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Last week, two conferences drew the attention of all of Washington’s policy nerds, though your excitement really depended on where you fell on the political spectrum. On the right, at the Westin DC Downtown: NatCon, a gathering of Trump officials and allies calling for the persecution of AI developers and the expulsion of the “insufficiently American.” On the left, at the Salamander Hotel on the waterfront: the Abundance Conference, whose annoyingly optimistic proponents envision an American techno-utopia, which could be realized if governments just stopped regulating so damn much.
Most journalists and attendees went to either one or the other — my report from NatCon is here, where I uncovered a brewing MAGA Butlerian jihad against Big Tech — but there were a few who were masochistic enough to try attending both. And one of those was Gaby Del Valle, a Verge policy reporter, who managed to catch the last day of NatCon before going to Abundance for a separate project. (Gaby is on book leave but, as she put it, came to DC “for the love of the game.”)
On her first day in town, as we were charging our phones in some hotel lobby, Gaby floated a theory: even though Abundance and NatCon were completely ideologically opposed to each other, the conferences were asking the exact same thing. “If Abundance is, like, We have all these people and we have to provide for them,” she proposed, “NatCon is like, We have these many resources and they are only for Americans — so who’s an American?”
We promised to check in with each other once we both recovered, and I guarantee you, this will be the only article in political news where both sides are truly represented. Before that, here’s the latest we’ve published…
“Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring” Josh Dsieza’s latest feature is a deep dive into the Wikipedia moderator community’s fight to survive the rise of international authoritarianism.
“Sal Khan is hopeful that AI won’t destroy education”: The web education pioneer talks to guest host Hank Green for this week’s Decoder.
“The tech antitrust renaissance may already be over” It was nice while it lasted, but as Lauren Feiner reports, the courts are demonstrating an aversion to breaking up big companies like Google.
“NatCon: all vibes, no policy. Abundance: all policy, no vibes.”
I know of very few people who went to both NatCon and Abundance other than Gaby, but when we were catching up, she brought up a fellow back-to-backer: Jerusalem Demsas, the former Atlantic writer who recently launched The Argument on Substack. Demsas delivered what Gaby called the funniest crack of the week. “She called NatCon ‘the Scarcity Conference,’” said Gaby. “It was really funny. And I think she’s kind of right.”
Tina: What the heck is Abundance?
Gaby: From my understanding, Abundance is the position that we need more of everything and that we can have more of everything, and that the thing that is holding us back from having more of everything is, in fact, regulation.
Abundance kind of came out of YIMBY stuff. They want more housing. That’s a big part of it. And part of what’s getting in the way of more housing is local NIMBY sentiment, where people don’t want stuff being built in their neighborhoods. But the YIMBY argument is also that local regulations get in the way of building more housing. They’re really into single-stair ordinances. I have not looked into it that deeply. I just know that there’s some type of requirement around stairs, for example, that prevents more housing from being built.
So, in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, they talk about this mystical future where, like, star medicine is delivered to you via drone.
Wait, wait, star medicine?
Yeah. It’s just a thing that they made up, but they’re like, This could be the future, medicine from the stars. And you’re not rich. You’re just a regular person getting star medicine delivered to you via drone.
The liberal argument for Abundance is that we developed this entire regulatory regime in response to complete, unrestrained capitalism that led to a lot of environmental degradation and pollution and labor abuses and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that kind of capitalism was at the time hindering progress. The regulatory regime emerged to make people’s lives healthier and safer and better. But now that regulation is a regime hindering progress and it’s preventing people’s lives from being healthier and safer and better. This is my very butchered understanding of what Abundance is. At least the liberal argument for Abundance.
But the conference was very horseshoe theory. It was co-sponsored by center-left groups and not-as-center-right groups — further into the right, but not like, far right.
Yeah, NatCon was definitely far right. But it’s funny that you mentioned that Abundance was anti-regulatory because in a lot of ways, NatCon was calling for fewer regulations, but only in some spheres, and in in other spheres, it was like, No, we’re locking down AI and tech development and immigration with extreme prejudice.
It’s so interesting that there seems to be this realignment going on on both sides. Right now NatCon is anti-free trade, pro-tariff, pro-reining in tech. And then this Abundance coalition seems to have a lot of internal disagreements, as all coalitions do, about how much we should limit, how much we should get rid of regulation, and how much we should do this. I talked to people there who were like, Yeah, I’m a socialist. And then there were people from The Foundation for American Innovation [a center-right think tank]. It was much more ideologically diverse, I would say, than NatCon. But Democrats historically have been quite for the regulatory state, and now they’re saying they’re not. So it’s not like a realignment or a rebrand for the right-wing groups that are involved in Abundance, but it kind of is for the liberal groups.
I would also say not everybody in Abundance was pro-AI. Well, pro-AI is maybe a reductive way of looking at it. But in one of the panels, somebody was talking about how even tech people now are interested in introducing some friction to their lives, because frictionlessness has gone too far. So it wasn’t, All tech is good, we need AGI now. There were people who think that, but then there also were people who don’t.
So Abundance was more accepting of the possibility AI could make their life good rather than bring forth Satan.
Yeah. Nobody in the room that I was in was talking about Satan at all, for what it’s worth.
Another thing: the way that they talked about immigration was really interesting. The only panel on immigration was specifically about high-skilled immigration. They weren’t talking about asylum or refugees or anything like that.
So increasing the number of H-1B visas?
Not even increasing the number of H-1B visas, but actually reforming the H-1B system. One of the panels suggested getting rid of the H-1B lottery and replacing it with a different system. Part of the reason people don’t like it is because there is some fraud and abuse that goes on. So, figuring out how to expand high-skilled immigration while also getting rid of the problems in our current high-skilled immigration system.
So my understanding of your theory is that NatCon and Abundance were basically two sides of the same discussion about the future of America via technology?
The future of America in general, including via technology. I didn’t go to all of NatCon, but my understanding was they believed that number one, America’s full. Number two, America’s ours, this is our country, this is who belongs to our country. And how do we ensure that the pool of resources or whatever that we distribute is for, like, Americans. But Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s speech was so “our forefathers came to the frontier for us, not for everybody else.”
He literally did say they fought off “Indian war bands.”
So I think NatCon was about defining who is part of America, and then how do they protect Americans against all of these threats — the threat of AI, the threat of abortion, the threat of immigration, to name a few.
And then Abundance, it was not that. I would say it was much more ideologically diverse just by nature of it being posted by a bunch of different groups across the political spectrum. But It wasn’t defining who is American in terms of who lives here right now. It was like, We have all these people here. What do we do to ensure that those people have enough of everything? Gov. Spencer Cox was talking about how to build more housing in Utah. There was a panel on “Abundance in the family,” which was, like, How do we create policy or create a culture where people can have more kids if they want to?
Some of the panels and some of the conversations were very much, This is going to be the winning strategy for the Democrats. But not everybody there was a Democrat. It was mostly people who were concerned about housing. They’re concerned about the cost of living, and Abundance is what will deliver what people want on those fronts. It wasn’t explicitly anti-Trump — though some of it was kind of leaning conservative.
The way that I would also describe Abundance is: very wonky, policy-oriented stuff that they’re trying to figure out how to sell to the public. Someone described it as “delivering utopianism through white papers.”
I have a very strong argument / rant about that mentality, which is, I think the Democratic Party relied on that far too long and was never able to actually message all of their ideas to the public. Which I think is why we got here, because they ended up being too explanatory: if you just explain to people what we’re doing and explain why the other side is bad, people will totally fall in line and keep following us.
There was some of that present, but then they were also aware that that had happened. And so they were like, How do we communicate this to people? How do we deliver something and then be like, “We did this?” The most concise way I could write the tagline, if I had to give it one, is: NatCon is all vibes, no policy. Abundance is all policy, no vibes.
That’s not for lack of trying on each side to have a mix of policy and vibes. On both sides of Abundance, generously, there is a commitment to bipartisanship. More cynically, I think the liberal side is thinking about how to get the Obama / Biden / Trump voters: is it by being more centrist, or not even by being more centrist? But Abundance is a genuine return to civil bipartisanship.
NatCon is not doing that shit. They are absolutely not interested.
And now, time for Recess.
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