A conservatism that speaks only of markets, efficiency, and consumer choice, while ignoring the rapid encroachment of technology into our social fabric, does not deserve its name.

Without Diminishment Editor and Peter Copeland

Jun 08, 2026 Paid

Culture is where we live, breathe, and have our being. It is the sum total of the norms, artefacts, institutions, beliefs, and patterns of life that make up a people. Tools and their use in the activity of making—what the Greeks called techne, and what we now call the technological—are therefore at the core of culture-making. Technology has always served human aims, but now, more than before, it has come to enframe and structure the whole of life, shaping and, at times, supplanting those aims through the expansion of efficiency-seeking and controlling technique as an end in itself. This orientation is consistent with the progressive worldview of both left and right, in which boundaries are to be overcome and limits transgressed in pursuit of the ever-fleeting satisfaction of subjective desire.

The social consequences of this worldview are becoming harder to ignore: anomie, isolation, loneliness, and demographic decline all bear the mark of a culture obsessed with technology yet increasingly estranged from human flourishing. It was not the case just years ago, but in 2026, most people can now recognise either inherent flaws or serious deficiencies in the omnipresence of the digital, social media, euthanasia and assisted suicide, transgender ideology, rampant pornography, the prospect of surrogacy, assisted reproductive technology that severs life from the loving bond of mother and father, and much more—even if they are afraid to say so. All of these things involve the deployment of technique to create technology that allows us to exert ever more control in the interest of unrestrained subjective desire and the impulse to overcome everything that is given.

Indeed, even Liberals in Canada have at least begun to recognise that certain features of social media design are harmful, even if they often take the wrong approach to content through ‘hate speech’ and ‘online harms.’ With a few notable exceptions, conservatives, by contrast, have had little of substance to say, treating technology with the same naïve laissez-faire they bring to so many other cultural questions, as though it were simply a neutral engine of innovation and growth.

Culture must be preserved, improved upon and passed on, and that requires an approach to technology ordered to that end. We have to recognise that many of the social ills that animate conservatives of different stripes are the consequence of ignoring culture and the technology that shapes it, and of an excessive reliance on the assumption that individuals should always be left alone to make their own choices, even if those choices evidently inflict harm on themselves or others.

This overemphasised belief in unrestrained freedom has left us powerless to properly design technology, and tailor its application in countless domains of law and policy. But we all recognise in our own lives that happiness is the result of commitment, of order, of using our faculties well rather than poorly, and many now see that we need a major shift in emphasis on the side of order in our politics and policy. We can’t continue to look to the liberal traditions of the libertine left or libertarian right for the answer—we need properly conservative ideas manifested in ordered liberty that tilts towards the side of order and manifests itself in policy ordered to the common good. Inspired by George Grant, we must recognise our unique position next to the United States—a nation that views technology as inherently transformative. In line with our own philosophy of peace, order, and good government, our approach to technology should build upon the past rather than break from it, ensuring that innovation ultimately serves humanity rather than supplants it.

The Canadian position

Canada stands beside the United States—the paradigmatic nation of the progressive ethos where technology stands for unrestrained freedom and constant change, which are treated as the foundational values of the culture and pursued almost as ends in themselves. Grant recognised this clearly. America’s immense productive power and technological ambition are inseparable from its revolutionary character, which is to treat inherited forms, natural limits, and settled boundaries as things to be overcome. It is a political philosophy that has generated extraordinary wealth and dynamism, but it has also unleashed a vision of progress that is increasingly inimical to the human.

The evidence shows as much. Compared with Canada, the United States has markedly higher inequality, higher violent crime and a homicide rate about three times as high, and worse health care outcomes for a significant part of the population, despite far higher spending. It also has a higher share of children living with a single parent. On some other family indicators—such as divorce and births outside marriage—we are more comparable, and there are contrary trends like the rise in euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada. But the broader pattern remains: the United States spawned the left-wing takeover of the universities, and every socially liberal phenomenon that is now worse here originated there. The U.S. has been the world leader in technological dynamism, but also in the commercialisation of practices and industries that treat natural limits as obstacles to be overcome. Commercial surrogacy is illegal in Canada but permitted in many U.S. states; the U.S. has built a vast commercial gambling market, including expansions into online gambling, sports gambling and polymarkets, with clear, documented harms: increased bankruptcy and insolvency rates, addiction, and declining mental health; its speech regime is more permissive towards pornography than Canada’s, and it is the United States that spawned Playboy and the pornography industry we have with us today; and many of the firms most responsible for the psychologically manipulative attention economy are American. These things derive from its highly libertarian society—the champion of ever-increasing, unrestrained, and unrefined liberty.

Standing next to that power, Canada should not simply imitate it, whether in its progressive or libertarian form as we have thus far. Our task should be to soften the sharper edges of an all-enframing technological order and to assert political and cultural agency over it. But we must not do so in the paltry way we’ve attempted to date.

The crude post-national kind of Canadian nationalism that shows up in our digital services tax that we’ve been forced to repeal and our Online Streaming Act, or our clumsy, CBC-subsidising protectionism that shuns all proper competition and market incentives—these things are certainly not the path. They have neither fostered a healthy sense of Canadian identity nor distinctive, high-quality Canadian cultural products, and they do so at unnecessarily great expense and in a manner that is undermining, rather than strengthening, the dynamism of our cultural and media industries. If anything, we need the dynamism of technology, harnessed properly. It is a crucial source of innovation, productivity, and prosperity that we sorely need. But Canada should distinguish itself in its approach to technology by shaping it according to a more serious view of the human person and the common good.

Technology policy in the mould of human nature

The right response is to shape technology according to human nature, rather than pursue it as a vehicle of unlimited transformation for its own sake. This means ceasing to judge its products only by their convenience and looking instead at the kinds of persons, habits, and social relations they produce. We can then see that the product design and business models of key goods and services are part of the problem.

We have, in the space of a few months, seen major successful lawsuits against purveyors of the attention economy like Meta and YouTube, in line with the recognition that many of the dominant products of this sphere are far from neutral platforms. They are systems deliberately designed to manipulate psychology and keep users in states of compulsive use and dependence. As recent polls would suggest, the Canadian public has had enough and wants to see regulation of both social media and key features of artificial intelligence.

To assert agency over technology and ensure it serves our ends and not the other way around, key features of its product design and reach can be targeted across key domains, from the attention economy and social media to online pornography, biotechnology, and our digital economy.

Targeting product design in the attention economy would include age restrictions for social media, the full removal of phones from schools, limits on addictive design features such as infinite scroll, and stronger scrutiny of advertising models that monetise distraction. Promising signs are afoot around the world, in places like Australia, where the government has banned social media for minors. Although some have been quick to suggest its approach has been a failure, I think, on the contrary, that early returns point to a drop in underage social media account-holding, from 49% before the law to 31% after it came into force. That is a substantial decline within just a few months, and no serious observer should expect a policy like this to reshape behaviour instantly. The law is a teacher, and over time the stigma associated with illegality should have a strong effect on people’s understanding of and interaction with this technology.

Pornography use is now widespread on a staggering scale. It has contributed to loneliness, shame, and the distortion of healthy sexual relations, while its production is often bound up with coercion, exploitation, and the abuse of vulnerability. Even where overt coercion is absent, its use is inherently harmful—from dimming and distorting healthy sexual desire to numerous negative health effects based on usage rates—both to users and to those who perform in it. In Canada, we are among the highest users in the world.

Far more serious enforcement is needed against the violent and demeaning excesses of online pornography, much of which already strains or exceeds the limits set by Canadian law yet goes largely unenforced. By the standards of our obscenity law, a substantial share of mainstream pornography is not merely explicit but violent, degrading, and dehumanising, and therefore obscene. Credible studies from around the world show that a significant proportion of mainstream pornography contains physical or verbal violence, with content routinely depicting acts that meet legal definitions of assault, torture, and sexual exploitation. And indeed, Montreal is home to the world’s greatest purveyor of such obscenity, Pornhub. Perhaps part of the problem is that our Charter adopted ‘freedom of expression’, rather than the more appropriate freedom of speech in the pursuit of truth. But given the letter of the obscenity law and the existing jurisprudence, much of it could be treated as unlawful, rather than tolerated through persistent official inaction. Image take-down laws, like those recently enacted in the United States, age verification requirements, and legislative efforts to seriously curtail the type and prevalence of pornography that is legal and excessive are all measures that should be pursued. The time is now ripe to act on this file, as even the UN is coming around. Just as UN human rights bodies moved sharply against Canada’s expansion of MAiD to persons whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable, there is growing recognition that large parts of the online pornographic economy are exploitative and harmful, and the UN has now called on Canada and the United States to take serious action against those who distribute and profit from it.

The use of technology to facilitate every base impulse in multiplying our consumption opportunities does not just extend to consumer products but has been turned inward on our own bodies. The application of technology to modifying the human is the next frontier. In biotechnology, the key distinction should be between therapy and enhancement: healing what is disordered according to an objective understanding of health, versus using technique to refashion the body in service of subjective will. It is a distinction that has implications across a range of questions—gene editing for disease versus trait selection, restorative medicine versus elective redesign, reconstructive plastic surgery versus the vain and aesthetic variant, and, not least, the question of gender, where the evidence for amputation, hormone suppression and bodily mutilation in pursuit of a mythical gender identity is continually found to be weakly supported.

This issue—and the typical way it is framed—is illustrative of what’s wrong with the approach conservatives tend to take, which is to be liberal-lite. In this case, it is the view of gender-critical feminists, who interpret gender ideology primarily through the dated prism of second-wave feminism, as though it were simply another chapter in the struggle between men and women. What we need, they say, is just a greater recognition of ‘women’s rights’ and a willingness to follow the science of sex. The deeper issue and driver here is technology as transformative, and its application to biology in the philosophy of transhumanism. Gender ideology is one particularly visible expression of a wider logic in which the body is treated as merely inanimate stuff, a limit to be overcome, all in service of the self. Recognition of sex over gender identity in the name of some feminist rearguard action will just be swept away if there is not a deeper shift in worldview to confront and supplant the tectonic plate moving beneath the surface—the transhumanist ethos and the pursuit of transgressive technology for its own sake.

It is a scandal that conservatives in Canada are not taking up these questions of gender ideology, bioethics, cultural degradation through pornography, and the regulation of the aspects of technology and social media product design, as they are all quite clearly harmful. The conservative wishes to put forward a vision of life and of the human person that respects limits, and promotes community, family, and forms of life consistent with human flourishing—not one that is libertine and degraded. Yet conservative parties have done little to advance that aim, consistently ignoring the domains of technology, culture, and product and service design—treating them as unassailable, necessary results of the invisible hand and the sacrosanct freedom of choice they see in the workings of markets.

The all-enframing, all-encompassing nature of technology in the contemporary era means that the individual and her mediating institutions of family, faith, and civil society are not properly capable of exerting individual agency to adapt technology and avoid its harmful manifestations alone. We need to exert pressure on the firms and business models that are in play, and provide clear signals from law and policy that show the public that these ideas, products, and practices are harmful. This can be done while respecting and preserving the sphere of liberty and personal responsibility that are crucial to a healthy society.

None of this requires hostility to tech as such, which also clearly holds great promise. The doom of job replacement and mass unemployment are overstated, because at their core, markets serve our need to serve and be served. This is the basis of exchange, and markets always adapt and reconfigure accordingly. As Waterloo economist Joel Blit has argued, technological change tends to come in waves, not all at once, and new forms of work and exchange emerge alongside it.

Vigilance is certainly needed, as the world of AI is replete with the kind of emotionally illiterate barbarism we find in any domain where techno-utopianism is present. A cyber-philistinism evident in the degeneracy of Elon Musk who has at least 14 children by 4 different women with some germinated and selected through IVF, Marc Andreessen who ‘practices zero introspection,’ or Sam Altman’s designer babies startup and the normalisation and promulgation of AI pornography. In spite of that, the technology’s nature and potential are misunderstood. It is a general-purpose technology, and like those before it, effectively enhances automation of functions by an advanced process of pattern-identification. The coming Generative AI industrial revolution will target entry-level white-collar work in the near term, while the premium rises on judgment, creativity, and the embodied and emotional dimensions of work—properly human skills rooted in consciousness and embodied experience, which a symbol-processing machine that necessarily lacks the capacity to think cannot genuinely reproduce.

That is why, when it comes to AI and digital economy, and our cultural ecosystem of media and entertainment, we ought to adopt an approach that jettisons the excessive and suffocating protectionism of our online streaming act, CBC, and media subsidies. In its place, we should encourage greater competition while building a regulatory framework capable of addressing the harmful design features of the attention economy. Likewise, our AI strategy should permit the regulation of demonstrable harms arising from particular products and applications, while otherwise promoting the use of AI to drive productivity, innovation, and broad-based prosperity that can be its fruits. Last week’s long-awaited strategy largely achieves this, with targeted regulation on privacy and discrete harms in the works, and a focus on increasing our anaemic adoption and promoting innovation rather than stymieing it with an EU-style approach that treats firm size and frontier models as dangers. It could do better by further enhancing entrepreneurial incentives, and by easing up on the heavy investments in a supercomputer and cloud infrastructure where we lack the competitive advantage, but it is otherwise sound.

Putting the logos back in technology

A humane society does not reject innovation, but neither does it accept the lie that private vice is the necessary price of public dynamism, or that technological progress requires social dissolution. That false choice has done immense damage.

A conservatism that speaks only of markets, efficiency, and consumer choice, while ignoring the technological forms of life that are inimical to stability and a cohesive social milieu does not deserve its name. Its reflexive suspicion of government and collective purpose is more juvenile than principled, born of fear and of an unwillingness to make distinctions, accept trade-offs, or confront the most powerful forces now shaping culture.

The very word technology points to what we have forgotten. It joins techne, the art of making, to logos, the intelligible order in reality: the rational structure by which the world can be known, and the normative structure through which we discern what each aspect is for and what is good for us. A properly conservative approach to technology begins from the truth about the human person. It asks whether our tools cultivate virtue or erode it, whether they strengthen or weaken the institutions worth conserving, and whether they serve lives ordered towards what is good, beautiful, and true. It is high time conservatives recognise the effect of technology on culture, and put the logos back in technology.

Peter Copeland is deputy director of Domestic Policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He worked as a director of policy and senior policy advisor to multiple ministers in the Ontario government.