The Rot Inside Tech

Gamergate is forever…or as long as long as reactionary sentiments are normalized in tech. So, probably forever. I said this on Twitter recently, and I believe it to be true. I believe Gamergate never ended, and for me, it never began.

For me, it was always there lurking. Because I was part of the culture that gave birth to Gamergate. And the alt-right. And the concept of “social justice warrior (SJW)” It’s a culture that cannot be divorced from tech. It is the rot at the heart of it.

It’s all just different versions of the same thing dressed up. The same bizarro world conspiracy theory I grew up in as a Evangelical Southern kid whose parents were part of the “Moral Majority.”

Back then some of the words were different. A major worry for us was “multiculturalism” which seems to have fallen out of favor and been replaced by “cultural Marxism.” Some of the words were the same. “Feminism” and “political correctness” were the enemies then and now.

And the overall mythology was also similar. I’ll call it the neoreactionary ideology (some of them even call themselves that). It portrays leftism as a powerful threat that has infiltrated most of mainstream culture. That minorities and women are not oppressed, that inequalities between them and white men are the result of inherent differences. And these differences are the truth, and the left wishes to suppress it because it does not fit their agenda. The left’s denial of this then becomes the real oppression, and so in this mirror universe identity politics, it is actually straight white men who are oppressed.

I was homeschooled, partially to insulate me from the leftist that had supposedly poisoned public schools. When I got access to the internet and started dabbling in coding, I encountered libertarianism for the first time. At the time I found libertarianism a comfortable haven for mild rebellion while in my own conservative comfort zone. Libertarianism differed a lot from the “moral majority” kind of Republicanism I grew up in. It was pro-immigration, anti-war, pro-legalization of drugs, and usually pro-choice. But it still catered to the reactionary within me.

People are often confused when they are told that this internet libertarianism of the 2000s gave birth to authoritarian movements like the alt-right. Because as a political theory, libertarianism is anti-authoritarian. They are missing the reactionary culture part. That despite the costume, these libertarians are just as worried about “modern culture” as a Moral Majority figure like Jerry Falwell.

It’s different costumes, different priests, and different methods. And one of these is evolutionary psychology — another thing that seems downright innocent if you don’t know how it was popularized, but it was extremely popular among internet libertarians at the time. And it has had a huge influence on Gamergate ,the alt-right, and the tech industry in general. Evolutionary psychology meant we didn’t have to give up our reactionary values, because they were justified by science.

Over time this culture split, and some people who got tired of cloaking their hate in libertarianism became the “alt-right.” A lot of this migration was galvanized by Gamergate, where some of the more awful aspects of the neoreactionary ideology spread like a virus on internet communities.

Those who would prefer to deny being racist and sexist just became “cultural libertarians.” But they are still just versions of the neoreactionary.

Now despite the assertion that reactionaries are oppressed in the tech industry, the tech industry is really a haven for these ideas. A lot of the people I rubbed shoulders with back then were in tech, and these things remain extremely popular in the industry. There should be absolutely no surprise there is a backlash against “diversity” among men in tech. Or that sympathy for Gamergate is endemic in the industry.

To an outsider it looks confusing. They don’t understand why James Damore’s evolutionary psychology screed looks so scary to those of us who have been part of the industry a long time and know the subculture. I’m not sure even he understood it. He seemed genuinely surprised at some of the ideologies of his boosters.

Some outsiders were like “oh I don’t see anything wrong with this.” And it’s an attitude I encounter even inside tech, often from people who consider themselves progressive liberals. Sometimes they even manage to get convinced by the neoreactionary talking points like “ideological diversity” without understanding them or where they come from.

Or the consequences. Isolated, talking points like “men and women are different in personality traits on average” are innocent. In context of the culture of tech, they are part of a larger movement to attack women and other minorities.

And despite my conservative street cred, not even I was spared. Because it’s not really about the conservative ideology, I’m sure on many economic and political issues, folks like James Damore are more “liberal” than am. But as my dad said “you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

Even before Gamergate I was getting harassed and threatened at various hangouts of the internet libertarian set like my paleo diet blog (this diet is popular for similar reasons that ev psych is). Also please don’t tell me how bad internet leftists can be, I got plenty of death threats from “meat is murder” types too. The difference is that these people are really just isolated voices, rather than a powerful subculture deeply embedded in a powerful industry like neoreactionaries are in tech.

In my case all this harassment turned out to be not so bad, since it spurred me to expose myself to all the evil leftists that I never got indoctrinated by before and to question a lot of my own internalized misogyny, racism, and other unfortunate remnants of my upbringing. The thing is a lot of these movements would be much less powerful if leftist indoctrination really was a thing. If people were educated about feminism from sources other than Christina Hoff Sommers or Jordan Peterson they wouldn’t become reactionary bogeymen.

For other victims, the consequences were far less pretty.

My time in tech and as an internet libertarian reminds a bit of this excellent piece (from which this title is inspired) from conservative leaning writer Hal Herring about the people he met at the Malheur occupation:

I went to the Malheur looking for kindred spirits. I found the mad, the fervent, the passionately misguided. I found the unknowing pawns of an existential chess game, in which we are, all of us, now caught.

The neoreactionaries in tech are just the city version of the Malheur occupiers. I figure they aren’t going to stop occupying tech anytime soon. Sure, not everyone in tech is like that, but most of them that aren’t are too blind to see the regressive reactionaries for what they are. They think adding more women to the mix is the solution. It’s just downright laughable.

Those of us in the mix have to endure the consequences. Men who are convinced they are oppressed by us and use it as an excuse to isolate us socially lest they be part of a “sexual harassment witchhunt.” Tech communities like Hacker News and Reddit that are valuable for information and networking but where it’s a constant barrage of neoreactionary regressive sentiments.

And the rest of you outside tech shouldn’t be surprised at the slightest when the tech industry puts out products that ends up empowering the voices of neoreactionaries inside and outside of tech.