Seeing a sudden surge in interest in the “Tech Right” as they’re being dubbed. Often the focus is on business motivations like tax breaks but I think there’s more to it. The narrative that silicon Valley is a bunch of tech hippies was well sown early on, particularly by Stewart Brand and his ilk but throughout that period and prior, the intersection between tech and authoritative politics that favours systems over people is well established.
John Ganz did a good coverage of the ideological side of tech, particularly using Herf’s book Reactionary Modernism that looks at the role of engineers in building Nazi ideology.
You can read Reactionary Modernism for free on the Internet Archive
A bunch of rich people with questionable morals like having easily influenceable people in power. Especially now that it is legal for presidents to take bribes.
Silicon valley isn’t what it used to be
Silicon Valley is fundamentally the same as it’s always been, it’s just a bigger scale
Specifically, the nerdy-hippy-freethinker cohort did not flourish at anywhere close to the same scale as the get-rich-quick segment of the population as this modern gold rush emerged.
Most tech bros would be stock brokers if born a couple decades earlier.
Turns out frat bros are pretty alt right. Shocker.
Nothing changed, they’re just mask-off now.
There’s a thread of Randian ideology that underlies the beginnings of the computer industry. Adam Curtis talks about it in his documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (very much worth watching).
Absolutely. In fact in one major survey of the values of the counterculture conducted back in the 1960s Ayn Rand was listed as one of people’s major influences. There were different strands to the counterculture, one communitarian but the other about self actualisation and the individual. Both positioned themselves in opposition to the state, but differed significantly in what kind of future they wanted.
