The Future Stays Out of the 2024 Spotlight

Surprise, (no) surprise: After yesterday’s Super Tuesday primary contests it’s thuddingly obvious, if it weren’t already, that the U.S. is headed toward a rematch of the 2020 presidential election between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

This presents a bit of a dilemma for a newsletter with “future” in its name — not least because it’s a retread of the previous election, being fought between two people who grew up when a computer weighed 30 tons.

That doesn’t necessarily mean American policymaking is stuck in the past; Biden wants America to build better microchips, and both presidents have signed executive orders on AI. But tech wonks we consulted this week have been worried that government isn’t doing enough to boost one of the U.S.’s signature industries — and worried that innovation as a policy issue in its own right is getting left out in the cold.

“Having a positive [tech] agenda almost seems like a liability in our current political environment,” said Zachary Graves, director of the Foundation For American Innovation, a right-leaning tech policy nonprofit.

The CHIPS and Science Act was a notable bipartisan success story, one of the few over the last four years. But Congress has consistently fallen short in delivering the promised money for its longer-horizon research projects, and regulatory delays have plagued the openings of the new microchip plants that have been funded through the bill. The upcoming congressional spending deal features significant cuts to the National Institutes of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation, crucial offices for national tech innovation.

This is partially due to extremely familiar policy hurdles. Permitting for new construction is a headache under the best of circumstances, and budget austerity remains the bedrock of the GOP agenda. But there’s also Washington’s shifting perspective on the big tech firms over the past decade-plus, which has evolved from the buddy-buddy relationships of the Obama era to a generally increased wariness across the political spectrum of tech’s impact on society.

Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the center-left think tank the Center for New Liberalism and author of the Infinite Scroll Substack, lamented how opposition to “Big Tech” has sorted into what he views as unhelpful partisan pile-ons, whether it’s the progressive neo-Brandesianism of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s antitrust efforts or conservative gadflies’ claims that the big firms are “too woke.”

“It’s not just how much we are cracking down on Big Tech, it’s why we’re cracking down on Big Tech — in service of questionable-at-best antitrust theories, or in service of culture war grievances,” he said.

The tech industry inevitably chafes at the kind of regulation that would restrict its ability to do what it pleases — a luxury it has enjoyed for most of the internet era. But voices close to that industry say that what they want now isn’t just laissez-faire as we’ve come to know it, but a more proactive investment in research and the startup ecosystem.

“The most important question is the degree to which the next administration actually wants to spur technological innovation. If they put other priorities higher, such as lower taxes and smaller government, or equity, green and heavy-handed regulations, nothing else really matters,” said Rob Atkinson, president and founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, in a statement. “Unless the next President, whoever that may be, leads the nation in addressing these areas, little will happen, and in all likelihood we will end up taking steps backward because of either over-regulation or under-investment.”