The left used to be more individualist in the U.S. (circa 90s most definitely) but it developed a toxic groupthink as it came to dominate pop culture and media in the 00s and 10s, and began to leverage that to employ censorship, deplatforming, doxxing, etc and it became incredibly dogmatic and if anyone diverged from a particular narrative (ie skeptical covid came from wet market), they would be ridiculed, shouted down, laughed off, shamed, kicked off social media platforms, ostracized, etc which is cult like behavior.
The left of the 90s would have never stood for that. They were the die hards for free speech then. Something shifted.
Yeah, the left of the 90s would never excommunicate anyone for being completely certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that climate change was a hoax, and the moon was made of cheese, and bringing these things up at every opportunity, because the left of the 90s believed in free speech.
Individualism has been failing Americans, while the quality of life has improved dramatically in less individualist cultures, in many ways surpassing Americans (health care, housing, education, upward mobility, etc), so it shouldn't be surprising that collectivism is starting to win mindshare.
Don't fool yourself, conspiracy theories are usually marginalized in US culture, the left didn't welcome conspiracy theories back then either.
Also, now that political correctness and censorship mostly coming from the right again (with the Moral Majority going after music then, and video games/porn now), we now see the civil libertarian elements of the left standing up to fight censorship once again.
The boomers got old. They were flawed but the heavy anti-authoritarian vibe of the old left was largely carried over from the 60s. Imagine a zoomer lefty burning their covid card the way hippies burned their draft cards. Nope! The thing that shifted was authoritarianism; the terminal end-stage of socialist ideology.
Hacker culture is principally 'don't tell me what to do'.
Which in the US puts it somewhat orthogonal to the left-right divide.
It mirrors the divide on the public at large - a disappointingly large number of people are wildly ready to jump on the authoritarian bandwagon, because the alternative has a few leftist ideas that make them feel icky.
If I had a debug console on reality, I'd be curious to query how big the intersection is between those who thrive in hacker culture and people with PDA.
To me, the Wikipedia page of "Pathological demand avoidance" looks like those in power are again inventing some new psychological disorder to pathologize (and perhaps hospitalize) non-docile people.
Interesting. In the UK it tends to be right wing ideas people find icky about the alternative. Maybe one party on the left but it is really small.
The problem here is that society and culture in general has got more authoritarian so it cut across the left-right divide (which IMO has got meaningless anyway since it no longer reflects a consistent difference in economic policy) but leaving the non-authoritarians practically without politically representation.
The definition of authoritarianism has widely expanded into uselessness, because it colors with the same brush concepts as disparate as:
* Throwing a bag over your head and sending you to a tropical gulag for life without trial or access to a lawyer, contrary to the explicit ruling of a judge reviewing your case.
* Requiring you to wear a piece of cloth on your face in the middle of a deadly pandemic that's killing millions of people.
(Its not that we can't tell the difference between them, any child above the age of 8 can grasp the distinction, it's that people who love the former and are mildly annoyed by the latter are being deliberately obtuse about it.)
During Covid, many of the Hackers in the infosec community supported government-mandated vaccination (this was what I saw through Twitter). I think this changed my view of activists and hackers after this.
It's authoritarian-minded people that don't want to listen to anyone (and want to force you to do what they want through hacking). When they get want they want, they don't care about trampling on the rights of or oppressing the people that disagree.
He did say "government mandated". It is perfectly possible to think people should have vaccinations (I did - and had them myself) without thinking the government should force them to have vaccinations.
The left of the 90s would have never stood for that. They were the die hards for free speech then. Something shifted.