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Comment by jhp123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a target of tech's fascist turn, but my head is still spinning from the change of direction. When I entered this industry it was for hackers, nonconformists, weirdos, nerds, people who don't care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.

What particularly stings is that the vipers at the top tricked people into giving away an enormous amount of intellectual property. Zuck is removing tampons from the men's room—will he also remove open source code written by queer people from his company? Of course not.

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I feel like the way you describe it came from the people who came of age in the 70s and made so much of what we now see as “hacker culture.”

Now, the leadership is mostly people who came of age a couple of decades later, and got sandwiched between the elders’ ancient wisdom and a newly democratizing toxic online culture.

Some found the right path, many hung out with (or were) the sort of people who pretend to pretend to have heinous opinions on 4chan and are finally feeling comfortable enough to drop the facade.

What “fascism” are we talking about here? A company pulling tampons from men’s rooms? Companies scaling down DEI departments that advocated (probably illegally) in favor of gender and race-based discrimination?

Or are you speaking more broadly about the U.S.? Is it fascist to revert to a sane border policy that’s aligned with what most U.S. citizens and legal immigrants want? Or an executive branch that’s actually run by a democratically-elected individual, instead a non-elected shadow government that governed on behalf of a dementia-afflicted president whose condition was hidden from the American public for years? The same government that censored the media? Or the tech companies that willingly obliged with the government censorship? The same tech companies that fired employees for expressing opinions that differed from those held by the liberal establishment?

Sorry, I’m getting very confused if we’re turning into the fascism or finally turning away from it.

we've seen newly government getting from shadow to the front row on the inauguration. No need to hide anymore.

It is fascism to create a false narrative that all of our problems are caused by people with a different skin color, country of origin, gender identity, etc., and that it justifies setting up an authoritarian government that unjustly persecutes those groups and anyone that disagrees or tries to stop them.

Immigrants are welcome in America, but we do not have an open border. We have an immigration process that must be followed, just like every other country on Earth.

Violating the immigration process is breaking the law. Enforcing our laws is not “unjustly persecuting” people.

If you can’t be intellectually honest and distinguish between illegal and legal immigration, or the fact that the U.S. does not have an open border and US citizens overwhelmingly do not want an open border with the rest of the world, there’s no basis for a conversation.

It is unreasonable to pretend this movement in the USA is even remotely content with strictly enforcing current immigration law, or welcoming to legal immigrants. The foundation of the movement is based on fundamentally dehumanizing and hating immigrants- with blatantly dishonest rhetoric like “they’re eating our pets” and discussion of how to revoke 100% legal full US citizenship by widespread denaturalization under dishonest and fabricated accusations. Just yesterday there was an unconstitutional executive order with a motivated misinterpretation of the law that aims to deny citizenship to US born children.

I am an academic scientist and many of my coworkers are foreign born and all here legally with green cards or visas. These are brilliant people with PhDs developing tech that is massively stimulating the US economy. Every single one of them knows they are unwanted by this current administration and political movement and is making family preparations for forced deportation. I noticed about half of our foreign postdocs suddenly needed to “visit home” this month, and I expect many are terrified and don’t plan to return. A similar terror to what trans people are facing, as discussed here. New hires have been refusing prestigious job offers for lesser offers in other countries.

The core of the movement is driven by hatred and dehumanization of specific groups of people- any particular immigration policy is only secondary and a first step.

Focusing on the immigrant aspect alone is also not appropriate here, when they are systematically implementing the entire philosophy and systems of fascism in all other aspects as well.

Is it fascist to vilify immigrants? Is the republican party full of bright young twenty year olds? Can you post "cis" on twitter?

Who “vilifies immigrants”? President Trump is married to an immigrant, as is Vice President Vance. And many of Trumps advisors are immigrants. And he has repeatedly said he wants America to attract the best people from around the world. You mean he vilified illegal immigrants specifically. That’s fair, he did. But he’s not obligated to speak kindly about people who flout our laws.

> Is the republican party full of bright young twenty year olds?

An absurd question, especially when outgoing Democratic president is a senile octogenarian. Twenty year olds traditionally favor Democrats, (although many shifted towards Trump in this election) but how is that evidence of fascism?

> Can you post “cis” on twitter?

Could you speak freely about Covid-19’s origins on Facebook? Is censorship only fascism when you don’t like it?

> Who “vilifies immigrants”? President Trump is married to an immigrant, as is Vice President Vance.

Misogynists, domestic abusers, patriarchs, etc. are also frequently married to women.

Such is the real world in which we live.

As points go that one doesn't carry weight.

He's not obligated to do anything, man, but I can point at what he does and call it fascism.

I know you may struggle with this because the American education system is awful, but if you pay a tiny fraction of attention to what American senators are like, you'll come to know that in a fistfight or a battle of the wits there is a non-zero number of senators that Biden could beat. This is not a Red vs Blue issue, as simple as that might be for you.

You're claiming America is "turning away from fascism" because of free-er speech. Citation needed. The Christian right is famously book-ban happy, my friend.

PISA suggests the US has a very good education system, and probably better than where your are from. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732087511327908128?s=4...

The parent comment you responded to was respectful and thoughtful, progressing the conversation in accordance to HN guidelines.

> I know you may struggle with this because the American education system is awful

This part undermines your whole comment by coming across as an insult rather than contributing meaningfully to the conversation. This is interpreted that the parent commenter lacks intelligence due to their awful American education, which is not productive at all.

While I understand that topics like this one can be emotionally charged, I encourage you to communicate in a more respectful manner in the future. It will help your perspective be heard more clearly.

I don't think you read the original comment.

Amazing what a little (a lot of) money and power can do to a culture. Some of our worst traits come out when we're all of a sudden in charge.

That hacker spirit is alive and well, and will be long after the fascists for one simple reason:

The same open minded creative attitude that fully and warmly welcomes people who are different, is also what makes us better able to solve science and tech problems in a creative way. The fascists need the hackers, but we don’t need them.

Authoritarianism is fundamentally culturally incompatible with innovation. Nazi cryptography was broken by an eccentric gay man, and so on- thousands of such examples.

operation paperclip would beg to differ WW2 ended because of sheer numbers

> operation paperclip would beg to differ

Operation paperclip? A huge number of scientists and engineers unable to accomplish much under an authoritarian regime, but then driving massive innovation and discovery when freed from it, is exactly my point. Even when employing brilliant creative people authoritarians will always setup a work culture and organization fundamentally incompatible with innovation where traits like creativity and honesty are seen as threats, and aggressively punished.

Even in the USA, you can see the effects of this- highly innovative research programs from Skunkworks to DARPA always have a radically anti-authoritarian work culture.

They did accomplish a lot you just don't hear about it because history is written by the victor. Think about the numbers it took to defeat them: USSR, USA, British Empire, French Empire, and China.

The reason the scientists were gobbled up by the US and USSR is precisely because of the knowledge they developed during and why everyone else was hanged.

One can argue a lot of the advancements made until the era of computers was made because of that horrible war

Not pro authoritarian regimes but logically if your life depended on creating something 9/10 you will

I do hear all about it because my wife is an obscure history buff interested in Ww2 and Soviet history, and I am particularly interested in foreign science and technology we don’t here about in the USA, and enjoy learning about soviet research and other science that still hasn’t made it back into mainstream western knowledge.

Authoritarianism does not fundamentally make it impossible to develop technology, it just stifles innovation and creativity to a degree that creates a noticeable disadvantage. Even US academic and government research institutions suffer from this to a substantial extent. Even being under stress for your life will be motivating but stifle your own creativity to an extent- and that physiological dynamic itself is very much central to how differently authoritarian organizations function, as they maintain a high stress environment to motivate and control people- which it does, but not in a way conducive to creative thought or risk taking. You also have the aspect of just giving individuals much less freedom and independence: needing to justify and seek approval up front for every little experiment, etc.

Just wanted to thank you and the commenter above for your thoughtful comment chain. It’s exceedingly rare to encounter such thoughtful nuanced conversation online.

I also wanted to add that although I chose a specific example from WWII, I agree with you that this dynamic I am taking about ended up not being a decisive factor in the war.

I would argue that this dynamic was one reason we got the bomb first- and that the leadership and culture of the Manhattan project was uniquely effective, and the culture persists today in the USA national labs to great effect, but the bomb also happened too late to be a factor.

It's time for tech to go back to its roots and starve the kings and 'noblemen' of our talent.

Stop working for billionaires.

Remains to be seen, but attention_is_all_you_need.pdf might put a kink in your plan.

> When I entered this industry it [... didn't] care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.

Are we experiencing the same industry? Because as an LGBT person, I have experienced a tech industry so drunk and fixated on identity that it can't shut up about it. It's patronizing, insulting, and divisive.

I got online in about 98 and had many many friends in online games or on AIM / AOL and it took until many years, maybe even a decade, after FB for me to even discover what some of these people looked like. The standard "ASL?" and just chatting about life was what happened, so I agree with the comment you replying to.

Corporate isn't an AOL chatroom. I remember those childhood days, and you're right. But the corporate environment I worked in was nothing like that. From about 2014 or so, identity was front and center.

This post [1] mentions a couple of the most salient anecdotes about my experience, but I've got so many more.

I was told I couldn't hire or refer white people on numerous occasions, certain groups (mostly the "WomEng" group) were given nice lunches and off sites and I had to take their oncall or interviews, I was told to cover for the work of underperforming engineers for well over a year before anything was done about it (a couple of non-special friends were simply let go), we all had to sit and watch other engineers get awards for their race (exactly what it sounds like), we had our walls painted with caricatures of our special identity groups. Every bit of it felt like an HR gimmick.

And that's barely scratching the surface.

It was one of the weirdest things I've experienced. And it carried on for years.

I tried to participate. I was an early proponent of this stuff. But when it started turning into favoritism, inauthentic gestures, and began feeling more like policing than something uplifting, it demoralized me and made me feel shitty.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42687151

2014 is way past the "hackers, nonconformists, weirdos, nerds, people who don't care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are" period of the industry. I entered the industry in 2011 and it was already bland, corporate, and hyper-capitalist by that point.

My sense is that the term is alluding to the late 90's or even earlier.

how did free speech become fascist? even in this ludicrous essay, which claims meta announced it will "increase the hate speech people like me receive". no, it announced reduced filtering of content.

what is more conformist than forcing people to adopt your speech and view points under threat? what you don't realize is the hackers and nonconformists _are_ taking the tech back, they're taking it back from this oppressive bureaucratic regime that stifles creativity and forces everyone to tiptoe within its absurd religion of rules and newspeak. they're taking it back from dei consultants and hr departments. make it about merit and hacking, not about dogmatic adherence to a (fundamentally incorrect and bad imo) social cause.

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