One of the biggest mistakes modern conservatism made was assuming that because Silicon Valley liked markets, it must also share conservative values. It didn't.
Tech culture was never traditionally conservative. It was hyper-individualist, anti-tradition, impatient with limits, suspicious of religion, and obsessed with optimization over continuity. Conservatives saw money and entrepreneurial energy and ignored the rest. Now the contradiction is impossible to miss.
A movement supposedly built around family values ended up admiring elites whose personal lives often look like experiments in post-human individualism. Elon Musk talks constantly about civilizational collapse and birth rates while treating motherhood and family formation like engineering problems to be solved through IVF arrangements, surrogacy, and semi-detached reproductive logistics spread across multiple partners. Whatever else that is, it is not traditional family life.
The religious side is equally revealing. Musk occasionally talks about "cultural Christianity" in the now-fashionable elite sense: Christianity not as binding truth, sacrifice, obedience, repentance, or spiritual authority, but as a useful civilizational operating system that helps stabilize society. Aesthetic Christianity. Instrumental Christianity. Religion as social software. And that mindset spread surprisingly far on the right.
You now see influential people who want Christian morality, Christian holidays, Christian social cohesion, and Christian voters, while sounding almost embarrassed by actual religious devotion. They admire religion the way a consultant admires institutional trust metrics.
But traditional conservatism was never supposed to treat religion as a behavioral management tool for the masses. It treated religion as something true, sacred, and above market logic.
Silicon Valley culture quietly flattened all of that into functionality. If religion increases stability, keep it around. If family structures produce productive citizens, support them. If traditions reduce social disorder, preserve them. Everything gets translated into systems language, as if they'd be tweaking society with configuration parameters. That is not conservatism. It is technocratic utilitarianism wearing conservative aesthetics.
And Musk is not uniquely weird. Silicon Valley culture as a whole normalized the idea that work should consume your identity, mobility should override rootedness, and relationships should bend around optimization and ambition. Founders publicly bragged about sleeping at the office, biohacking their bodies, microdosing psychedelics, replacing human judgment with algorithms, and treating ordinary social norms as obsolete legacy code.
This is a culture that genuinely uses phrases like "human capital stock" while acting confused about why people feel spiritually exhausted. The older conservative instinct was that civilization depends on institutions that markets alone cannot produce: stable families, religious traditions, local loyalties, inherited moral norms, obligations that survive convenience. Silicon Valley largely viewed those things as tech debt. And conservatives still cheered because Elon and his folks made Trump v2. They got a slap in the face when Elon called Americans retarded and advocated for more H1Bs.
As long as innovation produced growth, conservatives ignored the social worldview attached to it. Towns hollowed out under hyper-mobile winner-take-all economies that inevitably benefited large cities. Screen addiction reshaped childhood. Local businesses got flattened by corporations. Dating became algorithmic and transactional. Work consumed more of life while community weakened.
Then conservatives acted shocked when younger generations became more detached, less religious, less rooted, and less interested in building stable families. But why wouldn't they? The most admired elites in America increasingly modeled a life built around self-maximization, mobility, consumption, and technological transcendence rather than duty, continuity, or restraint.