[mindcrime]

As someone that's been here since the very beginning I think that tech has begun to be responsible for a larger portion of the world as a whole and this community has moved a small amount towards that direction as a result.

As one of the people who thinks that more (too much more) political content has crept in here, I will say that I agree with you on the above. That is, I agree that it is becoming harder (albeit not impossible!) to disambiguate what is "tech" versus what is "politics" when it comes to things like the discussions around, eg "social media's affect on society" and etc.

And to be fair, talking about tech has always tended to lead to a certain amount of political discussion, especially in terms of things like encryption policy, DRM, etc. So even I wouldn't try to say we should have zero political content here. But it does seem like it's grown a bit more prevalent than I'd prefer.

[vkk8]

We tend to reserve the word "tech" for new technology especially. Cars, power tools and horse wagons were also new sexy technology once upon a time, but no-one calls companies making those products "tech companies". The categorization from "tech" to "normal stuff" happens when a technology becomes ubiquitous part of our society rather than play stuff of early adopters and hackers. Arguably this has recently happened also to social media, internet advertising and many other internet technologies so maybe we should move on and recategorize those things as what they are instead of "tech".

So what is "tech" now, if we take the definition to be "new technology not yet widely adopted by everyone's grandmother"? Maybe some of the blockchain stuff? Nuclear fusion? Reinforcement learning based AI agents? Self-driving cars? Hyperloop? Homomorphic encryption? Nerve implants? Robots capable of moving in unpredictable environments (like Boston Dynamics has)? Artificial meat? Space ships?

[hutzlibu]

"Cars, power tools and horse wagons were also new sexy technology once upon a time, but no-one calls companies making those products "tech companies"

I think I have heard Tesla to be described as a tech company, once or twice. And with Bosch, my favourite power tool company, the same. I mean I am not a english speaker, but it would be really news to me, that "tech company" is defined as "brand new tech".

[bin_bash]

No, this is not simply a change in the way we use the term. Literally it’s that software itself is used in more fields to do more things in 2022 than it was in 2007.

[shadowgovt]

I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy.

History (particularly twentieth-century history) is caked in the blood of people killed by technologies that were originally conceived of by people pursuing what they thought was innocent (or, at least, amoral) knowledge. The Pugwash conference (https://pugwash.org/) grew from the need of those who built the atom bomb to wrangle the ramifications of their technology.

A hacker without ethics is a terrible risk. We should have discourse on the human side of what we do.

[mindcrime]

I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy.

I don't disagree. And if somebody started a forum dedicated to "the social implications of technology" I'd probably join and participate (some). But TBH, when I come to HN, I'm more interested in "Check out this cool new Erlang library" or "Why Go should or should not have generics", or "1001 Neat Regex Tricks" and such-like, than the more political stuff.

Maybe, for me, that's a reaction to the amount of time I spend on politics in the rest of my life. I'm politically active enough to the point that I've run for public office before, and spend a not small amount of time discussing public policy in other forums. So I guess I would prefer to find HN a bit of a refuge from that stuff. Of course I understand that other people have a different experience and will therefore feel differently about the "correct" amount of politics on HN.

[bitwize]

Everybody who still thinks real-world moral and, hence, political concerns are somehow separable from hacker interests needs to see Allison Parrish's "Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic" talk (or read the transcript) before posting: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...

[mindcrime]

Everybody who still thinks real-world moral and, hence, political concerns are somehow separable from hacker interests

Please note that I'm making no such claim. I would just prefer to discuss the intersection of "real-world moral and, hence, political concerns" and "hacker interests" either A. less often and/or B. somewhere else.

[closetohome]

> talking about tech has always tended to lead to a certain amount of political discussion, especially in terms of things like encryption policy, DRM, etc.

Growing up in the era of peak Slashdot it was hard not to view politics through the lens of technology. There were politicians trying to take away my games, and restrict my speech, and put me in jail for downloading MP3s. Fighting those battles through the years has definitely formed my political views.

[mindcrime]

Yep, same here. So yeah, definitely not arguing for a total separation of "tech" and "politics". That's probably not possible. But I do wish HN could move away from the more generic "politics with a tenuous (at best) connection to tech" and "general world news" stuff a bit.