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In the spring of 2020, as social distancing became the norm and almost the whole world retreated online, one industry particularly struggled to rework its business model: pornography. For its product, six feet apart might as well be six miles.
It didn’t take long, though, before the market worked its magic and hit upon a solution. A U.K.-based site, OnlyFans, had developed a subscription service for adult-content creators. With pornographic actors unable to shoot in the studio, many set up direct-to-consumer services on the platform. Meanwhile, with bars and clubs shut down, sex-starved singles quickly provided a surge in demand to match the surging supply. Between March and April, the user and creator bases both jumped by 75 percent. By the end of the year, the site had 85 million users and 1 million creators. Then a roadblock appeared: in 2021, after the company’s banking partners withdrew their services from the site, seemingly over concerns about illegal content, OnlyFans decided to ban its pornography. But content creators revolted, OnlyFans backpedaled a mere six days after the decision, and its meteoric rise has continued to this day, despite numerous reports of child exploitation and sex trafficking on the site.
From one perspective, OnlyFans is a textbook example of the market in action. Leveraging technological innovation in a digital age, it can respond almost immediately to tackle disruptions, match supply to demand, and maximize consumer utility. From another view, it is Exhibit A in the moral limits of the market, and the tendency of modern technology to hack the human person in the pursuit of profit.
A crude version of free market theory, which many Americans have been seduced into applying to digital technology over the past three decades, assumes that consumers are rational agents acting in their own self-interest to maximize their utility. From this standpoint, the more choices, the better; after all, since everyone’s preference profile is a bit different, the more options there are, the more likely each individual is to find the perfect fit. The miracle of digital technology is its ability to apply this theory in real time, far better than older forms of industrial capitalism: while hardware may remain standardized, software allows for infinite permutations in response to users’ desires.
By our ordinary common sense, however, and the testimony of philosophers in every age, we know that humans are not thoroughgoingly rational, that their wills are easily hijacked by impulsive desires for food, sex, and fame — fleeting pleasures that may well be at odds with their true flourishing. Left to our own devices, we tend to look for shortcuts to happiness, paths of least resistance that will gratify us today even if they harm us tomorrow. And today, our digital devices are more than happy to provide such shortcuts.
Americans once understood that, for all its blessings, any free-market system must account for the unfreedoms we are apt to run headlong into without due deliberation. They understood the essential role of law and society in preserving and protecting the human person against pimps and peddlers who sought to profit from our preference for ease. They understood that technology could either aid the human person in our labors and heal our hurts, or be deployed as a cheap substitute, degrading us. They understood that many technologies that look promising at the outset turn out to have unforeseen consequences and side effects, dealing out damage that then demands new technologies to repair or reverse. They understood the perverse incentives thus created, as innovators could make money first off the problem and then also off the solution. A society of people shelling out billions on junk food and also on gym memberships, diabetes treatments, and Ozempic is one that may well maximize its GDP, but not its human flourishing or happiness.
Human beings have a nature: distinctive forms and pathways of flourishing that cannot easily be bypassed without causing harm. While many people still believe this, we have also been allowing technology to tell us a different story, a fairytale in which any craving can and should be met and any negative side effects are temporary — just new needs waiting for a new solution from the technological cornucopia.
Rightly wary of the threats from big government, we have too often allowed ourselves to be lulled to sleep by lobbyists spinning this fairytale, and are now awakening to find ourselves in an inhumane dystopia in which technology has increasingly been turned, from conception to death, against the human person and against the family, in which we flourish. Today, with an unlikely coalition of pro-family conservatives and techno-optimists propelling a second Trump administration into the White House, we stand at a point of decision. Will we accelerate our regime of hacking — or begin to reckon with its costs?
It is time for our leaders to articulate a new policy agenda that directs technology toward the flourishing of the family and the human person, toward technologies that heal and away from those that hack.
Hackers occupy a curious position in our cultural imagination, evoking both apprehension and admiration. For all the mayhem they often unleash, we cannot find it in ourselves to see them as true villains; there is something heroic about their technical prowess, their ability to bypass complex systems with clever bits of code and bend the world to their will.
Because digital architecture is immaterial, there are always multiple ways to manipulate the architecture to your ends. We thus employ the word “hack” in a neutral or even positive sense: to describe any clever technological shortcut, any way to bypass the ordinary structure of a thing to get a desired output.
This ethos expands into ever more areas. Consider the name of the popular advice website LifeHacker. Hacking is at the heart of our technologized culture, representing our relentless pragmatism, our continual quest to find the easiest path to our destination. Never mind that when we arrive, we often feel hollow and unsatisfied, like the video gamer who annihilates his competitors through a cheat code that grants him superpowers. If we’re feeling down, there’s bound to be a hack for that too.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as we have come to think of our own humanity in technological terms — as biological hardware running psychological and social software, which can be reprogrammed — we have come to apply the language and concept of hacking to ourselves. What we are beginning to hack is human nature. When we hack, rather than heal, we discern a human desire and identify a technique that could enable us to meet that desire, bypassing ordinary human functions in a way that, while it may be pleasurable, profitable, or relieving in the short term, threatens the long-term health of the individual and of society.
Painkillers are a reasonable shortcut to feeling better until one actually is better; but popping oxycodone for life means giving up the goal of getting better. Using Zoom to touch base with grandparents until you can see them again can be a good relationship hack, but not if it keeps you from ever seeing them again in person.
The problem is particularly acute in medicine. “Not everything to which people will consent, or which they will even demand, is the right thing for medicine to undertake,” writes ethicist Oliver O’Donovan. “If I am too short to join the police force, too quickly winded to be selected for the Olympic team, or too forgetful to pass history examinations, it is not a matter for my doctor to deal with.” Or is it? All three of these frustrations have remedies available today in the marketplace, billed as if they were medical therapies. And far more powerful techniques are in the offing: Today we can now plausibly dream of genetic modifications that will make us — or our children — taller, faster, and smarter.
Or consider the way that medicine has dealt with the striking rise in people experiencing the acute distress of gender dysphoria: by permanently modifying the body. Such surgery, as O’Donovan observes, “is certainly intended to do the patient good; but it is not a medical good that it is doing her, but a social good. And to serve that social good, moreover, it adopts a procedure which is not even medically neutral, but manifestly injurious.” It represents an abandonment of “first: do no harm,” the historical commitment of medicine to the goal of bodily health. Defenders justify it on the grounds that bodily surgery achieves the higher end of psychological health, but this is a far more elusive ideal, one that may turn out to mean the satisfaction of short-term desires rather than long-term wellbeing.
Not all hacks, then, are created equal. Some may be harmless in moderation but can still tempt us to mistake them for the real thing. Others, by their ability to satisfy our desires so effortlessly, become addictive, blinding us to the real thing. Still others are so at odds with our natural forms of flourishing that to resort to them can permanently disable our ordinary human functions, rendering us dependent on more and more technological hacks to treat the symptoms of the cure.
For all its vogue, the word “hacking” still retains overtones of violence. It originally meant to cut into something or cut something off. That is what we are increasingly doing to ourselves — figuratively, in some cases literally.
We must be careful then to discern when a hack comes to hack at our very selves. If we really do have a nature, we should expect that any technological attempt to bypass it will come back to bite us in the end, whatever short-term highs the hack might give us. So it has been with the technologies that have embedded themselves in some of our most basic human activities: conception, birth, nurture, sexuality, and death.
Our urge to hack the human person emerges from a desire to control the natural vulnerabilities that are inherent to being human. This is nowhere more evident than in gestation and birth, where our species has long been most fragile and vulnerable, most subject to forces outside our control. For many decades, medical advances focused on reducing the chances of death for mother and baby. Then they began to focus on reducing the chances of birth, through contraception and abortion. At the same time, reproductive medicine began to move from treating infertility to bypassing it, through techniques like artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization (IVF). Although most Americans today support legal access to IVF, there is peril in our push to totally normalize the practice.
Doctors, researchers, and lawmakers alike tend to present IVF as a treatment for infertility. But this is misleading in several respects.
First, infertility is not a disease, but a symptom of underlying conditions, such as a person’s age, the loss of reproductive function, or other reproductive health conditions. For women, those conditions include endometriosis, adenomyosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, blocked fallopian tubes, and hormonal imbalances. For men, they include low sperm count, low sperm motility, erectile dysfunction, and diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Men and women on the whole bear the burden of infertility equally, with one-third of cases due to women, one-third due to men, and the remaining one-third due to combined causes. These causes may make conception difficult or impossible, but infertility is still only the result of these conditions, not the disease itself.
Second, IVF does not heal or restore the underlying conditions that cause infertility. Indeed, the man’s and woman’s bodies are circumvented altogether as human conception shifts from the body to the lab.
The lab setting then opens the door to further extensions of body hacking, all the while leaving the underlying condition unresolved. If a couple’s problem is that they cannot conceive using the man’s own sperm or the woman’s own eggs, they now have the option to purchase those cells from someone else’s body through a highly lucrative “donation” industry. The child’s gestation may then be moved to any womb where parties contractually agree to place the newly created embryo. Such surrogacy agreements separate biological motherhood from the intimate experience of pregnancy, labor, and delivery, and represent a commodification of the female body.
This has not stopped corporations, professional sports, and higher education from holding out IVF and surrogacy as a way of empowering women, enabling them to prioritize their careers or personal development ahead of marriage and childbearing. Indeed, when entire generations of women are told that they can delay childbearing beyond their natural biological clock and rely on egg freezing, IVF, and surrogacy to have children, this creates a negative feedback loop where underlying conditions are ever more ignored by medicine for the sake of shortcuts that diminish the human body.
The normalization of IVF is part and parcel of a sensibility that sees human beings as not begotten but made — the products of human will and fabrication. We may choose to “make a baby” or not, and if we choose not, we will generally choose the most efficient and convenient technique: hormonal birth control. Instead of developing technologies that empower us with a knowledge of our own fertility and how it can fail, the medical establishment has relied on tools that circumvent the human body, and often thereby suppress or destroy its proper function. Many doctors prescribe hormonal birth control as a catch-all for a wide range of problems, including acne, irregular cycles, painful monthly symptoms, and the desire to avoid pregnancy. As Sarah E. Hill argues in This Is Your Brain on Birth Control, the pill works by tricking the body into thinking it is already pregnant; this approach, however, merely suppresses a woman’s fertility and any potential underlying problems. After five, ten, or fifteen years of continual use, many women decide they are ready to have children, only to experience unexpected delays in their ability to conceive. Standard medical care directs doctors to then offer women additional technological interventions in the form of assisted reproductive technology.
The ultimate risk is not to individual women, but to our view of humanity. When children are not begotten but made, we may tend to see them no longer as gifts but instead as means to fulfilling our own desires. Unsurprisingly, the next frontier in reproductive hacking is the use of preimplantation genetic testing in the lab to be able to select which embryos we deem worthy of life, and which unworthy. Here, the goal is not merely the creation of a child, as with IVF and surrogacy, but the selection of a certain kind of child: a healthy child, a male or female child, an intelligent child, a child with certain personality traits, or even a child that looks a certain way.
Reproductive technology has thus quickly moved from the doctor’s office to Silicon Valley, where many of our tech elites have shamelessly embraced a new consumeristic eugenics. Consider Orchid, an embryonic genetic screening service that gives parents a “polygenic risk score” that promises to predict a child’s potential to develop conditions such as diabetes or bipolar disorder. The company Heliospect offers to test embryos for IQ. This technology, paired with widely available genetic tests that discern an embryo’s sex and conditions such as Down syndrome and Tay-Sachs disease, reduces unborn children to a set of statistics displayed on an attractive interface. Several of these companies, including Orchid, Genomic Prediction, and MyOme, have received millions of dollars to usher in a new era of Gattaca-style eugenics. In the name of helping children to live their healthiest lives, they encourage us to view the human person as individual parts of raw material whose genetic makeup predetermines our values, beliefs, capabilities, and identity.
What Jonathan Haidt has called “the phone-based childhood” is the hacking of young people during a particularly vulnerable period of their lives. Adolescence is when the body undergoes drastic changes in hormones through puberty and when the brain becomes more wired for social feedback and for the approval of peers as the child begins to turn outward from the family to the broader community. This period of development is being hijacked today by highly addictive digital products: smartphones, social media, and online pornography. In response, children are becoming overly sensitized to the rewards of the virtual world and desensitized to real-world relationships and pleasures.
A 2023 study by University of North Carolina researchers found that middle school students who checked social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat — multiple times throughout the day demonstrated divergent brain development over time, becoming hard-wired to expect the fleeting reward patterns of social media. Major digital media products are designed in a way that has our brains constantly release the neurotransmitter dopamine, a chemical that produces craving but never satisfaction. As addiction expert Anna Lembke has argued, digital technology has helped to produce a generation of dopamine addicts, increasingly unable to experience the slower but richer pleasures of life.
The irony is that social media and smartphones have been advertised to us as communication tools to help us stay connected to each other but instead they are making children and teens lonelier and more isolated. Rather than playing outside and riding bikes with their neighbors, children sit at home scrolling, listening to influencers who are complete strangers. The dopamine drip happens at the expense of the release of oxytocin, a hormone we produce when we experience face-to-face contact and physical touch and that we crucially need to bond with and trust others. Now screens come between parent and child, between siblings, and between friends.
As Jonathan Haidt has argued, this is in part because our society has become so safety-conscious that parents now fear to allow their children anything as perilous as riding a bicycle around the block. And since parenting means long and grueling labor, we can hardly be surprised that, instead of sending their kids outside to play, exhausted parents hand them an iPhone. Indeed, the parents have probably already handed them an iPad years earlier at the first onset of toddler tantrums; we are all too prone to follow the path of least resistance. Parenting by screen is an all-too-convenient substitute for the work of constantly correcting, training, and disciplining children away from tantrums and toward self-control. A 2022 study in JAMA Pediatrics confirms what we all already knew deep down: that a child raised on mobile devices will likely struggle to control his impulses.
As screens have quickly transformed from supplements to substitutes, they have short-circuited the developmental pathways that children must follow to a thriving adulthood.
Thanks to another technological hack, however, children today may never have to learn to control the most powerful impulse of all: the sexual urge. If rightly disciplined and channeled, it can offer a means to the strongest of all human bonds: the life-giving marital union. If allowed to run amok, it will become a rampaging force of jealousy and violence, as our ancestors understood. But online pornography proposes a way to have one’s cake and eat it too — sort of. It offers men (and increasingly also women) the chance to experience as many sexual partners and sexual adventures as they could ever desire — minus the intimate bodily and emotional union. Without any need for commitment or sacrifice, it is a bargain that a growing majority has been seduced into accepting — according to a 2023 report by Common Sense, 73 percent of teenagers ages 13 to 17 have watched online pornography. And since there is hardly a more powerful form of dopamine addiction, it is a bargain that, once accepted, can sometimes never be escaped.
The average age of children’s first exposure to online pornography is now 12, right as they grapple with puberty and their emerging sexuality. This means that by the time a teenage boy becomes a young man he will have been conditioned by the online pornography industry that his desire can be met without the hard work of a relationship: asking a woman out, pursuing and wooing her, and proving his commitment to her.
As with other hacks, the natural function of the body, once short-circuited, may be permanently stunted and deformed. Pornography consumption does not lead to sexual intimacy but creates habits of addiction and isolation that make intimacy far harder to attain, or, if attained, to enjoy. Pornography rewires the brain to need ever more extreme kinds of sexual stimulation and desensitizes the person to the pleasure of real-world sex and the relationship that encompasses it. Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction in men and impotence in women have become common conditions that therapists seek to treat. With the rapid rise of AI partners as well as forms of interactive virtual-reality sex, more and more young people are likely to choose cybersex over the real thing.
Those who do continue to pursue physical relationships are likely to bring the warped expectations of the digital deception with them: rising rates of child-on-child sexual abuse likely reflect teens’ attempts to imitate the violence they see in online pornography. Is it any wonder that a generation thus alienated from their own bodies has experienced an epidemic of gender dysphoria? After fruitless experiments in hacking themselves, teenagers begin hacking at themselves, engaging in self-harm and asking for surgical castration.
Habitual pornography use thwarts intimacy, impedes family formation, and disrupts or destroys existing marriages. In every way, online pornography and its growing ecosystem of virtual sex are undermining the family, the most critical building block of our civilization.
The ultimate hack of all would be to hack life itself, either by evading death for those who wish to live forever or by accelerating death for those who don’t want to live anymore. Here at the end of life we find an eerie mirror of the technologies that now dominate reproductive medicine. At the beginning of life, our medical practice has bifurcated into techniques for artificially beginning life or artificially terminating it, with ordinary fertility increasingly marginalized. Just so, at the end of life, many seek either to artificially prolong life or to artificially terminate it, with ever less room for ordinary mortality.
On the one hand, the Sarco pod, dubbed the “Tesla of euthanasia,” presents death in the image of futuristic autonomy where social beings are removed from all human interaction to spend their final moments at the mercy of a machine — its designer hopes it will soon be AI-assisted. The pod’s sleek aesthetic design obscures the fact that it is little more than a modern-day gas chamber, ridding the world of unwanted men and women. On the other hand, Bryan Johnson’s “Don’t Die” movement epitomizes a transhumanist agenda that cares less about indefinitely extending human life as we understand it today, and instead prioritizes existence — in whatever form or medium our consciousness takes — above all else. Such efforts may end in a hollowed-out human existence that looks more like a Sarco pod than an enfleshed being. Meanwhile, in Canada, over 15,000 people died through euthanasia in 2023, which makes it the fourth-leading cause of death after cancer, heart disease, and accidents. The rise of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia in the West cannot be explained alone by the desire to stop suffering; we are far more capable than any previous generation of mitigating the pain of terminal diseases. The trend makes sense, rather, as the complement to a culture that has replaced begetting with making. That which we can make we feel we have a right to unmake.
Trained by technology at every other stage of life to expect quick fixes, when we find ourselves confronted with the implacable reality of death, we reach for the final hack available to us, to end life or to abolish death.
This quick tour from gamete to grave has been a cursory one. Much more could be said about the ubiquity of human hacking — from screen-based education, to virtual reality, to the embrace of AI not as an aid to human creativity and labor but a substitute that renders thought itself obsolete. Or we might explore some of the more radical transhumanist fantasies, such as Neuralink’s aspiration to fuse man with machine, or in vitro gametogenesis, which promises to assemble an ideal embryo from any number of different genetic parents.
But the basic pattern is that every human hack has four features:
But just why is human hacking so profitable?
We must reject the easy narrative of an unholy alliance of sinister bureaucrats, white-coated scientists, and venture capitalists simply foisting this dystopian regime upon us. Many of these trends, as we have seen, are responding to consumer demand. They are the result of market forces. But we also cannot simply blame the free market for our civilization’s attack on human nature. We need a more candid and imaginative explanation.
Free-market economics textbooks often begin with rational choice theory: the idea that, left to themselves, producers and consumers will always act to maximize their utility. The problem is that utility is a slippery concept, as more sober-minded economists have always recognized. Do I maximize my utility by eating M&Ms for breakfast, or scrambled eggs? It’s quite possible, especially if I am a nine-year-old, that I will find more pleasure in the M&Ms, but surely the eggs will be better for me over the long haul. In this broad sense, we might say that nearly all consumer products that prey upon our appetites, against the better judgment of our reason, are forms of hacking — they offer themselves as cheat codes to give our bodies a quick hit of ultimately empty pleasure.
Yet we do not get too troubled about hacks on this level, recognizing that in most cases the harms are fairly minimal — the population of M&M binge-eaters is not large. We have traditionally recognized, however, that we pass an important threshold when we move from guilty pleasures to genuinely addictive products. Cocaine, like M&Ms, will give me a quick hit of pleasure at the cost of long-term health, but in this case, the hit is so powerful as to quickly overwhelm an ordinary person’s judgment and render him utterly dependent on the product, allowing sellers to maximize profits by exploiting the hack.
Free-market theory thus recognizes this as one of several kinds of “market failure,” specifically an example of what it calls an “externality.” Externalities result whenever one party, usually the producer or seller, is able to pass some of the true costs of the product on to an unconsenting third party, thus padding its own profits. Often, as in air pollution, this third party is society at large. Sometimes, though, as in addiction, it is our future selves, who are made to bear the brunt of harms for irrational decisions made in the moment — such that addiction has been called a kind of “intrapersonal externality.”
Recognizing that there cannot be a genuinely free market in addictive substances, we have traditionally banned or highly regulated them, especially for children unable to exercise rational choice in such matters. Our recent shrug of the shoulders in the face of the firehose of digitally driven dopamine addictions, from social media to sports gambling to pornography, represents a collective capitulation to an irrational choice model of markets, leading to a fundamentally broken political economy.
Many of the phenomena we have discussed above can be traced to another common market failure, known as “information asymmetry.” A rational choice, after all, must be made on the basis of good information, and a fair exchange will depend on both parties having roughly equal information. If I know that the used car I sold you is missing a key engine component and will break down after a few hundred miles, and you don’t, you will be grossly overpaying for it; indeed, you probably wouldn’t have bought it if you knew. Some might say “buyer beware” — you should’ve done your homework — but there are many areas of life where information asymmetries are endemic.
Health care is one of those areas. The doctor, by virtue of his long years of professional training and experience, will generally know vastly more about the effects of various treatments than the patient will. The patient is thus, quite literally, at his mercy. It is for this reason that medicine has traditionally been governed by strict professional norms that must take precedence over any crude market incentives: because the doctor alone may be in a position to judge what will truly make the patient healthy, as opposed to merely feeling better in the moment, he must not exploit the patient’s pain and ignorance to sell her a treatment she doesn’t need, or worse, one that will harm her in the long run.
Increasingly, however, the logic of consumerism has been allowed to run rampant over medicine, replacing codes of professional ethics with profit motives, thinly veiled under the rhetoric of “serving the customer.” The Internet has certainly played a role: many physicians are tired of arguing with patients who come pre-armed with Google searches about their symptoms and treatment options, and find it easier to just give them the prescriptions or procedures they want. And relativism has certainly played a role too: If we no longer know what human nature is, who’s to say whether a sex-change operation intrinsically heals or harms? Easier to bracket such metaphysical questions and focus purely on patient psychology, on whether studies happen to show that it reduces subjective distress.
But there is a further perverse incentive distorting our markets. In a political economy of hacking, there is money to be made twice over: in selling the product and in selling its cure. An unhealthy society is capable of generating a lot more GDP than a healthy one: there’s money to be made selling junk food, and money to be made on Ozempic; there’s money to be made on prescription opioids, and money to be made on Narcan and rehab clinics; there’s money to be made on anxiety-inducing social media apps, and money to be made on therapy; there’s money to be made on online pornography, and money to be made on parental controls and filtering software. As a society, we have made a devil’s bargain with technology: we will take the benefits now and worry about the side effects later, trusting that by the time they catch up with us, there will be a technological treatment for them too. Borrow now, pay later; that has become the American way.
But now the bill is coming due. Are we ready to pay the price of changing our habits today to avoid dystopia tomorrow?
We have been told for decades that “you can’t stand in the way of innovation.” Nor should we want to. But we are not facing a choice between libertarianism or Luddism. Markets, like rivers, will follow the path of least resistance. Left entirely to themselves they can wash away whole communities. Thus the makers of technology policy should take inspiration from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: you cannot stop a river from flowing, but you can stop it from catastrophically flooding. The trick is to channel it, to close off certain avenues of advance and then allow the river, of its own power, to forge and deepen an alternative path to the sea — a longer path, sometimes, but one more likely to serve as a force for life rather than death.
In the same way, the government can channel technology development in certain directions, toward human flourishing and strengthening of the family, and away from results that undermine these ends. When hacking the human person gets too easy, the state may have a role to say no, closing off harmful and lazy shortcuts.
But this is not a no to innovation, but rather an invitation to try harder at innovation, to explore other directions. Consider one of the most significant no‘s to technology of recent decades, President George W. Bush’s ban on federal funding for stem cell research that destroyed human embryos after the policy’s enactment. At the time he was pilloried by many in the scientific community for standing in the way of progress, condemning medicine to ignorance and impotence in the face of intractable diseases. In reality, the executive order wound up channeling innovation in promising new directions. Before long, drawing on the work of researchers Shinya Yamanaka and John Gurdon, scientists created pluripotent stem cells from adult tissues, circumventing the need to destroy embryos for stem cell research. Yamanaka and Gurdon went on to win a Nobel Prize for this work. Similarly, in the late 1980s, an international no to ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, then a mainstay of the refrigerant and aerosol industries, spurred technological innovation toward new chemicals that offered the same benefits without the disastrous externalities.
It is generally not the task of policymakers, outside of wartime R&D initiatives, to specify in advance what the outcomes of technological innovation should look like. But it is their task to set the constraints and incentives within which market actors pursue research, development, production, and marketing. And it should be their objective to align these constraints and incentives with the health and flourishing of the human person, to head off the ever-present temptation toward a Sackler-style capitalism that gets rich off addiction and exploitation of bodies and souls. Sometimes, as in the case of embryonic stem cells or certain kinds of addictive drugs, this alignment will take the form of hard bans or moratoria. More often, however, it will take the form of subtle nudges within the choice architecture of the political economy: taxes, subsidies, research grants, patents, and other regulatory tools available to the state. Our problem has not been a lack of levers to pull, but a lack of interest in pulling them. Punch-drunk from the pace of innovation in the digital age, we have been content to let our tech lords “move fast and break things,” accepting that this is the price we must pay for prosperity.
But the price is growing too high to ignore, and it is time to re-examine the choice architecture of our technology policies. When we do so, we will quickly discover that a deeply entrenched architecture is already in place, where we had been told there was only a level playing field of free competition.
The following proposals may serve as a starting point for a new architecture:
Against all such measures, futurists may still insist on a creed of creative destruction. But if we are not committed to conserving the human person from birth to death, and conserving the family, the fundamental home within which the person is nourished and launched into the world, then what future exactly is it that we are hoping to see?
Most hacks of the human person have been offered to “give the customer what he wants,” but we cannot pretend to such naïveté. We are the heirs of a millennia-long understanding of the human person that has taught us that our wants and needs are complex, and that shortcuts to fulfilled desire are often painfully paid for many times over. It cannot be the responsibility of our policymakers to ensure that we always choose wisely, or to punish innovators every time they make a quick buck off our foibles. But neither can we throw up our hands and allow unrestrained technological development to hack human nature, undermine the family, and thus imperil the future of our nation.
We must govern technology or we will find ourselves governed by it. The new administration must seize the opportunity to choose rightly between these two paths.
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