this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Same, I would actually be curious to listen to a right wing tech podcast as the two concepts clash so hard in my brain.
Not specifically about podcasts, but I think there's a minority (?) of privacy/security enthusiasts who are pretty overtly right-wing libertarians, often because those technologies are anti-establishment. Think Luke Smith. I've also met people in the tech sphere (both on the I love Big Tech as well as FOSS side) who have very traditionalist, borderline right-wing opinions.
yeah--the "techno-libertarians", as i've personally taken to calling them. that tendency was also the case on reddit in the early days (and to some extent still influences the site's cultural lean) and seems to be particularly common among stereotypical Silicon Valley types. a big calling card of that group is usually waxing poetic about the need to preserve almost unfiltered freedom of speech even though no website trying to preserve that has ever gone well.
Anarchists will always get persecuted by any state, their goal is to abolish the state itself, and no state is going to go down without a fight.
Libertarians on the other hand, while they share some of the same ideas, can fly under the radar... but only as long as they don't oppose those of the state, like in an individualist capitalist one, not so much in a communist authoritarian one.
There's a dude who does Linux videos.
Kind of went off the rails one day after one of the really bad mass shootings happened and he got all worked up about gun control.
I think this was actually after Trump was elected. Might have been the Vegas shooting. I remember because it was also when DuckDuckGo was getting shit from these people about not promoting Russian propaganda, which "interferes with free speech" or whatever the fuck one of their talking points is.
Actually, it might not have been after one of the shootings. But it was definitely around the time these people were complaining about DDG (and I think that was a while after the Vegas shooting) and it kind of devolved into complaining about gun control.
I didn't really watch him much, but I haven't bothered since. Can't even remember the channel name. Some bullshit. Dude was obsessed with xmonad.
It's distrotube
He also made videos complaining about GNOME's code of conduct and Mozilla's suggestion to deplatform Nazis.
There's very much a Peter Thiel-esque type of libertarian tech bro - think the crypto fanatics, the Elon Musk fanboys, etc. Or, tangentially, how New Atheism collapsed in part because some women had the audacity to point out that sexual harassment is a thing. On a similar note, just go onto any online video game and openly announce yourself to be gay or a woman.
Geek culture and its associated cultures have always had an undercurrent of sexism, probably not unrelated to the fact that they're historically dominated by somewhat awkward or lonely men. That feeling of male angst and isolation is absolutely something that the Right has been able to successfully exploit. Take Gamergate, for instance.
I don’t listen to tech podcasts at all, but now that you mention it, the concept seems odd to me, too. Tech involves objective facts, scientific reasoning, and logic, which are three things I definitely don’t associate with modern conservatism.
Maybe the making of tech is, but its application and relevance in modern society is, at the end of the day, a sociological phenomenon.
Ooh, I didn’t consider that. Good point!
I think this is where "compartmentalization" comes in. Similar in concept to how you are forced to wall off sadness when a loved one dies so that you can continue to live your life, I think there are mentally competent right wingers, but they wall off the logic and reasoning so that it applies only to machines. They do this because if those ideas of logic and reason get beyond the wall/outside of the compartment, the meaning of their lives falls apart.
engineering types do seem to fall off the conservatism cliff more frequently than other science-adjacent professions. so do surgeons, for some reason? at least from what i've observed. i think something about high performance, high pay jobs that require specialized education can make a person more vulnerable to brain worms.
Tech involves a lot of do x, y, and z to get outcome a with no ambiguity. That appeals to a lot of the right wing.
Tech also involves corporate $$, “disruptive” (read: anti-worker) innovation, etc. the general skew of tech as an industry seems center-right to me plus lots of tech bros fully engaged (sometimes “ironically”) with the alt right.
At the local level, tech bros form natural partnerships with right wing interests around gentrification and policing.
They're really ideologies orthogonal to each other:
The "right wing tech", in a US-centric definition, would likely fall under "conservative libertarian capitalist technologist", which is a possible combination.