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Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

(www.wsj.com)
370 points sillypuddy | 1 comments | 18 Feb 18 16:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.525s | source
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sho ◴[18 Feb 18 19:32 UTC] No.16407784[source]▶
What is crazy about the the situation in SF is that even 5 or so years ago if you asked me what the "echo chamber" there was echoing I would have said libertarianism and some kind of techno-utopianism. The takeover by the proscriptive far-left has been astonishingly rapid, and it is absolutely real. I also know people who have left, and many more who absolutely keep their political and even philosophical views to themselves, especially after Damore.

It's been an extraordinarily fast takeover and I'd really like to know exactly what happened those 5 or so years ago to precipitate this seismic shift.

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1. psyc ◴[18 Feb 18 22:17 UTC] No.16409124[source]▶
(Disclaimer: I do not intend anything in this comment as a judgment.)

In my view, exactly what happened is that a generation of feminists used the internet (esp. blogs and social media) very effectively. You can look to gaming culture, not as a primary source of this necessarily, but at least as a convenient observable thermometer and timeline. Again, I don't mean to suggest that gaming was the source of all this, but you can watch the dissemination of the ideas, and the predominating cultural shift, by reviewing the timelines of the Penny Arcade Dickwolves controversy (2010-11), and GamerGate (2014). A more direct connection is that the central figures in GamerGate did in fact offer anti-harassment consulting services to SV technology companies.