Is it really? I can think of approximately one political battle the tech crowd won (the Crypto Wars), to dozens of lost ones. Meanwhile, the battles where a strong technical solution was fielded are looking fairly good even when the political side was surrendered with nary a fight - I can still easily torrent most books and software, download scientific papers, emulate modern consoles and securely exchange data with people in any country less locked down than North Korea.
The cliché about how you should not approach political problems with technical solutions is recited all the time in these threads, but nobody ever presents evidence for this claim. It seems like a meme that is disproportionately useful for those who are confident in their abilities to win any political contest.