[EDIT: 2023-03-19@20:12PDT : s/esteem/respect/g, to match Rawls' usage.]
The anger you notice is not context-free. People are shouty because:
- There are livelihoods at stake
- Worse, there are systems of respect at stake, many of which underwrite people (artists, coders, etc) feeling good about themselves. Rawls is a great reference point for this; feeling like you can contribute meaningfully (in a way that is meaningful for you) is one of the prereqs for social stability (said Rawls: https://academic.oup.com/book/32571/chapter-abstract/2703665...)
- We tech bros (or bras, in my case) do have a notable pattern of disrupting-for-profit. I mean, even middlebrow fare like _Glass Onion_ now casts us as villains at worst, and stooges and best, and it would be good to slow down for a moment to consider if they might be seeing something real about us. (Ask an NYC taxi medallion holder.)
- Creatives, especially, were already at a profound breaking point, one that is not easily communicated to those outside the disciplines in question; see https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53935644-the-death-of-th... . It was created by, yes, our industry, and began in the nineties, before at least some of the readership here was born, and picked up steam ever decade thereafter.
Much like the early days of climate change reportage in oil/gas sector, the historic & intersubjectively verifiable externalities of our industry's (frankly incredible) progress feel ego-dystonic. It doesn't seem fair that something as fun as what we do could cause immiseration.
This --- to draw a tidy circle --- is because tech progress is part of our self-respect. And non-harming is part of most non-sociopathic self-respect, including our own. This is, in a word, a threat to our sense of self. A threat to our identity, and worse, a risk of moral injury.
'Moral injury' -- the harm to the self that comes from having done something wrong or harmful to someone else -- is one of the most profound roots of, e.g. PTSD in soldiers, and most humans intuitively avoid it at any cost.
One inefficient way of avoiding it is to avoid admitting that you did anything wrong, for example, by shouting back that you didn't do anything wrong.
In the long term, this works out about as well as you'd expect.
--
A quick closing word about the comments on the parent that advocate a sensible calm sit-down to work out solutions:
People are absolutely not going to have a quiet sit-down about how to fix this problem because we all know full well that very few liberal democracies remain functional enough to stickhandle everyone through such an enormous change. The USA, for example, can barely pass a budget; you think that you can get UBI through? Which would still do nothing about that Rawlsian self-respect, which, again, is just as significant to a healthy human as air, water, or food (and is therefore vital to social stability, in the same way that a steady supply of food is vital.)
Shouting is one of the few avenues left for self-expression, and thus, self-respect. No one wants to go quietly, and 'going' -- whether it be from a job, a career, a family, or even a home -- is quite clearly what is now in the cards for a great many.
And they are shouting at us because we do this shit on the regular. But never like this before. We went large with it. Did we ever.