Oh Noes! Rand Paul is Getting Popular in Silicon Valley! Plus: Get Rebooted in SF with Nick Gillespie!

New
York magazine is getting a little antsy that Silicon Valley
gazillionaires may be getting their libertarian on thanks to Sen.
Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Kevin Roose notes that the libertarian-leaning
politician is spending lots of time out West and is hanging not
just with the likes Peter Thiel but also Mark Zuckerberg and Sean
Parker.

And why not? Unlike most establishment pols on either side of
the aisle, Paul doesn’t evince the technophobia that tends to
dominate Washington, D.C. He understands that Uber is a good thing
and that taxi commissions don’t have the interests of riders in
mind. He gets that ossified dealership rules that screw over Tesla
(or AirBnb or whatever) are protectionism, not safety regulations.

Roose writes:

Paul’s biggest problem, to borrow a term popularized among tech
workers, is that he’s not a “culture fit” in Silicon Valley. A
gray-haired Kentucky ophthalmologist is a less obvious
representative for tech’s political class than, say, Ro Khanna,
an Indian-born 30-something who speaks easily about 3-D
printing and robotics. But it’s not hard to imagine that someone
with Paul’s political genotype and a different phenotype — younger,
coastal, more fluent in tech-speak — could pick up broad support
from the kinds of techies who want government to leave their
start-ups alone.

The ideological overlay of Silicon Valley isn’t strictly
political, after all. It’s more about how institutions are
structured and functions are carried out. Lean and fast-moving are
good. Bloated and deliberative are bad. “Permissionless innovation”
is good. Bureaucratic box-checking is bad.

In this context, you can see why someone like Paul could appeal.
And while it’s still possible that people like Zuckerberg and
Parker could remain in the squishy political middle, it’s also
possible that they could tip into anti-Establishment
libertarianism, and take a whole coalition of tech donors with
them. After all, what a certain Silicon Valley contingent wants
most right now is independence. And few national politicians are
prepared to lengthen the leash as much as Rand Paul.

As it happens, Paul will be out in San
Francisco this weekend, speaking to the same conference that I’m
also participating in:

[This weekend], Paul will get to make his case yet again as the
keynote speaker at Reboot, a San
Francisco conference put on by a group called Lincoln Labs, which
self-defines as “techies and politicos who believe in promoting
liberty with technology.” He’ll likely say a version ofwhat
he’s said before: that Silicon Valley’s innovative potential
can be best unlocked in an environment with minimal government
intrusion in the forms of surveillance, corporate taxes, and
regulation. “I see almost unlimited potential for us in
Silicon Valley,” Paul has
said, with “us” meaning libertarians.

Read the
New York mag piece here.

For more details on the Reboot conference,
go here. Among the other speakers are Kmele Foster, Matt
Welch’s co-host on Fox Business’ The
Independents; Derek Khanna, gadfly crusader for sensible
copyright reform; and John Dennis, the business-furniture magnate
who ran a great campaign against Nancy Pelosi in 2012.

Reason.com readers get 15 percent off all tickets by
using the promo code reason when
registering.