Dystopia

Tech Elites vs. Government: Katherine Boyle’s Strange Speech

The latest attempt by tech to adopt Republican talking points and pander to ultra-religious conservatives.

Gil Duran

26 Feb 2025 — 9 min read

A Silicon Valley VC paints a very strange picture of the relationship between family and government. (Shutterstock

Today: Some quick notes on a very unusual speech that deserves a lot of attention. Please share with anyone else who might be writing on this stuff.

The Point: In a strange yet revealing speech titled "Technology and the Family," Andreessen Horowitz general partner Katherine Boyle delivered an amazing specimen of anti-government pablum.

Speaking to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Feb. 24, the venture capitalist generally framed "the state" as the enemy of "the family," suggesting that only technology can liberate humanity from the oppressive clutches of … the democratic state?

The state, she says, has "been winning this civilizational war against the family for decades."

The illogical government-bashing screed is the latest attempt by Silicon Valley oligarchs to adopt Republican talking points and pander to ultra-religious conservatives.

The Back Story: Sorry, but you have to read this speech for yourself to get the full effect. It appears to have only been posted on X. Click here to read the thread.

I encourage you to read it closely and tell me what you see.

Summary: 'Technology and the Family'

Boyle’s odd sermon seems to equate most government actions with communist dictatorships (and the literal murder of Jesus) while positioning tech bros as the ordained saviors of the traditional family.

With breathtaking historical revisionism, she ignores how unregulated capitalism actually harmed families while government protections strengthened them ... all while peddling the absurd notion that tech platforms are somehow the natural allies of family values.

Hilariously, she asserts that the same tech industry that created:

Addictive platforms that fragment family attention
Precarious gig work that undermines stable employment
Surveillance business models that monetize personal data
Supercharged child exploitation apps

…should be trusted as the guardian of family autonomy against the tyranny of democratic governance.

Deeper Dive: Boyle's Speech at AEI

Boyle begins by framing herself, in religious terms, as a mother with a duty to pursue "American Dynamism" (which is basically tech supremacy rebranded as patriotic gobbledygook).

My most consequential job according to the Ordo Amoris, a job that is deeply tied to building American Dynamism in the most concrete way. And that is my job and my duty as Mother.

Ordo Amoris is a Christian concept meaning "order of love." J.D. Vance recently used the term to justify Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID.

Boyle then argues that all of human history is a conflict between the family and the state (government):

For all the talk of Technology and the State, there should be much more talk about that 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.

This is a very weird statement that gives the impression that all governments are authoritarian, which is not the case.

In true Silicon Valley style, Boyle makes a faux-academic argument (involving Plato) to justify her claim that government opposes families. I won’t waste time on this specious interpretation, but it seems like a ploy to somehow prove that governments are mostly authoritarian and evil.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a Silicon Valley venture capitalist in 2025, everything looks like an opportunity to question the existence of government.

So Much for "Government of, By, and For the People" Who are you going to believe? Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, or some VC who used to work for a company that makes military drones?

Boyle continues:

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 tradition are ones of tribes, families, lineage, and the authority that comes from them. It's no surprise then that the Christian story begins with conception and childbirth. And the Holy Family's lineage ends with a mother watching in horror as the state tortures and murders her son. I'll say it again— all of history is a war between the family and the state.

Got that? The Roman government of Judea killed Jesus Christ, therefore all governments everywhere are always bad.

One wonders if Boyle has ever heard the word "fallacy."

Apparently, her only point in bringing up Jesus is to portray governments as Jesus-killers. This tactic brought to mind the book Unhumans, which uses a similar rhetorical device.

Now, check out this section here, where the 20th century – the century of American growth – is depicted as a scheme to weaken the family:

If this sounds a bit hyperbolic because 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. It is a story of American growth and excellence, but it can also be accurately told 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 in war while families are literally destroyed.

However, factory exploitation wasn’t a government imposition – it was industrialists maximizing profit with minimal oversight. She somehow misses that democratic governments responded to these abuses by establishing child labor laws, workplace safety regulations, and social insurance programs

Also, those "atrocious" wars were, uh, kind of important. Especially that second one, in which many of our family members proudly fought to protect freedom from fascism.

Many 20th-century government policies empowered and strengthened families. The New Deal, GI Bill, and the creation of the middle class through government programs are conveniently absent from Boyle's account.

Good democratic government is the best protector the family ever had. In fact, as Dr. George Lakoff has shown, our dominant political metaphor is Nation as a Family. We have "founding fathers," we send our "sons and daughters" to war, we defend the "homeland" (or the "motherland" or "fatherland"). We tend to view government as aligned with family, not as its opposition.

But, silly me, I am arguing facts...

Tech and Theocracy: Strange Bedfellows? Or Match Made in Silicon Valley?

Boyle goes on:

The greatest enemy of the family is authoritarianism. 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.

This is where it starts getting juicy. Boyle is about to let the cat out of the bag:

Strange bedfellows are sometimes necessary, and to paraphrase Peter Thiel, what does 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 threat of authoritarianism. 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: 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 no central authority can ever control, stifle, or break the long arc of creation and innovation.

Strange bedfellows, indeed. Again, this is inaccurate on multiple levels. We have representative government, right down to the neighborhood level. Our democratic system, imperfect though it may be, has a long and well-documented lineage tracing back through ancient Greece and Rome. In the United States, the "state" is us.

The anti-government sentiment reflected here seems like something you'd read in an old John Birch Society pamphlet. It's very alarming coming from a wealthy and privileged VC, but that seems to be the trend these days.

The idea is clear: Allow tech companies to govern...for the good of the family, of course!

Boyle goes on to argue that the Tech Right and the Old Right can find common cause by changing work, changing education and working to "radically transform the Culture by making families a priority again."

To drive home the point, she later declares it's time to "make America pro family again." But it's not clear that replacing the state with tech oligarchy is the best way to do that. History suggests the opposite is true.

Tech Savior Complex Meets Cognitive Dissonance

Analysis: This stilted speech was clearly designed as an effort to show great commonality between Radical Silicon Valley and the Radical Republican Old Guard. But it has some serious problems.

As I mentioned above, Boyle labors to position tech companies as the natural allies of family autonomy. But this requires ignoring that many modern tech platforms have created precisely the invasive capabilities and centralized control that she claims to oppose – only privatized rather than governmental.

In fact, so-called American Dynamism appears largely dependent on government contracts to make weapons of war and surveillance. It's not a question of whether we'll have Big Government – it's question of who that government will serve.

Some tech figures even claim they will "create" God in the form of AI, which ought to make any truly religious person's skin crawl. And let's not get started on transhumanism...

In Boyle's defense, she does give a rousing defense of work-from-home policies that she says are helpful to working mothers. But the main opposition to remote work comes from business, not government. In fact, remote work has no greater enemy than Elon Musk, the billionaire father of (at least) 13 children who derides remote work policies as "morally wrong."

Irony: Government-Created Technology as Anti-Government Force

Boyle romanticizes "decentralized technology" as the savior of the family. Yet the decentralized internet architecture she celebrates was largely developed through government funding.

DARPA, federal research grants, and public universities created the fundamental technologies that Silicon Valley later commercialized. The "decentralized authority" she claims as technology's natural state was actively designed by government researchers specifically to withstand centralized control.

Anti-government capitalists always try to ignore this undeniable reality because it undermines the myth of their own personal exceptionalism.

Framework for tech oligarchy?

What Boyle's speech ultimately represents is not a genuine philosophy of family empowerment but an intellectual framework for tech oligarchy.

Her vision would seemingly transfer power from public institutions to private technology companies and their wealthy investors – entities with no obligation to represent the public interest and every incentive to maximize profit extraction.

The "Tech Right" alliance she celebrates is not about strengthening families but about harnessing conservative cultural anxieties to advance tech industry power.

Boyle’s speech is not a genuine philosophy of family empowerment. It’s an mock-intellectual framework for tech oligarchy that seems designed to:

Position government as inherently oppressive
Portray tech companies as the true allies of families
Justify dismantling regulations and public accountability

This vision doesn’t eliminate authority. It merely privatizes authority.

Instead of elected representatives, we'd be governed by unelected tech billionaires with zero obligation to serve the public interest. Hmm. Sound familiar?

Boyle's speech was delivered at a routine tech policy conference in Washington. But it sounds a lot like an oddly religious-themed call for replacing democratic governance with digital feudalism.

Final word, from Boyle:

Seemingly insignificant changes to the Culture, which can have outsized impact on altering the status hierarchy of daily life. We are living an age of memetic power and memetic war. Meme it and we will be it.

Translation: Welcome to the Propaganda War.