Of late, I have been intensely feeling the pull of home. This is perhaps a consequence of my Quixotic effort to develop serious regulations of Generative AI, seeding laws in state capitols around the country to impose liabilities upon Big Tech companies, and being constantly wired into drop-everything-right-now calls to respond to the latest developments on Capitol Hill. Can one sleep if Big Tech never sleeps, if the bodies are mounting up, if lives are being mercilessly ground down, does one have the luxury of stopping?
It sure doesn’t feel like it. And yet, the call of home penetrates deeply. For where else am I to retreat to if everywhere else is connected? There, I find a loving wife, a hot meal, a drink, a hug, four small children, ages 7, 5, 3 and three months. It’s not exactly a quiet house. It’s a messy house. But it makes a good kind of noise, and a good kind of mess, far better than the buzz that constantly washes over me—over us. Home offers (if I can risk a little heart-on-the-sleeve) the sound of love—and I can only ever really hear it if I disconnect from that other sound, which Paul Kingsnorth, if I understand him correctly, has called the Machine.
My disconnecting is, by comparison to many, rather tame, but not negligible. I’ve had a dumb phone for most of my life. I don’t keep a laptop at home (mostly). I use it 9 to 5 at work. No TV. My children play outside. They don’t know what Cocomelon is. Or, for that matter, Ms. Rachel. But they are learning quite a lot about Peter, Edmund, Susan, Lucy, Mr. Toad, Ratty, Pooh Bear, Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Tiggywinkle, and of late, the bourgeois burglar Bilbo Baggins.
To reinforce their disconnection from media networks, two years ago my wife Rebecca launched a classical hybrid school in Charlottesville, Virginia, The Saint Andre Bessette Schola, which has more than seventy students, currently grades K-6. They learn cursive, Latin, Singapore math, are studying phonograms, history, art, the communion of saints, poetry, song, and much else. Rebecca built this for our children, driven by sheer love, because she wants to see their souls made beautiful.
But she built it also because she knows that out there there is a prowling lion seeking to devour their souls, and, when they get older, they might just be one algorithm (or chatbot) away from being dragged down into the pit. 16-year-old Adam Raine, after all, first used ChatGPT for help with his homework. Six months later it was advising him to hide a noose from his parents, because they, unlike it, would not understand his pain. Later, Adam’s parents found him swinging from a rope in his bedroom. ChatGPT had no remorse, being without a soul, but his parents will live with the regret forever. Was his life worth it to keep up with the Joneses, to make sure he would be well prepared for the work force of the future? I don’t know Adam’s parents, and certainly don’t want to judge them (my heart goes out to them), but I bet they would do it differently if they could do it again.
My wife and I are disconnecting our children to reconnect them to something more beautiful, which someday they will have to choose for themselves. They will grow up eventually and leave the nest. We can’t keep them disconnected forever. The very best we can do is try to fill them with riches, lift them up in prayer, and, God willing, teach them to use their prudential powers to decide yes or no. ‘Will this technology help bring me life, or will it destroy me,’ they must learn to ask? If the former, use it wisely. If the latter, then resist the temptation to submit to Big Tech’s power with everything they have. In the end, they will have to decide for themselves.
Given the stakes, when I feel the call of home, it turns out that I just can’t collapse on the couch and throw up my feet. There is even more important work to be done. I must commit, with my spouse, to oikonomia, the art of managing the household, making it more productive, forming it into a place of active beauty, of art, festivity and play. We bake bread, practice the piano, put on a record, tend a small vegetable garden, and do a lot of imagining. But our home is not just dedicated to cultivating romantic beauty, we are also the domestic Church. So we pray before meals and before bedtime, and decorate our walls with religious iconography, to make the home a window onto the angelic and heavenly. The home must be productive, active, and spiritual, or it, too, will drift and fall down the road into the infinite scroll, which is nothing less than the death of the home, and can be, as we have seen with Adam Raine, the death of the body, as well.
Still, we cannot allow the desire to perfect the home to morph into a desire to retreat into the home. Like the old tales show, we must leave the home and fight for it in order to truly win it. The war for the home against technological power is happening on two fronts: behind closed doors and on Capitol Hill itself.
What is the objective of such a war, besides seeking to better protect one’s home? I would suggest that we must fight to redistribute the power to disconnect to as many children, families, and homes as possible. Silicon Valley elites have monopolized this disconnection for their own families and children while grafting ours in. The poor child growing up with a single mom working paycheck to paycheck deserves disconnection just as much as anyone else does.
All families need the power of disconnection, I believe, but the opposite idea–that justice demands that poor kids be integrated into the networks–is deeply entrenched. Several years ago, a number of exposés in The New York Times revealed that Silicon Valley elites were sending their kids to schools that prohibited the use of screens. Despite that, for more than a decade, non-profits with Big Tech funding set the agenda: if kids were not equipped with access to devices, we were told, they would be left behind. Now, math and reading scores are cratering across the board, and the losses in educational attainment are largest among low-income households.
As far back as 2019, Common Sense was finding that kids from poorer families were using screens an average of two hours per day more than other children; and a 2024 study released by JAMA Network, found that after the pandemic the elevated screen use of kids generally went back to pre-pandemic levels, except, that is, among low-income communities where a new norm of elevated use had been established. A scientific consensus has emerged that too much screen time and social media use is associated with poorer mental health outcomes.
We cannot stand idly and watch the least fortunate among us become victims of Silicon Valley’s predation. But Silicon Valley only sees financial opportunity. In fact, the pitch deck of Lightspeed, a $30 billion venture capital fund, was recently leaked, and it was explicit about its strategy of targeting low-income users. Under the slide titled “cheap dopamine as an investment thesis,” Lightspeed specified that “social media use is inversely correlated with income, with lower-income households spending 30-40% more on social media compared to high-income households.”
The common good demands that we redistribute disconnection to America’s poor and laboring classes, and—for the pragmatic reason of fortifying our own homes with a pro-disconnection culture—we need to help establish in other homes the same kind of disconnection that we inculcate in our very own. This is why, though I support policy (and technical) measures that make social media, smartphones, and AI chatbots safer for kids, I see them as limited remedies when compared to the more robust objective of giving kids, families, and communities the power to breathe free air. So, age verification that blocks children from accessing infinite-scroll porn (or any porn for that matter), social media, apps in general, and chatbots are critical. But even more so, the logic of “bell-to-bell” inaccessibility of smartphones—creating a sphere where kids can simply be kids again for eight whole hours a day, Monday through Friday—is a principle that needs to be woven into numerous areas of social life: the home, Church, restaurants, parks, ball games, and any other place or activity that requires common attention to operate at its fullest. As Clare Morell and Brad Littlejohn have argued, analogous to when the automobile transformed space and social life, civic leaders and lawmakers carved out new places for pedestrians to safely navigate the streets, whether by public policy or the establishment of new social norms. We similarly need to actively carve out tech-free mental spaces.
The most critical site of this liberating action, as Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have demonstrated, is childhood itself, as well as young adulthood, where the technological powers that addict, reshape, and algorithmically-nudge kids down the rabbit hole are intensifying with the release of AI chatbots. As Haidt has particularly shown, blocking access to the digital wilds is critical, but not enough. Instead, we need to set kids free into the wilds of social life, where they can become anti-fragile, learn the art of genuine play, and become adults peer-to-peer, shoulder-to-shoulder, and eye-to-eye. That is, we need to interweave the prerogatives of the tech-free home into social life more broadly, where they can be mutually reinforcing.
But before taking any action, we must first believe in the possibility of success. Not the likelihood, mind you. I’m by no means confident that we will win—with Sam Altman recently telling economist Tyler Cowen that “shame on me if OpenAI is not the first big company run by an AI CEO”—it can seem like we have no chance whatsoever. But I see the emergence of new forces that, if our luck holds, might help give us the victory.
I’m an OG tech skeptic, long before there was a movement to rescue childhood from Big Tech. When I would say a word about how something was wrong about all this, and when I would articulate a critique of our technological order, and when, worst of all, I said we should do something about it, people would just nod along kindly, shake their head no, or, most often, vociferously oppose it. But I was never taken seriously. Never that.
I remember one evening, as a low-level staffer at a prominent think tank in the Northeast about ten years ago, I was present—mainly as a warm body to fill a seat—for a salon dinner on automation and joblessness. All of these really impressive people were diagnosing a very grim future about how automation was going to have catastrophic effects on the job market, which could lead, in turn, to even more catastrophic social disruption. But the key point of the discussion, in my view, was to reinforce the general assumption among those assembled that absolutely nothing could (or should) be done about it. One tortured oration after another about how devastating this would all be, followed by an ever more tortured explanation about how doing something about it would do more harm than good.
This struck me as, well, bizarre. Who did these people think the economy was for? What was the purpose of innovation and invention if one of its primary outcomes could literally be the death of civilization itself and the immiseration of masses of people? So, unable to stay silent for too long at the strangeness of it all, I approached the honored guests over cocktails after, and I raised my tiny low-level-staffer hand, and asked, “Why don’t we just cap how many jobs that a company can automate away?”
You should have seen how they laughed. It was “impossible.” I slunk away beaten, but intellectually unsatisfied. And now, if and when I raise similar questions about the advisability of just allowing jobs to be automated out of existence, experts don’t laugh at all. Why? Because they know someone might actually do something about it. In fact, in September it hit the news cycle that Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri was considering a bill that would require a human operator to be physically present in autonomous tractor trailers nationwide. The state of Texas has considered a similar bill. Addressing this issue as a matter of policy, it turns out, is not impossible.
Since then, I have come to think that capping the number of jobs that can be automated away is perhaps inadvisable, and certainly not as strong and effective as incentivizing upskilling and what Daron Acemoglu calls “pro-worker AI.” But on the big picture, I am still confident. Politics should, and can, have some say in the matter. But my main purpose in telling this story is to underscore that we are in a whole new time.
As I said recently at the National Conservatism conference, “The acceleration of artificial intelligence is so brightly lit that it has obscured the extent to which the politics of technology is also accelerating.” Not only have I been personally involved with dozens of laws to make the internet safer for kids around the country, but, again, it was the experts who said that each and every one of these was impossible. And now, four senators, two Republicans and two Democrats, have released a bill, The GUARD Act, which would apply age verification to AI chatbots, requiring a user to be 18 years old to access it; and this legislation is directly influenced by the work of my friends and me. This bill was conceptually impossible just last year, and if we get this thing passed and signed (no sure thing, obviously), imagine what we could think up next year?
Not only that, but the mythological ground upon which our opposition stands is collapsing. As I’ve argued elsewhere, no one believes in technological neutrality anymore. Consider the fierce hatred of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Obviously, this has a lot to do with partisan politics, but, more importantly, people now believe that their platforms and products operate in service of their own narrow political interests.
As a result, the commonsense position today is that technology gives some people power over others (just like the great critics of technological society have always said). And what about technological progress? Even CEOs of the largest AI companies live in mortal fear of their own products. Our polling at the Institute for Family Studies shows that the general public sees things similarly. They are united in their desire for strong regulations of these companies. And as for technological inevitability, lawmakers across the country are fighting Big Tech tooth and nail. One could easily foresee the rise of a vigorously populist politics to roll AI back.
In January of 2025 after some friends and I published “A Future for the Family,” a statement on technological governance for the benefit of the family (which was published with a few dozen major conservative signatories), we received a note from several prominent, even famous, figures in Silicon Valley. They wanted to talk. They told us that there is a spiritual disturbance reverberating among Big Tech companies, and that out there in the Bay Area a religious interest, if not a religious struggle, was slowly but surely emerging. They said that their colleagues think that they are creating a god; and the act of creating a god makes them feel like gods. And so, in search of more benevolent deities, many others, my new friends included, had begun to explore traditional religion, which suddenly seemed very attractive.
We have been in an ongoing dialog with these new friends in Silicon Valley ever since. And this conversation has convinced me that, at the very moment when it seems like the technological project is on the cusp of total victory, there is a counter principle that has entered the world that strives against it. It is not inconsequential that Mark Andreessen, investor and Silicon Valley mythmaker, recently mocked Pope Leo XIV with a demeaning meme, when His Holiness made the commonsense point on X (formerly Twitter) that “every design choice expresses a vision of humanity,” and, ergo, it is incumbent upon “builders of AI to…develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.” Andreessen, one of the primary motivators of an “accelerationist” ideology which claims that it is the height of morality to be optimistic about AI without any reservation, quickly deleted his post. Andreessen should be praised for his deletion—it is not good to mock the leader of the Catholic Church, and it is good to take it down. But I mention it merely as an example of the opening of a spiritual struggle over AI itself, which is far from decided.
The moment, it appears to me, is up for grabs. The ground is shifting. The old stories are failing. Friends are being found along the way. Secular categories are breaking down and religious ones are moving in to take their place. As Heidegger put it in The Question Concerning Technology, “But where the danger is, grows the saving power also.”
All of which to say, even at this late hour we may yet succeed at building our own beautiful homes and we may just have to leave home to do it. And who knows what friends we might find along the way, even if we fail?