The papers presented in this panel illuminate how social and political conservatives in the United States embraced the promise of new technologies at the end of the twentieth century. The speakers examine how conservative writers and politicians incorporated ideas about networked digital technologies into their policy proposals, and how they crafted broader political frameworks for the coming digital society. The papers surface the unlikely political alliances and cleavages that formed around new technologies in the 1990s, and how right-wing figures—most notably, but not exclusively, Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich—navigated this political terrain.

Collectively, the papers in this panel problematize predominant historical narratives about digital technology and politics in the 1990s. Throughout the decade, multiple political coalitions fought for competing visions of how the internet and the New Economy should be governed. To date, scholarship has largely foregrounded the impact of two such overlapping political coalitions: first, the group of civil libertarians at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who fought against regulation of the internet; and second, the “Atari Democrats” whose neoliberal, tech-friendly priorities set the stage for the New Democrat Coalition. By shifting the focus to the political right, the papers on this panel open new avenues for understanding the policy battles that took shape—and open new questions about the impacts of those battles.

So too do these papers contribute new dimensions to the historical understandings of the American political right. A growing body of scholarship has begun illuminating the key priorities and strategies of conservative movements in the 1990s. This scholarship frequently distinguishes the staunch traditionalism of paleoconservatives like presidential candidate Pat Buchanan from the techno-enthusiasm of cyberlibertarians in Silicon Valley. The panel instead questions the clear boundaries between these right-wing projects, surfacing the futurist commitments at the core of several otherwise reactionary movements and the support for state-sponsored technological development among assumed libertarians.

Finally, this panel collectively makes sense of ideological approaches to the “future,” and how “futurism” itself became a social and political project at the end of the century. While the futurist political project was not exclusive to conservatives, right-wing futurists nonetheless offer one way in to understanding the broader discursive and social phenomenon. At a moment of great technological and historical change, metaphors like the “Electronic Frontier” and “cyberspace” both helped predict the future and shape it along ideological lines. In a contemporary moment of continued political and technological upheaval, understanding the political power of claims to the “future” is more crucial than ever.