Trump’s alliance with tech looked formidable in those now-iconic inauguration photos. But after 100 days, it’s unclear to me what they intend to build together.

So at this year’s Hill & Valley forum, a tech-focused conference at the US Capitol Visitor’s Center, Pirate Wires (that’s me) had two related questions: is MAGA-tech a real coalition, or just a short-term truce based on shared enemies — and what sort of legacy might they leave?

The H&V conference connects Washington lawmakers and Silicon Valley founders, partially in response to the rising geopolitical and technological threat posed by China. And the core premise seems to be working. According to H&V lore, the TikTok ban got started over forum-adjacent dinners — and this year’s vibes felt similarly consequential.

I’ve never met more founders, venture capitalists, LPs, Hill staffers, senators, and congressmen than I did after twenty minutes of standing around the trashcans of the CVC auditorium (no coffee allowed; cue trashcan-proximal chugging). For two worlds that, until recently, barely spoke, they were all seemingly, surprisingly, on the same page: what tech and MAGA should do together is rebuild American industrial strength and beat China. The two goals are mutually reinforcing. Beating China requires AI and manufacturing (weapons), which requires datacenters, which requires electricity (coal), which requires reduced regulations. And Trump, btw, is basically a “homie,” as one twenty-something tech founder put it, for leading this charge.

Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, kicked off the forum with opening remarks that set the tone.

“If we don’t have enough power, we’re going to lose the AI arms race. And the AI arms race with China is one of the two existential threats that I feel we face as a country,” Burgum said from the CVC stage. “The other is obviously Iran getting a nuclear weapon.”

Last year, China added 94 gigawatts of energy from coal, the equivalent of powering 94 Denvers, he said — double what the US added across energy sources — and we have to be aggressive about closing that gap. But where to start? The secretary suggested federal public land. There’s not a soul alive in Washington who actually knows how much value the government is sitting on across its 500 million acres of federally managed land. Drilling, mining, and harvesting the resources that Teddy Roosevelt tucked away for just such a purpose (“the use of the American people,” Burgum said) could financially support our national parks, help us win at AI, reduce our reliance on imports, and deliver returns to our grandchildren. According to a rough internal estimate he got in April, the coal on public lands alone could be worth $8 trillion.

“There isn’t a company in the world — not even Saudi Aramco — that comes even close to the balance sheet that the Department of Interior plus USDA would have. But what’s our return on that? You’re all investors. What’s the return?” he said, adding: “What’s the value of the 500 million acres of timber and land and rare earth minerals?”

Maybe we should just pillage what’s left of the forests, I found myself thinking, as the hypnotic trance of China, China, China echoed through the Capitol auditorium like an incantation. China sounds bad. Maybe we really should undo all the environmental regulations — not because we want to, of course, but because of China. Maybe the tech founders should be allowed to do whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want, as long as it helps us beat China and, by extension, protect personal freedoms everywhere. Freedom sounds good. And come to think of it, tax breaks — floated by Senator Bill Hagerty right after Burgum’s speech — sound pretty reasonable, too. (They’ll help the tech founders focus on beating China.)

This is probably a good spot to introduce myself. Having recently joined Pirate Wires from blob media, which I joined from the blue blob in a sea of red that is UNC at Chapel Hill, I am governed by an entirely different memeplex (read: cluster of thought viruses) than that of the center-right tech community which makes up the majority of H&V’s attendance. I have a running list of things you all don’t like so that I can keep track (Anora, therapy, Taylor Lorenz, criminals, etc.). Where just months ago I was investigating how red states were paying private equity-backed companies to electronically monitor abortion prescriptions, and feeling like, huh, this “investigative” pursuit of iffy business decisions sure does feel bad and soulless all the time — now I am bumming Zyns from AI-manufacturing founders who fuck with God, having lost the plot on who exactly the bad guy is. So, beyond any one assignment, H&V was an opportunity to keep downloading more of a foreign memeplex.

But the thing about memeplexes is they have blind spots. And the thing about the forests is that their value isn’t just financial. And the thing about regular people is that they see tech as lizard people mercenaries who don’t care about their impact. Who aim to extract at all costs.

Tech has three years remaining in what is potentially a temporary alliance with the country’s highest office. And I think it’s supremely safe to suggest there’s currently a bit of a messaging problem.

The Musk-Trump bromance and DOGE rampage strike people like my dad as mean-spirited (I’m sure the teenagers are doing great work to root out government waste, but moms and dads everywhere are bristling at the idea of Big Balls and his cheery band of software engineers fist-bumping their way through layoffs at the Veterans Administration.) Tariffs are, to keep it short, scary. And bringing back manufacturing, to those who’re not plugged into the flow of investment dollars (my dad), feels like more of a talking point than a national agenda to restore prosperity specifically to our neighbors. (My dad’s neighbor is a 90-year-old Mainer named Ken.)

It’s all a masculine-coded mix of defeating, correcting, and punishing. And given the context — Americans are drinking themselves to death — we need to round out the storytelling with something more restorative. Substitute drinking with whatever form of numbing you want, and the basic problem remains the same: people are lying face down on the couch, lonely, spiritually dead, scrolling TikTok, covered in shame-salsa, ill from consumption. The last generation of well-intentioned tech founders didn’t cause the crisis of meaning. Probably, our basic needs being met for the first time in human history did that. But it is now obvious that they made it worse.

The next generation of founders can take a different path. And actually, I saw the makings of such a path at H&V. A discarded Zyn-scattered path where the signposts are robots.

TECH’S NEW GUARD TAKES WASHINGTON

Burgum had hardly left the stage when Palantir CEO Alex Karp, joined by H&V founder Jacob Helberg, were interrupted by a heckler from the other memeplex.

Egad, I and literally everyone else thought, an agent of the other memeplex! Where on earth was security?

The woman, screaming from the second-story balcony, was an unfriendly reminder that Israel, a big customer of Palantir’s, was killing Palestinian refugees with AI weapons.

“You’re getting wealthy off of killing Palestinians! Palantir kills Palestinians with their AI and technology! You are killing my family in Palestine!” she said. “What kind of person are you? How do you sleep at night?”

It appeared that her questions were rhetorical.

“If your argument was so strong, you’d let me talk,” Karp said amid the yelling.

When the woman was escorted away, Karp defended Palantir’s AI weapons.

“The obvious solution to war is the West having the strongest, most precise, deadly weapons possible so that we can minimize unnecessary, innocent deaths,” he said. “And by the way, the primary way you minimize these deaths is you’re so strong, no one attacks you.”

Karp is a believer in “the obvious truth” that Western society — defined by meritocracy and rule of law — is superior to authoritarian regimes, and must be defended through hard power. The West has a moral imperative to “win” the AI race for this reason. If it doesn’t, the world order will be defined by those who would kill or imprison the heckler for holding a contrarian view.

Yeah, fuck those forests, I thought; we gotta beat evil Hamas and China, China, China.

After writing in my notes “clarity of voice,” and retreating to the coffee area, I asked anyone who didn’t run away from my bright red press badge about the health of the tech-MAGA marriage. What stood out: there’s no such thing as the tech-MAGA marriage. Republican lawmakers are kicking it specifically with a new guard of tech startups (Little Tech, if you will) that have been supportive of Trump for longer than two seconds (think: Palantir, Anduril, and dozens of firms following in their wake), led by founders who are actually pretty right-leaning, or at least, not unlike Karp, openly critical of large swaths of the other memeplex. They want to have a lot of babies with hot wives who respect them, type of thing. They don’t want to be canceled for saying the word “retarded.” Half the founders I met at H&V were teenagers during the 2020 election, and they could not give less of a shit about whatever progressive sensibilities stopped their parents’ tech companies from working with the government.

In his 2024 book The Technological Republic, which Karp discussed on stage, he argues that the West’s survival depends on rekindling the alliance between tech and the state, with a focus on defense, industrial policy, and national purpose — not dating apps and food delivery. As far as I can tell, that was taking place in real time at the CVC. The new guard is actively making inroads with the administration to get backing, political and financial, for solving very real, physical problems in ways that don’t strike this visitor from the other memeplex as evil or wrong.

AU Systems is making smaller, cheaper particle accelerators to test computer chips, as one example, for space missions. Deterrence (founder: 36 years old) is automating the production of missile parts so that humans don’t get blown up in the process. Rainmaker (25) is using drones to create more physical bounty by literally making rain. Fuse (25) is working on nuclear fusion. The German startup Zellerfeld (29) wants to 3-D print shoes right here in America. At Lumaril, two ex-Palantirians (33 and 39) aim to make manufacturing more efficient through a mix of AI systems that understand, for one, video data. Meeting these companies in quick succession — plus more than a few VCs looking to back them — made me think maybe this whole Industrial Revolution 2.0 stuff wasn’t just a talking point. Possibly hundreds of startups might just collectively call forth an age of industrial strength, and Washington is rolling out the red carpet. Not just because there’s alignment with what this community is building — Congressman Byron Donalds wants to bring more space and manufacturing jobs to his home state Florida, he told me — but because these founders could become the next generation of ultrarich political donors.

That strange, foreign feeling stirring in my chest — was it that particularly loathsome virus of the other memeplex? Pride for one’s country? Rah rah America, fuck yeah, and please God can someone lend me a Zyn? Ryan Hassan, the 20-year-old founder of political research firm Advancing Intelligence who I met by the coffee table, explains it better than I can.

“Tech is feeling more patriotic than ever. We’re way beyond the 2010s, when hating America and dying your hair blue were equally cute,” he said. “Our wildest innovators don’t want to build the next Uber, they want to build the next Concorde. You can’t do that in any other country in the world; and instead of ignoring that fact, we’re putting on our suits and coming to the table.”

We’ve come a long way from Google’s infamous “Maven” project circa the 2010s. The tech company was helping the Pentagon analyze drone footage with AI until employees rallied to shut it down over concerns that it contradicted Google’s internal motto and ethos: “Don’t be evil.” (Nevermind that Google was simultaneously investing heavily in AI research and talent in China.)

This year, Big Tech was mostly absent from H&V, while men in suits discussed its fate over finger sandwiches. By trying to get on Trump’s good side, companies like Meta and Google have alienated former allies on the left (and pissed off a lot of their employees). And they can scrub the word “equity” from job postings all they want — Washington Republicans are unmoved. Clint Brown, president of the American Path Initiative and a conservative strategist, brought up Gmail disproportionately sending Republican campaign emails to spam in the 2020 election; and if the Biden administration had a gun to the head of Facebook et al. to censor speech (read: Hunter Biden laptop stories), why didn’t the companies just say so?

“These trillion dollar big tech companies have taken major steps to further a leftist political agenda,” Brown said. “But, when conservatives gain power they offer platitudes and gestures. Little tech, defense tech, and a strong contingent of venture capital, on the other hand, are committed to building their companies for American greatness. That’s what conservatives want to see in the golden era, and frankly, what most Americans want to see.”

Which is why one panel later in the afternoon caught my attention.

Anthropic’s Jack Clark, Ravi Mhatre of Lightspeed Venture Partners, and South Dakota’s Senator Mike Rounds were talking about the balance between accelerating AI development without handing over key infrastructure (semiconductors) to rivals like China — when Rounds took it in a different direction entirely.

“We’ve got to maintain the belief and the support from the American people that we’re doing the right thing,” Rounds said from the CVC stage.

Americans can’t see with their own eyes how AI is aiding necessary weapons systems. They do see, however, the “pain in the butt” that it causes on social media “in terms of being inundated with stuff” (slop), he said. Taken together, why, exactly, would everyday taxpayers believe in the promise of the technology?

After the panel, I caught up with Rounds, as he and two staffers rushed towards the underground Capitol subway. Across winding staircases, hallways, and tour groups of middle-schoolers, he fielded my questions about the future of tech and DC.

The way Rounds sees it, AI can help us out on multiple fronts. Defense is a given. “Nothing else matters if your country’s not safe.” But if that’s the first priority, a close second should be improving people’s quality of life, like through AI-powered research that cures cancer.

“So for me, it’s a win-win. But it’s a matter of showing people that this is actually a workable item and it’s not just a pipe dream,” he said.

“It feels like your question for tech is like, how are you going to help the American people?” I replied.

“No, more like — come tell us what we need to do so that we can help the American people,” Rounds said. “Come help us make the right decisions.”

MARRYING MEMES INTO A BEAUTIFUL STORY

After a late-night gathering the Tuesday before the forum, I stepped out of a social club onto 15th Street NW, ready to make use of the vapid consumer convenience that is Lyft, when I ran into a young founder in the industrial space. At last, I managed to bum a Zyn. (Introversion + drinking + 100X normal social stimulation = I needed a Zyn). And it was a 6-milligram one, so while I was in the sweet spot between no longer wanting to kill myself and needing to puke, we talked about why the right-y memeplex is taking over tech.

And I get it. It feels like the country has changed for the worse, for reasons the left can’t muster the balls to discuss in plain English. Towards the end, though, he implied that perhaps I could do more good raising a family of my own than through writing professionally. I was surprised mainly because I had just bummed a Zyn. Had I not proven my androgynous worth? (It was a 6-milligram one!) But he wasn’t saying I shouldn’t work. He was saying raising good-hearted leaders is more important. And that doing both takes a pronounced toll on moms.

Ouch, Charlie. The other memeplex bit me.

The idea swirled around in my mind for the next few days. Did the new guard’s plans include me?

Let’s say I cede the floor to the future-builders, and have a bunch of babies with a husband whom I respect. What sort of future will you build for said babies? And how much money does my husband have to make in order for them to get a taste of it?

The central message of the Christian myth that many of you have been gravitating towards is about grace and healing through surrender, not, necessarily, domination and control. And one way to think about surrender is looking around and just noticing… what wants to happen? In the face of all this suffering, what do you have to offer? What are you offering?

That should be the work of the unprecedented-in-the-modern-era collaboration between lawmakers and tech. Put the Manhattan Project spin on the needs of this moment, but in addition to the short-term goal of crushing enemies, think in 100-year timeframes. What great bounty can you produce that restores human connection and flourishing that will get my dad to vote for your guy JD Vance in 2028? If we need the coal, great, fine — can we mine it where people actually need jobs and reasons to live (West Virginia)? Can we do it without screwing over the miners? Without covering up their black lung and polluting their rivers? Can we invest in their Main Street, that forgotten place where multi-generational miners would gather on Friday nights, without phones or invitations?

If this community owes its roots to defense and China, China, China — great. But what if we took after the AI models we keep talking about, mathematically scanned our two memeplexes, and married the most worthy bits into a force that’s as nurturing as it is powerful? As the new guard expands rapidly, there’s a chance to tell a more expansive story. It’s great to be powerful, to talk shit, to be strong. But what are we defending? What are we fighting for?

Look around, rainmakers, much of that vision is already here. It just needs to be articulated courageously into a megaphone throughout the land.

—Blake Dodge