The Right to Bear Technology

America’s Other Second Amendment

This piece by Katherine Boyle originally ran in The Free Press, as a part of their “America at 250” Series.

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One of the greatest Saturday Night Live skits in recent memory begins in Philadelphia in 1789. A fife plays as James Madison announces the First Amendment, the cornerstone of our republic: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, of abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble. . . . Well done, gentlemen! The First Amendment!”

The Framers applaud, and the hifalutin music stops.

“Now what shall we discuss next? What is the second most important principle of our nation?”

It’s here that an unknown guy named “Matt” appears and says the word we all know is coming: “Guns.”

The audience laughs.

“Excuse me?” Madison says.

Matt, played by the delightfully Southern Walton Goggins, lowers his sunglasses and repeats himself slowly, this time with an even more pronounced drawl:

“Guunnnnnsss.” The audience laughs even louder.

“It’s ridiculous,” Madison retorts. “What will posterity say of us if the second right we enshrine in this document is simply ‘Guns’?”

Matt responds: “That we don’t play.”

The audience reaction highlights one of the most uncomfortable parts of the founding of our republic: that the shocking dichotomy of the First and Second Amendments is actually very funny. The rights to freedom of speech, religion, and peaceful protest are the cornerstones of the American republic, enshrined so deeply in our revolutionary ethos that every elementary school student knows what they mean. These are the virtues that make America, well, America, the named and sacred freedoms for which men have fought and died for generations.

The Second Amendment is one we don’t like talking about, the one that can get you eye rolls at Thanksgiving dinner with your liberal in-laws or, worse, find yourself labeled a gun nut, as if you know the difference between a Glock and a SIG. But as our apocryphal Framer Matt says, this principle reminds our enemies that Americans don’t play. And indeed, we do not. FAFO is ingrained in our national ethos, and it goes all the way back.

The First Amendment is what we stand for; the Second is how we enforce it. And the story that has shaped America can be boiled down to this deep-seated tension in our founding documents, the very principles awarded first and second chair in the orchestra of the American experiment. Idealism and force. Virtue and strength. Truth and organized violence. Take the Second away, and the First withers.

A Right to Technology

While watching the SNL skit, I realized something important about the Constitution: The Second Amendment is the only one of the 27 amendments to explicitly grant Americans the right to a specific piece of technology. The technology written in ink in the Bill of Rights is “Arms.” Weapons. Guns.

This is not something we talk much about. And it is likely a bit horrifying to modern Silicon Valley, which was built on arms and weapons manufacturing in the mid-20th century but prefers to work in cleaner realms of numbers and math today.

In this sense, the modern tech sector owes a greater debt to the Second Amendment than to the First, even if most of the technology we produce does not enjoy specific constitutional protection. Technology cases brought to the Supreme Court usually involve the First Amendment or the Fourth (which protects us against unreasonable search or seizure). But this fundamental technology, as understood by the Founding Fathers, was named and given special protection, as it was essential to the enforcement of the values being codified. They named the tool. And that protected tool defends the preceding and subsequent rights that define who we are as Americans.

I can already hear my colleagues in San Francisco shrieking. “Freedom of the press is 1A! We are distribution and more aligned with the ideals than the guns!” But tech would be wise to remember our rightful place.

Technology, by its very nature, is force. And it is becoming more essential to national success and resilience than natural resources or population. This is also why tech is so hated, so feared or distrusted by many, with large groups of skeptics wishing America would just stop building the enforcement layer for our rights. Technology is the strength part of the “peace through strength” doctrine, something Americans like and have come to expect. And if we all forget tech’s rightful place in this American dichotomy, there will be nothing left to protect.

The Hidden History of Silicon Valley

Why do American technology companies, and by extension America itself, dominate the world? It is because Americans believe in our inherent right to use technology freely, much more so than people in other countries. And that mindset has an identifiable origin.

Many of us know the founding story of Silicon Valley—how William Shockley helped invent the transistor (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, in 1956) and how the “Traitorous Eight” left his lab to start Fairchild Semiconductor, attract the first venture capital investments, found Intel, and then pretty much everything else. The semiconductor gave us the personal computer, the internet, and the technological capacity for individual self-expression—our contemporary First Amendment tool kit, used in the comfort of the home.

But across town, there’s a parallel origin story of Silicon Valley, which had been underway for decades. The companies over there helped us win major wars—from the development of radar jammers in World War II to our missile defense systems of the Cold War. This is where we told the world, We don’t play. Yes, I know my geography is a bit slippery: Berkeley needs to be included, from J. Robert Oppenheimer through the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Bear with me.

In the Silicon Valley telling, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the first Big Tech company headquartered out West. But the Lockheed Corporation, which moved out to Sunnyvale in 1956, had six times as many employees there as HP in 1960. Their flagship “peace through strength” product, the Polaris missile, was the anchor tenant for market demand in computing, all the way up the semiconductor stack. In the early years of Fairchild Semiconductor, a company now synonymous with the region, the biggest customers weren’t commercial entities but NASA and the Pentagon, which had almost unlimited budgets to compete with the USSR as the space race and Cold War heated up. According to Chris Miller’s Chip War, 72 percent of all integrated circuits were bought by the Department of Defense (DoD) in 1965. Without the voraciousness of the DoD, the critical technologies of the 20th century would have rotted away in academic labs.

Meanwhile, Stanford’s dean of the School of Engineering, Frederick Terman, became university provost in 1955, driving the school to become the MIT of the West. Stanford’s Systems Engineering Lab, established by Terman, was the elite problem solver for the Air Force, NSA, and CIA, and helped fix the hardest signal processing issues in radar jamming and missile defense.

Terman ripped up the old rulebook around research and commercialization. He encouraged graduate students to start businesses, liberally shared intellectual property rights, and promoted the radical idea that transforming research into a business was a good thing for your academic career. (For more on this story, read Steve Blank’s “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Secret History of Silicon Valley.”) Our world-leading culture of technological entrepreneurship starts here, in the urgency of the Cold War, on the Second Amendment side of town.

Terman, maybe more than any other individual in the 20th century, implemented the assertion that Americans have a right to technology. His idea that the natural home of advanced-state technology should be entrepreneurial distribution—and as quickly as possible—was a radical one. But it’s why we accept today the idea that the purpose of technology is to be used by everyone who wants to. The consequences of that philosophy have been far-reaching, and Americans know that, though not codified directly in the Constitution, this is part of our ethos, our history, and our future.

The Second American Century

Seventy years later, Silicon Valley’s technical and cultural achievements now support our entire American way of life. Of the top 10 companies in the world by market capitalization, eight are American tech companies, up from three at the start of the century. Currently, 22 of the top 25 companies by the same measure are American public companies, compared to just 12 a quarter century ago. Innovation has spurred the U.S. economy to grow to nearly double the size of the European Union’s. And as much as China is feared for its population size and production capacity, it still trails the United States in innovation, and dynamism, with a GDP approximately 63 percent the size of America’s despite having roughly four times the population.

We should pause for a minute to reflect on how it is the pairing of the first two amendments that has given us such a distinct role in the world, and a differentiated advantage that seems to compound each year. Americans believe, fundamentally, that we have the right to use technology as a form of personal expression, leverage, and if necessary, force. This is the belief system on which our success depends. There is no other country, however capable or large, that possesses such a heritage.

The best example of this dichotomy is also the worst: When tragedy strikes. A man is assassinated on a college campus or a teenager shoots up a school: Who gets blamed? Guns, of course. But also tech. The internet. The phones. Social media.

The reaction is natural. Guns and tech are cut from the same cloth. This is an uncomfortable truth, given how much we sense that technology is the lever upon which we’ve built our way of life and something so essential to American hegemony. But the builders of stuff, and the wielders of tools, have always been more inherent to the scaffolding of our house than to its contents. And in this way, technology is not an ideal, not a moral good, though it should be used for such.

There was a time where Silicon Valley, even more so than the rest of America, forgot the burden of force and its early history. The Second American Century began with our imperial cities on fire. But Silicon Valley ignored the clash of civilizations, having just weathered its own cataclysmic crash on the other side of the country. Post–September 11th, a meandering decade ensued, which culminated with rallying cries to Occupy Wall Street on the heels of the Great Recession. During America’s longest war, so many technology companies avoided their duty to serve as the enforcement layer, the protector of the very rights young men and women were dying for across the world. But now, the tech industry has finally returned to the other side of town, building in service of the national interest, a duty tech must embrace in perpetuity. We must keep up our side of the bargain.

Our technological strength and our self-determined freedom to use it comes from our Second Amendment heritage more than some of us would like to admit. All technology, not just the guns and the arms, is our “peace through strength” enforcement mechanism: The protection that gave us the first American Century and ensures the continuity into the second. Our technology sector should never again forget its duty. And Americans should not forget tech’s rightful place in this glorious American dichotomy.

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Katherine Boyle is the co-founder of the American Dynamism practice at Andreessen Horowitz and a member of the board of The Free Press.

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