[1996]

> For some reason Hacker News really likes the idea of centralized authority and criminalizing things like math and free association by threat of violence and imprisonment.

The new kind of "geek" in the opposite of the traditional "geek" who was a libertarian / pro freedom.

My guess is that most geeks can't afford to bite the hand that feeds them (google/facebook/twitter...) so they decided to loudly proclaim their allegiance to modern values (environmentalism/social justice/wokeness in general)

[lanstin]

There were leftists among geeks the whole time. Stallman didn’t even want passwords. A lot of people viewed technology as a way to achieve mass human prosperity and end the bullshit accumulation of numbers in a database/blockchain ledger as a proxy for social status/power. The environmentalism and the desire for justice is a genuinely held belief of many scientific oriented people of a humanist bent. The difference between math and computers back then was that computers would let you do math stuff and thereby transform society.

[1996]

I disagree.

> There were leftists among geeks the whole time

Clearly a much smaller proportion.

> The environmentalism and the desire for justice is a genuinely held belief of many scientific oriented people of a humanist bent

Is it not interesting in how this is a new social good, especially for geeks working for large corporations in California?

I believe all behavior is based in self preservation: it would be career suicide for a young googler to be part of the christian right, or pro Trump, or try to pull off a Damore like memo.

So I am not surprise they do not bite the hand that feed. I am only surprised in the convoluted rationalization they engage in, instead of being more honest (at least online where they can be anonymous) and say "I pretend I'm woke because I like my job because I like the money and status it gets me"

[lanstin]

Oceans razor good sir. And left desire to transform society has if anything decreased in the last fifty years. In the 1970s people with sincere belief said The US is on a journey towards a just and free society. Where we honor e pluribus unum. Where people programmed computers to unleash the potentially awesome society it would enable. What is new is a bunch of smart and powerful individuals settling for a salary while they give their power over to corporations that are structurally unable to stop stealing everones privacy and stop from putting human decency under the next quarters profit.

The reason why so-called Christians are unpopular is because they are seen as public hypocrites; rather than follow Jesus and condemn praying in public, and instead helping the poor, the widows, and the orphans, they seem to spend their energy seemingly endorsing superstitious racialist ideas that were clearly un-Godly 100 years ago.

Those ideas are horrid and they are rejected because they are horrid. Not because Google is pushing an agenda of the sacredness of all human beings, a mirror of the image of God no matter what history they walked to get here.

And the environmental movement is just the same as the people saying “there is a flood coming from the blocked sewer drain, let’s go unblock it.” The anti-environmentalists are the people saying, naw, don’t worry about it.

[lanstin]

A second reply. If you sincerely believe all behavior is based on self preservation, perhaps you do not understand that a sincere Christian, seeing each person as good and capable of more good and worth suffering for, can thrive in all sorts of environments, being a angel to others and not being untrue to God and without being a notable asshole. We have songs for training people in how to do this, about Love and the Christ in me greets the Christ in thee and on on.

[1996]

I do not fully understand indeed, but I really appreciate both of your replies as it gives a different perspective that I did not consider.