Proposing A GOP Tech "Manhattan Project" – Jason Belich

Jason Belich:

The key to undoing that skill and aversion problem is to build an ecosystem that is right wing friendly, heartland friendly, patriotism friendly.

Eric Wilson:

I'm Eric Wilson, managing Partner of Startup Caucus, the home of campaign tech Innovation on the right. Welcome to the Business of Politics Show. On this podcast, you are joining in on a conversation with entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. We're joined today by Jason Belich, a coder systems architect and technologist based in San Francisco, with over 25 years of experience developing mission critical architectures and systems. He recently wrote about the need for a Republican tech Manhattan Project to win in 2024 and beyond, and I knew we just had to have him on the show. That post is linked in the show notes. If you wanna give it a quick read and then come back, or if you wanna read it afterwards, in our conversation, we dig into the less advantage in big tech, what the right is missing and how we can fix it. Jason, give us the crash course on Silicon Valley's Alliance with the left. How have the Democrats and their relationship with Big Tech evolved over the years, and what effect has that had electorally in recent cycles?

Jason Belich:

Tech in general has a very strong relationship with the left and the liberalism, and with Democrats in particular for quite a few decades. It starts with Democrat control over education, particularly higher education, creating a bias in its graduates, even graduates outside of liberal arts and things. Even as far back as the seventies when tech became an actual discipline, you could study for technology and, you know, software and hardware had a very strong left-wing bias, and the relationship between tech, big tech and the Democrats starts with that bias. Now, there's a strong libertarian component as well, and gen Xers definitely comprised that. And even, you know, some of the early Gen Xers and the boomers in tech had a very strong libertarian bias, but the millennials since then have gone fanatical largely by again, these schools teaching left wing values even to, to Christian and conservative families. And at, at some point in the nineties we're taught a type of man Caan politics where they are good and we are evil, and they're, that they consider degrees of the Democrat Party to be the only acceptable political expression.

Eric Wilson:

And so this has obviously permeated kind of the monoculture of, of Silicon Valley big tech. And then we really saw this get leveraged for Democrats Advantage in 2008. How did that come about and what did that look like?

Jason Belich:

Well, the period between the late nineties and 2005, 2008 ish was a period where big tech became big tech were all of the technological innovations that we see a dystopia of now with profile marketing where, where big tech can predict your bodily functions based on your, on behavior they can monitor what you do and say all those things. All of the, the, the underpinning technology that was grown between say 1995 and 2005, and by the time we get towards 2008 ish, that's when we had the Obama Hope and Change campaign preying on emotions of these people to bring them from the philo, from just the philosophy of living and bringing it into some sort of political sphere. As of 2008, what happened was, since the technology companies that would all become subsequently Big Tech was populated almost entirely by left wing people by default, wasn't considered a big deal to also attempt to take those technologies and include them into the political process, right? They just considered it a normal thing. Facebook famously gave access to their profiles and their data to the Obama campaign for free in 2008, right? Absolutely. For free. I mean, there should be people in jail for, for doing that.

Eric Wilson:

Obviously that was a, a huge game changer. And, and, and that that whole ecosystem working for, you know, certainly the, the left broadly you, you write that in tech terms and ecosystem is that collection of companies, organizations, and projects that all work on related goals in the same general direction. What does that look like on the left? What, what are those companies orgs and, and projects?

Jason Belich:

Big tech is all populated by left wing people, like I just said, but the tools they use are also fully integrated with traditional nonprofits. You know, the, the United Way is using the same software as Vote for America to, to, to interact with donors, to interact with potential supporters. The data work is almost in, in many cases is the same. So it's, it's fully integrated with the non-profit ecosystem via, you know, via vendors like N G P van, which the, you know, they do data warehousing work, supposedly their core business is traditional non-profit world, but the traditional non-profit world being heavily left wing, they also do lefting campaigns as well.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah, that's a huge piece that a lot of people miss out on. So it's not just that the, they've got this sort of technology for campaigns and, and as people who <laugh> have listened to this show know from, from talking to our entrepreneurs, it is, it is a cyclical business. If your, if your sole or primary customers are campaigns, well their, their money comes in and fits and starts, but if you are then also serving nonprofits, they can sort of subsidize or underwrite your development and make the product better and more affordable for political campaigns.

Jason Belich:

Right? And, and something else that the Democrats have done is they funnel money, huge amounts of money through impact investment firms like Arab Barrel Partners, they funnel money to c3 s and c4 s nonprofit organizations who directly fund projects incubate projects and even just stipend developers to do what it is they want. And then whatever's developed in those situations are often spun off into for-profit, profit companies that are also funded by the, by Arabella and, and the other organizations doing impact investing. And then so with, there's a very large pool, literally billions of dollars is, is in this pool. So all these, these companies outfits, these projects, they all in, in the course of working together, increase each other's value and subsequently lift all those boats in the left.

Eric Wilson:

And so contrast this with the, the Republican ecosystem which, which you describe as political operators dabbling in technology rather than technologists bringing their value into politics. Talk more about this skill inversion, why it's a problem and, and how you might fix it.

Jason Belich:

The skill inversion is instead of bringing top developers into the political ecosystem, what's happening on the right is our political type people who also code on the side so they're not as in tune with newest technologies, the best practices of doing things, and the technologies that actually are working under the hood. The key to undoing that skill and aversion problem is to build an ecosystem that is right wing friendly, heartland friendly, patriotism friendly. A very huge piece of this is to educate the donor class. They donate to campaigns they donate in election years, but at the same time, they're also donating to their, usually their local left wing nonprofits. They oftentimes fall into the Arabella type impact investing paradigm on one hand and then donate to Republican on the other. We have to be able to have our own Arabella type situation where we can funnel money to top developers in order to work on things that align with their values.

Eric Wilson:

Jason, I, I agree with you that we need to have a, a more robust nonprofit arm if we're gonna, if we're gonna really get into this fight, I want to wanna offer two perspectives that, that I, I think our challenge is the first is, you know, if you are a developer or a technologist with sort of free market pro republican leanings, your first inclination is to go out and build a really good business, make a ton of money. It is not to, you know, I, I want to go make sure that, you know, more Republicans get elected, so how do we get more people to see the, the value of, you know, if if you don't come fight for those opportunities, they're not gonna necessarily be there anymore.

Jason Belich:

That's why donor education is so important. Urban, democrat, billionaire donors are all part of the same social circle, and they're doing this this impact investing alongside their rich friends.

Eric Wilson:

Got it. So just ha just unpack the incentive structure.

Jason Belich:

Yes. Hacking the incentive structure that breaks the stigma. Say if you are a rightwinger or if you're even anything other than an extreme left-winger, you can participate in our side of the ecosystem, our side of the tech ecosystem, and you still have career options if you choose to stand up for your values. And a, a big piece of that is, of course, getting the donor participation to be investors, but also to focus outside of big cities, outside of Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, New York, because the Heartland area has, has coders too. There's all kinds of smaller cities elsewhere in the United States where you can learn coding and be a technologist and, and do a very good job of it. You don't have to be here, you don't have to be in San Francisco. And

Eric Wilson:

So that was my second follow up, which is, I, and I've seen it just in the, the few years that I've been been doing this, is that the technology is becoming more and more democratized small d Democratic in that you don't necessarily have to be a Stanford computer science engineering major to know how to build applications. I mean, we're just seeing advancements all the time with low-code, no-code. You might cringe when I say that <laugh>, but, you know, being able to actually just put the pieces together to build applications that solve problems getting a little bit easier. And so I'm hopeful that it's gonna put it into more people's hands. And, and then as a result of that, it becomes a little bit more friendly.

Jason Belich:

We actually solved this problem already in tech, but we've gotten away from that solution. The old ethos, I like to call it the old ethos for technology and for coders, this is primarily a Gen X thing. We were heavily focused on open source right projects, open source development, and sharing our output and our development. I think that an op an opportunity exists for those of us on the right who want to, to, to build more stuff for the right is to support open source development more. It's actually a really big problem in open source right now that coders working on open projects have difficulty getting paid to do it so they can actually live doing their projects. And most of the opensource ecosystem that is very, very prominent is actually also very, I don't wanna say aged, but certainly a lot more mature. There aren't, there's not nearly as much open source projects happening out there that come impactful than there were, you know, 20 and 25 years ago, Linux, MySQL, Apache Web Server JavaScript language, all these things are, or open source develop or, or open development, open source development, and they underpin all the technology that we're doing right across all tech.

Eric Wilson:

The way I describe it to people is like, imagine if you had a, a, a building and like the, the janitor was a volunteer, right? <Laugh>. And it was really important that, you know, you built this around being able to have like clean, secure <laugh> facilities, and then there's this, this volunteer janitor that's not, not getting compensated, still wants to see the building kept up, and, and that's a lot of what these open source projects look

Jason Belich:

Like. Yes, that is absolutely true. And our own bias on the right is so heavily towards profit that we're not understanding the value of volunteerism in, in developing really solid technologies. I considered a weakness of the left, a weakness of, of big tech as it is right now, is that the entirety of technology is so heavily underpinned by open source development, yet almost no resources go into that development. So I, I, you know, you know, financial resources or even developer resources, there's, there's so much focus on Get Rich quick. So much a focus on building an app that makes money that you're not making a better database. And, and we're getting a, a, a little bit tangential to the topic, but it is an opportunity for the right and for people on the right to have an outsized impact to, to, to make sure that the ecosystem we build strongly supports open development specifically, so that we can have a much stronger leverage.

Eric Wilson:

You're listening to the Business of Politics Show. I'm speaking with Jason Belles about his call for a Manhattan project for Republican campaign tech. Jason, what would that look like and what should it strive to achieve?

Jason Belich:

Well, a Manhattan project for, for other Regans, it has, I don't wanna say start with, but a, a, a major component has to be the donor class. The, the donors who are giving large amounts of money to campaigns to run, run television ads, overpriced television ads, whether it it's direct to a candidate or even worse towards a super pac. You're burning your money, all you're doing is giving money to the consultants for, for massively diminishing returns. So we, we need to educate donors and we need to, to, to build a pool of funds to be a tech incubator. I mean, and, and a real tech incubator too, not something performative, but to actually build companies, projects and products to build the, the pool of funding for that, those resources for a tech incubator to then focus heavily on victory technology technology for winning the ballot chasing contest that we're going to have to do for the next 20, 25 years as, as, as kind of a primary primary focus for that tech incubator, but then also provide funding for open source development for project development things that would be boilerplate, really foundational technology like database libraries or shells for mobile development and, and things like that.

And really focus on getting those projects out and into the hands of users, regardless of whether they're for profit or not for profit. Being able to kind of distribute that support among a reasonably large number of developers and technologists will help open up the closet for those of us who are inside tech or big tech to be able to be a bit more vocal about what we're doing or to have an option if they ever take the risk to come out of, to come out of their closet.

Eric Wilson:

So what can we learn from you? You mentioned of course, some, some past attempts, you called them performative. I'm curious, what are those, the lessons that we can take away from those and be applied to future initiatives?

Jason Belich:

The biggest lesson I think is past attempts at right wing funding for technology attempted to play a part they don't understand. So like if you're an actor and you, you, you have, you have a part in front of you that you need to memorize and learn and perform, but you don't really understand the character. And we can't do this in way that the left and the traditional venture capital funding process works because their process is actually grossly inefficient for one. But it also pushes a mindset which is harmful to technology itself. And they do that by pushing fake notions of value and quick profits over quality of the product, quality of the project, and the long term impact of what it is that you're intending to do. Traditional venture funding in Silicon Valley is just as left wing as the rest of Silicon Valley and the way Sandhill wrote, which is the, the center of venture funding in the valley values companies, a huge piece of that is based on number of developers, the number of technologies you have in your company or in your project. That's how they value things. So the incentive structure there is to hire a lot of developers and give them not very much consequential to do, which is fine if you have unlimited money <laugh> or relatively unlimited money or super cheap money, and it's massively superfluous. You just don't, just don't need that many technologists on your, in your company or in your project. A team of four or five can accomplish as much or more than a team of 500. And this is something that we know in technology,

Eric Wilson:

So we don't need to find too many Republicans or conservatives in, in the big tech closet. No, we don't just, just make sure that we, we get them connected in the right place.

Jason Belich:

We can do with 50 or a hundred million dollars what the traditional VC slash democrat ecosystem does with, with 500 million or a billion and a half. I mean, as I mentioned like Arabella earlier, they funnel a billion and a half dollars every year to their c3 s and c four s.

Eric Wilson:

We've talked a lot about the, the funding side of it and then, and bringing in

Jason Belich:

Funding is the seed,

Eric Wilson:

The seed and that that brings in the, the technologist. What about the, the culture o on the users? What needs to happen with the mindset of people who run campaigns to make this work?

Jason Belich:

Yeah, that's a, that's that, that's a big thing too in Republican politics. The right was the original big data, the big data side. Ever since, you know, you know, Dick Viy and b and, and, and Bruce Eley invented direct mail fundraising in the late sixties and early seventies. Republicans have been doing a lot of data work since then for fundraising, for voter outreach, for everything it has to do with managing someone's data in, in, in how you interact with them as an organization or a party or a campaign. We're still using the paradigms that were created at of that time to manage that data. So like I like to say is Big tech gave Democrats the social graph and we're still using database tables for the culture of using data and politics. We have to stop using the 1970s paradigm where we get as much data as we can and we just pound the hell out of it and see what happens.

And if we get that half percent positive response, we're doing good. We have to get away from that paradigm. It's turning people off. It's treating people off in huge ways. Actually that's how you get these situation. We were getting texts and emails flooding into you from Republican campaigns with heavy pitches. You'll get 10 x response or whatever if you donate this now. And if you don't, if you don't, if if we don't get this three x match, we'll kill this bunny and that type <laugh> your stuff. This is all rooted in decades old paradigms. And the Democrats have learned how to use profile marketing and data targeting using graph algebra to tailor what they're doing to the people they're reaching out to in a way that doesn't abuse them, it doesn't a abuse the data that they have, and they're able to harvest what they're doing orders of magnitude more effectively than we are.

So on the <inaudible> side, we have to get out of that paradigm. Even in the organizations and, and campaigns I've been talking to over the past few months, I've always been extremely solid that the campaign consultants are asking me about subject, about this subject in terms that they understand of data universes and list sizes. And my first reaction to that is always, I am never going to give you a list. I'm not going to give you a bulk quantity of data that we would be painstakingly, painstakingly validating and curating, just so that you can have something to abuse.

Eric Wilson:

Well, Mike, thanks to Jason Belles for a great conversation today. Go read his op-ed from Red State. It's in our show notes. You can learn more about him there as well. If this episode made you a little bit smarter, gave you something to think about, which it certainly did for me, all that we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague, you look smarter in that process. So it's a win-win. Remember to subscribe to the Business of Politics Show wherever you listen to podcasts, so that way you never miss an episode. You can visit our website, business of politics podcast.com to get past episodes and to sign up for email alerts. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. See you next time.

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