[ModernMech]

  "All of us should take a moment to acknowledge all the Peter Thiel-adjacent folks in this community who drove us directly to this moment"

This is why this community in particular needs to be talking about these things instead of flagging them as irrelevant to the hacker ethos, as if we don't have direct responsibility for what's going on right now.

"Move fast and break things" is a culture we promulgated. Yes, me, you, everyone commenting here. The people we looked up to for years - mentors and thought leaders - are the ones planning and directing this effort. Hackers apparently are the ones implementing it. If we want to talk about it in our cultural terms, these guys are imo acting like black hats and we need to grapple with that.

Clearly we as a community are not ready for these conversations, but flagging them and burying them isn't going to make the need for them go away.

[ttpphd]

Yes my main takeaway from the musk flagging discussions on here is that tech people are no where near capable of taking responsibility for their central role in this mess. If I call all my sins "politics", say discussing politics is off the table, then magically you can't say anything bad about me!

[llamaimperative]

It's because there's this pernicious meme throughout the tech world that political aloofness is a sign of intelligence. It was pathetic years ago and repugnant today.

[ketlag]

Wow, haha. A real one. Never imagined I'd see a comment like this in the wild. I do think it's a stretch to, say, blame the community, but what breaks my head is how everyone is acting like this is normal? Kids going in and Ctrl-F'ing "dei" and "gender," deleting the former and replacing the latter with "sex." Making false claims about government spending about things that have been online for years and available to see... Never realized what a cult was until now!

[archagon]

Agreed, except I am more on jwz’s side with regard to the “hackers” here. Despite the name and occasionally intelligent discussion, HN isn’t really about hacker culture. It’s about Silicon Valley venture capitalism, with hacker-relevant topics largely used for tech cachet and recruitment. Real hackers are, on the whole, aligned with anarchism and socialism and are generally incompatible with SV culture. They would certainly want nothing to do with Thiel’s ridiculous politics.