many techies i've met are keenly interested in policy discussions (how to design better systems). fewer seem to be interested in politics (the jockeying of individuals for power).
but even then, i'm not sure the mean and deviation around those two poles warrant generalizations like yours.
There's a strong tendency to say that anyone who doesn't have an easily-legible stance "isn't political", but that elides the difference between "doesn't care" and "isn't compatible with the existing political options". Even on "politics versus policy", I meet some programmers who limit themselves to policy based on lack of political interest, and some who limit themselves based on lack of political options.
If you're something like left-libertarian or a privacy-supporting technocrat, modern US parties have roughly nothing to offer you. Those views aren't just outside the mainstream, but perpendicular to it. You can't just try to pull the Democrats left or the Republicans right to reach your views, you have to hope for some complex multi-directional change.
Many of the most political programmers I know have one of those positions. So they lobby against SOPA, or push for pollution taxes over caps, but they don't see much value in advocating for any of the existing players.
(Of course, programmers are also just normal people; all of these generalizations are best understood not as actually common but as how programmers diverge from the mainstream when they do diverge.)
political parties seem to have detached themselves from the common citizen as they chase moneyed donors (who themselves have concentrated in the past few decades). power is consolidating along many dimensions, and that's both disconcerting and isolating to us ordinary citizens.
It doesn't mean $1M in the 401k and a couple of residential houses they rent out.
You're right about the 401k - that $1M doesn't help too much until you hit retirement age. You need substantial unearned income or enough principle to draw down to be FI.
1. FatFIRE targets $4M-$7M, and is closer to your definition.(https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/)
Disclosure: not in the Bay area.
Way too many SV employees are completely out of touch with just how privileged they are.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/13/how-much-americans-at-have-i...
Privileged doesn't typically mean luck, it means advantages granted to you because of social class or parents and whatnot. I mean I guess you could stretch it to mean luck.
>a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.
Someone far less privileged than you are could also be working far harder than you are.
Privilege isn't a bad thing. Acknowledging it shouldn't take away from the fact that you had to work really hard, maybe harder than many others, to get to where you are.
As a mostly out of touch techie: How does that scale with living expenses? Do average people in SF have more than $1000 in savings because their living expenses are also that much higher?
I come from a relatively unrich area in Europe and when I had $1000 in savings over there, I felt super rich and like nothing can touch me. Now I'm in SF and I have 20x more savings, but feel like I'm one small catastrophe away from homeless.
Techies just don't care much about the rest of society because they got theirs and they think they deserve it - that anyone else could just as easily be in their position, so if they're not then it must be their own fault.
We've rebuilt all the same power structures, but with different players.
We could have had a cultural renaissance, a democratization of information and thought. Instead, we got a plague of click-bait tabloids, echo chambers, walled gardens, algorithmic gatekeepers, and television that you don't need a cable subscription for.
Exactly. It was a decision made for Internet users, on behalf of Internet users, _but not BY Internet Users_.
It appears there was debate in the 90s/00s going on, far above our heads whether any given connection to the Internet is to be considered a highly-modularm, highly-democratized "Terminal" or the individual "Pseudonym". Where "Pseudonym" here is the ever-growing bag of personal data, fingerprinting, ISP info, History, Cookies, etc. etc. that distinguishes you from your twin brother/sister).
Instead of Advertising Industry crafting a better message that appeals to the User of any given Terminal, Advertising Industry instead decided to collect as much data on everyone as possible, and infect their pages with invasive malware peddling wares they (usually) don't even need.
Mark Z. made his stance absurdly clear with his identity talks, and generally the rest of the Big Players followed.
And analytic and advertising systems being built upon the "Pseudonym" approach creates a plethora of unsustainable clickbait drivel.
Sure. They could opt out of that, just as some people opted out of having a telephone in their homes back when it was the primary mode of communication -- but they were so few that one was considered strange for not having one.
Of course, the objections to using Facebook are much stronger than they've ever been for having even a television, nevermind a telephone. Yet most people can't seem to tear themselves away. Not that they'd want to. They've got everything they need on Facebook, don't they?
> We could have had a cultural renaissance, a democratization of information and thought.
I have hopes, that we will see a new mindset in the coming decades, which looks back at our times and recognises its primitive state.
There are ways to give the power back to people and raise them in ways that encourage benevolent cooperation and progress.
Some of what's new is bad, but none of the bad stuff is actually new.