HACKER Q&A
📣 cruzcampo

Anyone else disillusioned by the industry's hard-right turn?


When I started in the industry, it felt like an optimistic, positive movement - new technologies were created to make people's lives better, the industry pushed for a more inclusive world.

Now, during Trump's second term, it feels increasingly dystopian and fascist-enabling. Industry leaders rapidly kissed the ring of the increasingly authoritarian regime; they're busy building doomsday bunkers instead of doing anything to prevent a doomsday from happening.

Worse even, they seem to actively cheer on societal and ecological collapse. Even the latest obsession, AI, feels like it will be a force for evil as long as wealth (and with that compute, or in Marxist terms, the "means of production") is concentrated in the hands of a few right-wing billionaires.

Does anyone else feel the same way? How do you handle it?

  👤 JSR_FDED Accepted Answer ✓
I also miss the “bicycles for the mind” era.
👤 ungreased0675
The average American would likely say the industry is left-leaning or far-left.

I don’t believe there’s an actual right shift, it’s part messaging, part self-interest, part pandering. The government has a lot of ways to make life difficult for large businesses. Best to suck up a little now to avoid unpleasantness the next four years.

👤 archagon
Yes. Fuck the industry and fuck our spineless "leaders."

Fortunately, there are plenty of real hackers out there who devote their lives and careers to the betterment of humanity through open-source software, research, etc. (Unsurprisingly, they tend to lean hard left and don't head multinational corporations.) I will let their work be my guiding star.

👤 ThrowawayR2
Their support for inclusion was to improve their public image and make more money, their shift to support the opposite because public opinion changed and the political winds shifted is because they expect to make more money. When the next administration comes, they'll shift again just as easily.

It's about the money. Always has been, always will be.

👤 cicker
It's nothing new. The industry has always been driven by the excesses of predatory capitalism. I mean just look at how Microsoft were regarded around the turn of the century. It's really no different today.

Perhaps you're just more aware of it now.

👤 watwut
I thought SJW were paranoid and now I think they were 100% correct.
👤 jfengel
No, but only because I went through it about a decade ago. That's when I ditched Slashdot, which was looking increasingly like 4chan. The far-right turn of the industry leaders is more recent than that, but it was preceded from the bottom-up.

The industry has always fancied itself to be inclusive, but its inclusivity was "meritocratic". You had to earn your way in. Anybody who didn't qualify -- for whatever reason -- was excluded.

That was heavily influenced by Objectivism. The Objectivist philosophy imagines itself to be benevolent: those excluded for lack of merit nonetheless benefit from the largesse of our innovations. That is, unless they get in our way, in which case they are thieves.

The meritocracy was always faulty, but asserting that is seen as a deep personal insult. That assertion often came from the left, so a lot of people moved to the right in response. And the political right encouraged this, constantly presenting new classes of people as a threat to their self-image.

That's much more visible now that the right has achieved political victory -- which came about in part because technological innovation encouraged echo chambers that appear to be more galvanizing for the right than for the left. I have no idea if that was inevitable or not, but the drift of the tech industry to the right probably was. We have to justify ourselves as masters of the universe, and that's something that the left wing discourages.

👤 kgwxd
r/StallmanWasRight
👤 dzhiurgis
Not really, because it's not really far right. Meanwhile far left really freaks me out more. Visiting SF/LA scares me.
👤 bigyabai
If you paid attention to how executives behaved over the last 2 decades, this right-wing infatuation should not even remotely surprise you. Liberals are seen as the "enemy" of innovation for demanding higher environmental, safety and legal standards for businesses and individuals. Conservatives by contrast tend to preach a "hands-off" approach even when the company in question is killing foreign citizens on a farm in Belize.

I mean, shit. Look at companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft and Meta, the blue-chip stocks we like to hang our hats on in America. Apple is fighting antitrust at home and abroad, Google is now a monopoly, Microsoft is a former monopoly and Zuck is currently being questioned for sedition.

The commitment to liberal politics only exists when it's convenient for marketing. You have to watch what executives do, not listen to what they say.