Tech's Anti-Humanist Wave
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg—all bowing to fascist impulses. Thiel funded JD Vance's Senate run with $15 million and his network now controls key Trump administration positions. Musk donated $277 million to Trump while endorsing Germany's neo-Nazi AfD party. Zuckerberg eliminated fact-checking and called previous content moderation "censorship," explicitly framing it around Trump's "cultural tipping point."
But they were always weak-willed and extractive. Their products weren't good beyond making people dependent on them.
Are these people really in the same lineage as the homebrew computer club, the Whole Earth Catalog, the cypherpunks? Does Satoshi smile when bitcoin buys a yacht or pays off a hitman?
I want to dissect this corruption. How did people who use the same technologies and come from the same culture I do end up such pieces of shit?
The Inflection Point
GamerGate was the moment hacker culture got weaponized. The 2014 harassment campaign used doxxing, coordinated raids through 4chan and 8chan, and technical tactics to drive women like Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu (ultimately a piece of shit in her own right) from their homes with death threats. Experts later called it "largely considered one of the biggest influences for today's spread of misinformation" and the template for QAnon and January 6th.
Andrew Tate selling dropshipping courses to incels. Joe Rogan platforming conspiracy theorists between discussions of kettle bells and DMT.
The discipline and focus that could build world-changing software got redirected toward building hate movements. Proto-male cosplay for weak people, wielded to bring them to hatred of minorities, election lies, antisemitic conspiracies.
The fascists took their anger and systematically claimed every throne of power available. While the old tech establishment was lazy and complacent, the reactionaries captured funding streams, platforms, cultural spaces. Peter Thiel funding Manhattan scenes. Tim Pool taking $10 million in Russian money to spread propaganda—livestream-stringer-turned-Russian-asset.
The Corruption
The same technologies that could liberate became instruments of capture. "Move fast and break things" got turned toward breaking democracy. It's not like our Status Quo didn't need breaking, but the world they envisioned rebuilding was dark and short-sighted and based on perceived grievances and deeply-ingrained bigotry.
How do you tell the difference between a hacker and a grifter when they're using the same tools and speaking the same language?
Village Idiots With Nuclear Weapons
Vapid man-boys who see any shared resource and want to hoard it or sully it. We used to bring these people outside the village and smack them around until they learned to share.
Now they're celebrated and empowered with magical tools of technology. Like all magic, it can be deployed for profound darkness.
The problem isn't the technology. We gave sociopaths control of the amplification systems. We might have even ceded it to them.
What Would Our Ancestors Do?
Traditional societies had mechanisms for dealing with people who couldn't share, who hoarded resources, who put their own appetites above community survival. Exile. Shunning. Sometimes violence.
But now these same antisocial impulses—greed, narcissism, zero-sum thinking—are rewarded with billions of dollars and global influence platforms. We've created a system that selects for the exact traits that would have gotten you kicked out of any functional human community for the last 10,000 years.
The technologies aren't neutral. They amplify whatever you feed into them. Feed in curiosity and collaboration, you get Wikipedia. Feed in rage and narcissism, you get Facebook.
Don't Cede the Ground
The way out is to not shy away from these powerful tools BECAUSE they are used for evil.
I look to the zoomers who grew up in an era where technology was PRIMARILY used to sap attention from their friends and loved ones. No wonder they hate it. But they CAN'T CEDE THE GROUND to the techno-fascists.
We can still wield the tools to defy them. Encryption to defy their surveillance. Communication tools to organize and defy their curfews and fight back. But only through persistence and the recognition of the power and availability and built-in democracy of the tools we have right now.
The same technologies that build prison walls can build escape tunnels. The same networks that spread propaganda can coordinate resistance. The same platforms that amplify fascists can amplify mutual aid.
Reclaiming the Magic
Every encryption key and anonymous post is a small act of rebellion. Every decentralized protocol is a vote against centralized power. Every time you teach someone to code, you're giving them a spell that can reshape reality.
The techno-fascists want you to believe the tools belong to them. That's the lie. The tools are ours. They always were. We just forgot how to use them for liberation instead of extraction.
The village idiots may have captured some of the amplification systems, but they didn't capture the fundamental technologies. Those remain as democratic and accessible as ever.