Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned by the industry's hard-right turn? | Hacker News Reader

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

55 pointscruzcampo31 comments

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?

View on HN

I also miss the “bicycles for the mind” era.

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.

I'm not American and I believe the average American is right-leaning or far-right.

...Then how could you possibly have entertained illusions that one of the country's biggest industries was a genuine outlier? Not that I agree with your assessment in the first place, but assuming it's true then you should have seen this coming.

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.

He's not that far off the mark unfortunately. From a detailed post-election analysis by David Shor posted on HN a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43400172): "... Fundamentally, 40 percent of the country identifies as conservative. Roughly 40 percent is moderate, 20 percent is liberal, though it depends exactly how you ask it. Sometimes it’s 25 percent liberal. ..."

Would you mind expanding on "suck up" and "unpleasantness"? Something I can Google?

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.

Both commercial and free software are full of talented people able to make good code.

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.

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.

I think it's oversimplification. They needed engineers before, and it did shape culture at the companies (see "don't be evil"). Those times are gone, capital is the king. And engineers aren't needed. Hence extreme cynicism and hypocrisy. I don't think it would change with next administration, not as easy at least.

Poor choice of example since "don't be evil" was just nerd marketing. Google opened negotiations to purchase DoubleClick, infamous for slimy online advertising techniques, as far back as 2007 and absorbed DoubleClick in 2008. Enshittification and advertising dominance was always their endgame; we're seeing them lose anti-trust trials just now because of it.

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.

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.

I thought SJW were paranoid and now I think they were 100% correct.

Can you please share more about when, why, and for how long you thought "SJW" were paranoid? And, also... Who you count as SJW?

I think the 'culture wars' are made much worse by a feedback loop that is amplified by social media. It's sad to watch this slowly bleed into the opinions of real people in my life (whether of the left or right). Ten years ago this wasn't the case. I could rely on real people to be more tolerant and less set in their opinions - much more open to meaningful discussion about society, culture, and politics.

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.

r/StallmanWasRight

Ironically a victim of the culture wars that have helped fuel the unhealthy social division that lead us here.

Not really, because it's not really far right. Meanwhile far left really freaks me out more. Visiting SF/LA scares me.

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.

But even that doesn't make any sense. There's been nothing any liberal has done that has been nearly as disruptive as the trade war started by the current right-wing administration.

It's certainly disruptive. But if you asked me in 2018 whether I'd be surprised by Tim Cook donating to Trump's inaugeration, I'd know my answer.

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.

Then you're not paying attention. U.S tech companies are the envy of the world, and every country is looking to limit or cripple them in some way. TikTok is a prime example of how government support has allowed a foreign tech company to unseat what should be an unmoving dominance of western tech. Without equally aggressive support it's only a matter of time before the magnificent 7 are gone, and the Biden admin seemed to be working in the opposite direction.

But the tariffs are what will cause them to be gone.

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-...

If you watch their actions it's clear they're already planning it either way. Australia and Canada are pretty much running extortion on social media companies to subsidize local industry, the EU is trying to break up and companies with stuff like DMA, and of course other markets like China don't even bother pretending to care for our companies. As much as I dislike someone like Vance, his willingness to threaten countries for their plans to regulate Twitter is the kind of support big tech needs that the Biden admin had no interest in giving.

I strongly disagree with you here. I think big tech has become way too powerful and has increasingly been wielding said power for evil. I think breaking it up and regulating it is the way forward if we want to save our democracies.

See? You fundamentally don't care about big tech, so why should it care about you? I care about big tech because big tech is America. We've invested all our best and most productive people into tech, and it carries our whole economy and U.S hegemony in general. I don't want to cripple our industry or let someone usurp it. I want democrats to work with big tech to minimize the harm domestically while maintaining dominance.

Big tech is America? What are you even talking about? Big Tech is a tiny fraction of America that's increasingly hated by the rest of the country - and the world.

It's actively harmful to US hegemony, too, with industry leaders starting fights with your closest allies.

Tech and finance keep the US economy afloat.

It's rather like an Irish person defending transfer pricing. Probably morally wrong but completely understandable.

The most powerful billionaires are basically victims ... while their actual victims don't matter.

Hands off isn't accurate for this administration. They absolutely want to meddle, but instead of breaking big tech they want to work together to advance shared interests. Big tech will never be on the left's side if the left is primarily interested in crippling them, and this generation of tech leaders are no longer interested in passively conforming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com