From the Safe Space to the Infinite Frontier
The story of the moral tribes of America is familiar: the left pushes for progress, and the right pushes back to keep it from moving too fast. It's an elegant and comforting framework. It is also a relic. This simple story has gone awry.
Conservatism is not complicated. A conservative tendency in society is inevitable. There will always be the police, military, and small business owners working to keep things stable. It is needed. A society made up entirely of open-minded radicals might spin out of control into anarchy.
There also needs to be some kind of progressive force. This part is more difficult to get right. Ideally, the progressive force strives for an ambitious but achievable and broadly appealing future. Martin Luther King Jr. famously dreamed that "my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” They are in touch with reality and achieve substantive progress while shooting for the stars. They deliver on key achievements like equal rights.
Today's progressives, though, stubbornly insist on igniting violent, chaotic revolutions in pursuit of a nonsensical fantasy of radical liberation from norms and hierarchy. Today's progressives simply confirm the conservative's perennial suspicion that the reformers are just stirring up trouble to no positive end. We deserve a better version of progressivism. We have no uniting, positive vision, only one side trying to pull us towards an illusory utopia and the other dragging its heels.
We need a new progressivism, root and branch. We need a new frontier for the young, ambitious, open-minded, and energetic, a frontier that lifts humanity up toward flourishing and abundance instead of dragging it down toward misery and scarcity.
Who is actually moving us toward a definite, optimistic vision? Who is delivering on promises of a better future? Who has a strong record of delivering real value, not a spotty record they are running away from? So far in the 21st century, the answer is obvious: tech founders and the engineers, scientists, and others who support their vision. The clear leader is Elon Musk.
These are the true progressives we've been looking for. Unlike the incumbent progressives, though, these new progressives tend to shy away from explicitly leading the culture in a different direction. They want to build cool stuff and let their work speak for themselves. They have visions of a radically better future but are more focused on building it piece by piece than painting a compelling picture. That's just talk, that's just marketing, that's not the work of a builder. Sure, Elon and Steve Jobs' storytelling is legendary, but the ratio of their achievements to their talk is something like 10:1, as opposed to the 1:100 ratio of the hard-left ideologues running the cities of the West Coast. It's just a different mindset that is grounded in tight feedback loops and milestones, not BS and excuses.
The differences have been apparent for some time, but not glaringly so. In the early 2010s, Bay Area techies focused on building their companies and left politics and culture to the Blue Tribe, who seemed roughly aligned. But as techies went from scrappy underdogs to the new masters of the universe, the inverted morality of the Blue Tribe recast them as villains. By the early 2020s, there was a full-fledged war between the incumbent, decadent Blue Tribe members of NYT, WaPo, and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and aggressive, results-oriented techies.
The Blue Tribe, after years of escalating one-sided cultural and political warfare, finally provoked the techies into uniting and forming group consciousness, first to defend themselves, then to put forth their own agenda. Now, techies like Garry Tan and Balaji Srinivasan are starting to proudly identify as effective accelerationists or Gray Tribe members.
Their attempts at branding their movement are somewhat amateurish compared to the media wizardry of the legacy Blues, but they have a key advantage: the things they do actually work. They actually make things better instead of worse. They can point to achievements instead of constantly explaining away their latest embarrassing disaster.
Finally, the nascent Gray Tribe is starting to address its weakness: they are learning media. They are telling their own stories. They are putting on their own conferences with high-production-value talks. The recent All-In Conference shows the growing power of the Gray Tribe. Elon Musk called in from the sky, connected by Starlink. The talk was posted first on X (formerly known as Twitter). Then there was Bill Gurley's feisty rallying cry for building in the open, competitive market, which got an enthusiastic response at the All-In Conference and on X. Balaji Srinivasan's latest intellectual innovation, calling for the Gray Tribe to lead us out of the mess the Blue Tribe has gotten us into, gives us the needed frame: this is the Gray Tribe shining, literally soaring, inspiring its members to build more, to excel more.
It's a glimpse of a different world, a world that celebrates achievement and excellence instead of demonizing it. A world with rapid progress in quality of life through science and technology. A world led by builders, not bullshitters, by market entrepreneurs, not political entrepreneurs. A world that is developing into something better instead of devolving into a dreary dystopia, leading us from decadent cityscapes to new frontiers of human achievement.
Today's progressives' heaven is a safe space, an escape from adulthood and responsibility. The Gray Tribe's heaven is a continuously unfolding infinite frontier that keeps elevating humanity to higher levels of self-actualization and empowerment. If the Gray Tribe can learn to explain their vision as well as they can build, they will win, and we will all be better off.