The Tech Right’s Plot to Dismantle Themselves

There was an extraordinarily boring and hysterical article published last month in The Guardian that you almost certainly did not read. It was written by Jason Wilson and Ali Winston, and it was about an idyllic campground called the Wagon Box Inn in a tiny, rural Wyoming town called Story, at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. The article insinuates that the new owner of the campground, Paul McNiel, is a far-right radical connected to Silicon Valley billionaires who are bent on dismantling the nation-state and replacing democracy with rule by a cabal of tech overlords, and that the Wagon Box Inn will be a headquarters of some kind for the enactment of their devious plans. The evidence it offers includes that a reporter once wrote about the Wagon Box Inn in an outlet that some right-wing venture capitalists have invested in, and that a speaker at a Wagon Box event once also spoke at a conference founded by a guy who also founded a “rightwing business network.” It’s almost impossible to keep track of the connections without a crazy wall. It might be one of the dumbest articles I’ve ever read.

If you attended their 3-day campout this week, as I did, you might be confused to discover that the headliner of the event was the novelist Paul Kingsnorth, whose entire philosophy is founded on the idea that technology has ensnared humankind in a soul-crushing mental and spiritual prison that we must liberate ourselves from by cutting ourselves free from its digital tentacles and re-establishing authentic connections with each other and the natural world, preferably in a remote setting surrounded by an abundance of plants and animals. Or that one of the major themes of the meeting was the promise and urgent need for regenerative agriculture. Or that one of the talks was about the need to use the government to bust up corporate monopolies as we did under the New Deal. Or that when I had the honor of interviewing Kingsnorth on stage, he condemned Artificial Intelligence as “demonic” and announced a new initiative to get writers to pledge to abstain from ever using it.

The Guardian reporters seem to be vaguely aware of the deep skepticism of technology that pervades the Wagon Box project, as they point to a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ted Kaczynski in the title of an April event, who they inexplicably appear to believe is a figure “associated with the far right.” The entire guilt-by-association hatchet job just highlights how incomprehensible and meaningless the entire left/right political paradigm has become, one in which the world’s most infamous anti-technology eco-terrorist is lumped in with Silicon Valley billionaire transhumanists in some undefined and incoherent common political category.

The main theme of the campout was, in fact, that its attendees largely didn’t agree with each other, but were all eager to come together in a civil and sublimely beautiful setting to have thoughtful conversations about the things we disagreed on. And the main thing we disagreed on was AI. Kingsnorth is famous for his opposition to the cyborg-iation of society, specifically through AI. That didn’t stop at least three AI engineers from attending, as well as an AI investor. Those AI enthusiasts were given the same amount of stage time as Kingsnorth and by War Room correspondent Joe Allen, who wrote a book about the abominations of transhumanism. Then we all had beers together and listened to live bluegrass. I got in a heated happy hour debate with a hardcore Zionist over Israel, Gaza and Iran, a subject on which readers of this Substack know my opinions. Then I pulled a seat up next to him, bummed a cigarette and yakked about some other topic I had too many drinks at the time to recall now. That kind of respectful debate over stuff we had passionately divergent opinions on was literally the reason we were there.

The other reason we were there was to be in Wyoming. In between talks, I took a day hike with a friend from college in the Bighorns. Others learned how to fly fish or shoot guns. A few went on a horseback ride. There was WiFi there, but mostly we were too preoccupied with talking to each other and doing meat space stuff to spend much time online. That was consistent with the general Wagon Box ethos, which is that human communities are rooted in face-to-face connection and physical activity in our natural environments, not in the mediated synthetic hyperreality of The Machine.

To the Guardian I guess that codes as “right-wing,” though as a Gen Xer I’ll never understand how. But even the Guardian can’t explain how any of this can possibly align with the world domination fantasies of tech oligarchs. But of course, they don’t have to explain anything. They can just drop scary names and point accusatory fingers and hope you’re stupid enough believe them.

Social Studies is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.