The New Right-Wing Tech Intelligentsia

Summary

The offices of Arion Press, the last vertically integrated bookmaker in the United States, are tucked into a museum-like building with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a clear summer weeknight, and I’m here for a happy hour for local writers and publications — which in San Francisco typically means tech writers and tech publications.Gatherings like this one are microcosms of a wider tech culture that, over the past few years, has shifted decisively toward the political right. This trend is clear as day among billionaire CEOs, but it can now be felt even in everyday spaces like this happy hour, where left-liberals and rabid nationalists rub shoulders.Entering the lobby, I’m confronted by a wall of neatly shelved metal type for different fonts, an open bar, and stacks of the periodicals featured at this gathering: Kernel Magazine and Asterisk Magazine.Kernel is a slick print outfit covering tech from a “progressive,” “techno-optimist” perspective. The typical reader is a young techie, but the kind who added on a humanities minor in college and still writes poetry on the side. This is also roughly the image of their editorial collective, which emerged in 2021 from a cluster of Stanford undergrads. One of them, Jasmine Sun, co-hosts this event. Sun is a rightwardly mobile liberal who at a previous happy hour announced earnestly to the crowd, “I don’t hate billionaires.” Maybe this is because Kernel has received funds from Omidyar Network (as in Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay) and the libertarian Mercatus Center, among others.But Kernel itself is not a mouthpiece for billionaire interests. Its contributors, comprising programmers, artists, and investors, are enthusiasts of technology through and through, but try to reckon with its terrible failings. Kernel splits the difference: on the one hand, it publishes apologetics for crypto and angsty startup founder fiction; and on the other hand, it provides a platform for critical stories on for-profit prison phones ...