Project 2025 and the Disaster it Encodes for Tech
What it may look like for Silicon Valley and the tech world if the conservatives win.
Last month I got the opportunity to sit in on a briefing led by two public policy think tanks: the Cato Institute and the Niskanen Center. There, they spoke about Project 2025 - the Republican blueprint for the next conservative presidency - and what it portends for immigrants and immigration in general.
I learned many alarming things that day, which I then wrote about with an emphasis on how it may affect Indian Immigrants. In that article I detailed how Project 2025 lays out plans for thousands of mass deportations, higher walls, DACA denials, manufactured green card backlogs, more visa refusals by embassies, more bureaucratic delays, and lesser number of legal ways to enter the country.
But I was also curious about what it means for tech. After all, Republicans are the pro-big-business and pro-capitalist party. Surely, they wouldn’t want to harm the very companies holding up the stock market.
I was wrong.
Project 2025 and Social Media
Every propaganda mission starts with a few grains of truth. Something people really do care about. Project 2025 has - to their credit - identified some of those issues perfectly.
In their defense of the perfect American family, they recognize the harm social media companies have caused young children. In one such paragraph about the virtues of maintaining “family values“, the document argues:
Consider our approach to Big Tech. The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps. Many Silicon Valley executives famously don’t let their own kids have smart phones. They nevertheless make billions of dollars addicting other people’s children to theirs.
TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings.
Umm.. they are not wrong. Tech executives famously do restrict their own screen times while designing products in a way to maximize ours.
But when the very next paragraph celebrates overturning Roe vs. Wade, it is hard to overlook the fascist bent. Moreover, the mandate misses the opportunity to deliver concrete measures needed to check the powers of Big Tech and actually protect the children.
About the Economy and Jobs
On one end, Project 2025 points out the destructiveness caused by offshoring manufacturing jobs and outsourcing software / call center roles. On the other end, the mandate dissolves into xenophobic and communist-hating rants when alluding to Big Tech.
As it goes in Page 11 of the 920 page chilling agenda:
Then came the rise of Big Tech, which is now less a contributor to the U.S. economy than it is a tool of China’s government. In exchange for cheap labor and regulatory special treatment from Beijing, America’s largest technology firms funnel data about Americans to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).
One side of Big-Tech companies’ business model is old-fashioned American competitiveness and world-changing technological innovation; but increasingly, that side of these businesses is overshadowed by their role as operatives in the lucrative employ of America’s most dangerous international enemy.
If you want to understand the danger posed by collaboration between Big Techand the CCP, look no further than TikTok. The highly addictive video app, used by 80 million Americans every month and overwhelmingly popular among teenage girls, is in effect a tool of Chinese espionage.
According to the mandate, the solution is not to enforce safeguards or develop solutions to fix these issues but to rip apart Big Tech at the root. Project 2025 is extreme in its proposals and open about it. They claim that the next government should openly go on the “offense.“
They propose to shut down Tiktok and other “such tech companies that act in favor of China“.
They wish to end immigration, not only curb it.
They plan to end democracy, not just influence it.
The accusations hurled at Big Tech would be funny if not for the seriousness with which they spout their ideologies. Plus, we should not forget that Project 2025 is a multi-million dollar strategic initiative involving bureaucrats who held key roles in Trump’s previous administration and are set to again take up powerful roles if they were to win in November.
Further Attacks Aimed at Tech
Project 2025 takes aim at all kinds of immigration. Contrary to Trump’s fantasy of handing out green cards to qualified individuals, those working in Silicon Valley and other qualified white collar jobs throughout the US are set to face even more hurdles in their immigration pipeline.
The planned attacks on immigration will have immediate consequences for tech due to the fact that millions of tech workers are foreign born and currently live and work in the US on the basis of some kind of immigration visa.
Right-wing strategists fear the influence that Big Tech has over our society. Not only for its addictive tendencies but also for its ability to connect people across languages, borders and cultures. They are afraid of the ideas shared, the opinions voiced, and the horrors unearthed.
They don’t want us to talk about how bad the environment has become, how racist, sexist, and ableist exploitative-capitalism is, or who has led the world to this brink.
I suppose one must admire their honesty. They are single-mindedly blatant about their mission to promote oil, gas, and coal again. And they know that the best way to keep the masses uninformed is by dismantling the public forums challenging fossil fuels.
The Tech that Project 2025 Wants to Keep
In a further twist, not all technology is decried as awful by Project 2025. According to this blueprint, technological advancements are OK as long as they are made in the name of the American War Machine or the oft-dreamed of Space Force Academy; to gain control of Big Data or to police the border walls; to prevent cyber crime or to enforce “cyber diplomacy” which may include censorship, surveillance, and rigid guidelines of what the internet’s free speech may contain.
In between shooting carefully worded dogma at China, the document slips in praise of the eastern nation’s totalitarian control of the internet and social media.
The other grain of truth the document chances upon is the total dominance of Big Tech. The mandate proposes increasing support for small businesses that benefit from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, and also increasing small businesses’ access to capital.
Project 2025 further urges the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to rein in Big Tech and ensure accountability, to impose transparency rules on Big Tech, and get the same companies to pour in more money into the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, the program that helps provide internet services to rural areas.
Takeaways
Project 2025’s views on technology may seem like a mixed bag but their final intentions are clear: control the tech, control the narrative, control the flow of money, power and information.
Moreover, some of the points laid out against tech are valid ones that can resonate. Instead of the complete bashing the current liberal media has embarked on, the better way to counter this nightmare would be by proposing stronger plans that will check the power of Big Tech, curb their unceasing rounds of layoffs, stop the stream of stock-buybacks and executive greed, while simultaneously ensuring that there is ample space for innovation so that newer technologies and smaller companies have the means to rise up.
To fight back, one needs to use the lessons learnt in France and counter these autocratic and xenophobic proposals with saner ones that can benefit the people economically and socially. More importantly, several polls show that the majority want policies that will actually improve their lives, and not hate on immigrants and tech.
Note: Thanks for reading this article! I have no sticks in this game. Merely, curious about what the future may hold for tech workers if the parties were to change power. And maybe because whatever happens in America has the unfortunate side-effect of rippling all across the world.
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