besides a reverence of violence against those they perceive as weaker or subordinate to them. Why not make that the whole project? You can make a lot of money off of death.

I suppose one could say that we knew all of this already, but I’d like to argue that we actually didn’t. This newsletter is all about the distinctions between things; Boyle’s particular brand of conservatism is a product of Big Tech but not universally shared. Silicon Valley is a really optimistic place. They truly believe they’re changing the world even as they make it worse. That optimism used to prop up a fantasy of connecting the world, taking for granted a global society where everyone was on an equal playing field as a consumer—eyeballs in Jakarta are just as good for Meta’s shareholder value as eyeballs in Des Moines, and you could sell the same products to both. Now they’ve turned inward. Bombs abroad are just as profitable as deportations at home.

I think that’s important because basically no one else in American society is optimistic these days. A hallmark of MAGA is that even when they’ve won, they still need to be the victims of the universe. This strain of patriotic technofascism is cheerful and hopeful, which can be politically dangerous. I don’t think people respond well to pessimism because it already permeates every sphere of American society, and frankly, being a downer is really lame. What answer does the left have to that?

In this proposed vision of American nationalism, workers get to participate in the American project, and their labor maintains the national interest. The national interest, Silicon Valley proposes, is surveillance. The military Keynesianism of FDR and Harry Truman let American workers participate in policing the world. Now, they get to participate in policing themselves. I guess the conceit of fascism is that a lot of people already let the cop in their head take over.

---

---

I wrote about teachers’ unions, public schools and school governance under fascism for The Baffler. One thing that didn’t get a ton of airtime in the piece, but that I think there should be a lot more reporting on, is how public schools are adopting AI. If the country’s biggest teachers’ unions are going all in on AI in the schoolroom, then there have to be guardrails for student safety and privacy. It doesn’t seem like much progress has been made on that front.

ICE agents abducted nine street vendors on Canal Street on Tuesday. They were tipped off by a right-wing influencer named Savanah Hernandez, who posted a video of herself on Twitter harassing street vendors and tagging ICE to ask them to “check this corner out”. Many things about this situation are infuriating, but chief among them: this woman doesn’t even live here! If you don’t like New York or the street vendors who have always been part of the fabric of the city then you can leave. You don’t get to tell us who does or doesn’t belong in our city!

I didn’t watch the mayoral debate last night but apparently Zohran wants to build new nuclear power plants in New York State. I agree.

Tesla’s profits have dropped by more than a quarter, thanks to Trump administration policy. I would kill to be a fly on the wall of the Tesla board’s next meeting, where surely there must be some second thoughts about their plan to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire. (The autocorrect on the word processor I used to type this keeps trying to correct “trillionaire”. Touching! Maybe they’ll add it to the lexicon in 2026.)

Seth Moulton is running for Senate. Here’s my perhaps controversial opinion: I don’t think Ed Markey should be running for Senate again. He’s 80 years old! Don’t these people have grandkids? Moulton shouldn’t be running either, but a state with a Democratic supermajority and two of the most progressive senators should be capable of producing someone decent to run for this seat. I remember in 2020 when Jake Auchincloss, a thinly veiled Republican lacking in any kind of charm, won a crowded primary in Massachusetts’ 4^th District because the ‘left’ candidate turned out to be a fraud and progressive voters couldn’t get their shit together quickly enough to back the next best option. Everybody swore they would primary Auchincloss in 2022. No one did. He ran unopposed again in 2024. If Massachusetts’ progressive ecosystem couldn’t find a single person in four years in BOSTON to primary a 30-something unpopular congressman who proudly voted for George W. Bush, then what exactly can they do? If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. I lived in greater Boston for two and a half years and it was a formative experience, but I had some demoralizing experiences being involved with Massachusetts politics, including (especially!) with the left. Like, maybe they deserve Seth Moulton. I don’t know.

All that being said, I think it’s interesting that he’s returning AIPAC donations. This is obviously a political stunt that people will see through but I think it’s probably good that centrist Democrats feel the pressure to do something like this.

AI wants to help you buy beauty products. There are some interesting use cases here but I don’t know if consumers will like the consequences. Beauty has always been a more personalized customer experience the more money you’re willing to spend (Sephora and department store counters have testers, drugstores don’t), and I think this is another iteration of that. I stopped buying drugstore makeup once they started locking everything up at Walgreens. I wonder how much money people would be willing to spend just to talk to a store employee.

Everyone at the Claire’s bankruptcy hearing had a story about getting their ears pierced there. ““I’m prepared to head back to Claire’s” for another piercing if a buyer is found and keeps at least some of its roughly 1,300 U.S. stores open, Sussberg vowed.”

Airbnb prefers Alibaba’s Qwen model to ChatGPT because it’s faster. I wonder how many other tech companies are making similar decisions. So much for American Dynamism!

I don’t care about Graham Platner. I’d like to move on now.