If you're a believer in technology, it used to be that you were a liberal. You believed in trying new ideas. Conservatives were in favor of keeping things the same.
The technocrats are increasingly siding with conservatives. The VCs are talking about Girard and memetic desire. They oppose the increasingly liberal mass media. Elon Musk believes Americans need to have more kids, not less. They emphasize growing the pie over redistributing it. Some of the top entrepreneurs and VCs speak against both woke politics and cancel culture.
Technocrats still have left-leaning views. UBI grew popular in SF in recent years. Big tech companies put banners on their sites supporting BLM. They believe in climate change, legalizing drugs, etc. The tech elite are responsible for building some of the very technologies that conservatives blame for the undoing of our social fabric.
From working in tech I see a divide between employees. Some are woke, others are secretly conservative. The woke are the loudest. The VCs and old Silicon Valley pioneers are increasingly conservative.
Lots of the people who appear liberal to conservatives are better described as libertarian. It may seem like a distinction without a difference. Both support drug use. Neither propose real solutions for homelessness. However, both the left and right believe they know what a good system looks like. Libertarians by definition don't. They leave the choice to the individual. If these individuals want to organize, libertarians have no problem with that. Conservatives fear that with enough libertarians, we may no longer have a country.
Conservatives have have mixed feelings about technology. Technology often disrupts traditional systems, and yet societies that don't innovate do get stomped out by those that do. Conservatives know this and aren't against all forms of technology, just the ones with negative social repercussions.
Libertarianism isn't the enemy of conservatives. Liberals may see abortion as a liberating technology that allows women to choose whether they get pregnant or not. Libertarians simply acknowledge those people. The libertarian is closer to the conservative view than the liberal is. It's hard to go from "abortion is good" to "abortion is bad". It's much easier to go from "let people do what they want" to "I wouldn’t do it myself", to "people shouldn't get abortions". Libertarianism may be distasteful in how it seems ambivalent to moral questions, but ultimately it represents no man's land that both the left and right can fight over.
Conservatives aren't against new ideas. They believe in building things. The God of the Bible is a creator and Christ is a carpenter. The divide between technocrats and conservatives is on social issues, but there is a bridge. The question they both need to answer is: "are traditional values a social technology?" If so, losing tradition would be more like Europe’s descent into the dark ages, or the US developing the space shuttle and then decommissioning it without a better replacement. Losing traditional values would be a step backward in social technology.
Most people believe in social technologies, whether they realize it or not. The two day weekend is a social technology to ensure people are well rested. The Bible gave one day of rest. What makes it a social technology is it sets up common rules for people live by. Money is a social technology in that we all need to agree what we use for money. Social tech ranges from the trivial to the indispensable.
Liberals, even in their support of technology, have come to take it for granted, in the same way that conservatives claim liberals take many things for granted. Conservatives don’t want to destroy the economy for the sake of the environment. Hurting the economy would mean more struggling people and less money to dedicate to making new things.
The view is compatible with something Elon Musk says again and again: "the cure cannot be worse than the disease". Recently, he's donated $100 million to the carbon capture prize. Regardless of what you think of climate change, he's attempting to save the planet by adhering to conservative ideals, not socialist ones. Instead of begging others to make sacrifices for the environment, he sacrifices his own money. Instead of pushing electric on you like the left has, he instead succeeds by making the cars better. If anything, he's a demonstration of conservative values working. Conservatives aren't against clean air.
Elon Musk believes that technology doesn't move forward on its own. Conservatives believe that we need a moral system in order to function as a society. For the two to connect, the technocrats need to be convinced that technology cannot continue to improve without a more traditional moral system. If not, I think technocrats will continue to be a thorn in the side of conservatives. They'll continue to disrupt tradition as the social fabric unravels.
Found someone had the same insight I had (but 3 years earlier), and he's a far more serious thinker:
Social Technology | Samo Burja
https://samoburja.com/social-technology
Feels great to know someone else has gone down this path, but also means maybe I don't need to since he does this sort of thing for a living. I started following him on Twitter