As someone who is inside the IT industry, and has been for a while, I have some insight here. Yes, it’s stupidity alright, but a weird focused kind of stupidity like having a blind-spot. Money and ethics, IMO, are the only divisions that explain it.
We like to think of tech as being this rebellious, counter-cultural place. And that tracks when you start talking about “market disruption” and “move fast and break things.” But there’s this problem where that group is actually multiple groups moving in a similar direction. If you look at the decisions people make, there’s a clear tradeoff of ethics in line with freedom and liberty, for cold, hard cash. It took me a long time to reconcile this, and I’m now comfortable concluding that the rebellious spirit here is less “damn the man” and more “fuck you, got mine.” Nevermind that it’s not sustainable and always ends in a death-spiral of everything they built.
Once you surrender your ethics, or figure out that having few/none is seen as an asset, bigger paychecks are on offer. It should come as no surprise that aligning one’s self with authoritarianism and even fascism is a small step from there.
And my personal experience - take with salt - there’s also a lot of people in security that are just VERY pessimistic, if not outright fearful, of their fellow man. A lot of them vote to the right, despite depending on an industry mostly fueled by left-thinking labor. They’re highly skilled, competent, and intelligent people in every other way. Once again, I think the fat paycheck smooths a lot of this over.
smeenz@lemmy.nz 4 weeks ago
Anyone who voted for trump is so fucking stupid it’s absurd.