Is it just me, or has Hacker News seen an uptick in politics-focused posts and comments recently?
I'm reading "A Hacker's Mind" by Schneier and it makes a fundamental connection I've been trying to reason about for a long time. He looks at hacking through a very broad lens. He defines it essentially as the manipulation of a system using its rules to take actions that are allowed by the system but undermine its intent.
The key thing he says is that systems exist within and connected to broader systems. He gives the example of an ATM. Fundamentally it's a computer connected to a box of cash. You can hack it by manipulating computer rules. But it also exists within the broader monetary and legal systems, and while the computer's rules might allow you to execute the hack, the legal system will always treat that as an illegal action and prosecute you.
So what I'm basically saying is that as a matter of systems thinking, politics makes sense here on Hacker News. I think where people might object is that it can devolve into arguments about values and black-and-white thinking (arguably this essay does that, although I think the Burroughs quote about the bull in the ring approaches a systems theory aspect). Personally I enjoy thinking about this stuff though. Macro-level socioeconomic systems are the largest things we can think about aside from planetary-level concerns like geology and universe-scale stuff like cosmology. Their dynamics are very interesting and interact in many ways with the stuff we think of as more traditionally "hacking."
As a 53 year old who has been interested in technology for my entire life I'd say that in the past the technology industry has never been anywhere near as outwardly political as it is now.
When the front row of the presidential inauguration is every major tech CEO, well yeah politics are going to to come up in technical spaces.
tl;dr - The shift you are seeing isn't specific to HN.
I don't entirely agree with the FSF on everything but my first internet email address.back in -1992 was gfm@gnu.ai.mit.edu
I'd argue that the problem isn't necessarily an occasional political discussion, but that all political discussion here feels like somebody copy and pasted a few longer-ish social media comments into an HN comment tree. It's as if the moment politics is mentioned, people magically forget where they're discussing it, and before long you end up with a flood of childish insults, flaming and nonsensical accusations of conspiracy.