Ask HN: 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?
32 comments
[ 12.9 ms ] story [ 1016 ms ] threadI 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.
I'm a queer man, it's not like Tim's marketing is lost on me. But I see the way he behaves and the principles he sacrifices for success; he's a CCP pundit, of course he's willing to toe the conservative party line. This goes for almost all leadership you hold to represent "progress" in the private sector. Fairweather friends, until being enemies is more profitable.
It's literally the EU's planned response should Trump not back down from his trade war: https://www.reuters.com/technology/eu-could-tax-big-tech-if-...
It's actively harmful to US hegemony, too, with industry leaders starting fights with your closest allies.
It's rather like an Irish person defending transfer pricing. Probably morally wrong but completely understandable.
It's about the money. Always has been, always will be.
It probably caused some unease among Google employees but not enough for any of them to walk away from their annual double digit stock price growth.
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.
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.
More realistically the only ideology in business is profit, and the rest is noise used to advertise to customers or prospective talent, investors, and so on. They're windsocks, they aren't the wind.
Perhaps you're just more aware of it now.
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.
I could find someone to follow in either one of them.
It's hard to find someone to follow in HN though. Too much nonsense.