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

I don't get it. I grew up in Silicon Valley and I work in tech, and so do many other people I know. They run the gamut from far-left socialists to libertarians to own a bunch of guns. They have all kinds of ethnic backgrounds and religious views.

Some of my most libertarian/pro-gun friends have not been shy about their political views and it hasn't hurt their tech careers at all. They are far more welcome here than liberals are in other parts of the country.

It seems to me, from personal experience, that the people who feel alienated are the ones who bring politics to work in an overbearing contrarian way, seeking to cause offense under the guise of "debate," and then pretend to be shocked when people don't want to put up with their shit. Work is for working; it's not a debating society, and especially not when the debating is done in bad faith.

Peter Thiel has been more politically vocal than most, and he is vocal about things he knows to be unpopular. He can't be surprised that people who disagree with him are also vocal. If he can't take the heat he should stay out of the kitchen.

The people I'm honest with about my politics are people I've sort of slowly sussed out as cool, we're all pretty afraid to state many of our actual opinions because we're not rich.

I don't care very much but there are a ton of people out there afraid of being damore'd.

> I don't care very much but there are a ton of people out there afraid of being damore'd.

Seriously, here is how it went down from what I remember:

Damore writes controversial internal only paper -> another googler takes the document meant for internal only viewing and shares it with the media -> someone removes most/all graphs and citations to make it look more like an opinion piece (most likely to flame up more media attention) -> journalist posts internal document without permission from company.

That is at least 2 people going out of there way (in a most likely illegal way too) essentially trying to start a witch hunt on this guy and ruin his life for writing 1 paper just because they do not agree with him.