Comment by rachofsunshine

5 days ago

Being anti-censorship is one thing that should, taken in isolation, have nothing to do with your object-level views. But in practice, those claims tend to correlate with very specific views, and they're applied hypocritically. Elon is the most high-profile recent example - I think it's hard to argue at this point that he had any principled anti-censorship views, given his behavior since taking over Twitter - but he's far from the only one.

You won't see PG writing an article on how homeless people in SF should be more pro-breaking-the-rules. Because it's OK to steal from your users, to inflate your growth numbers, to make false promises to build your initial userbase, but it's not OK not to shoplift from the Safeway or do drugs on the BART. That's the kind of breaking the rules that isn't cool, edgy, smart, and most importantly high status and beneficial to Paul Graham. Don't you think that double standard is a bit suspect, that he's "pro-breaking-the-rules" exactly when the rules restrain him and not others, when it's the rules he thinks are stupid and not the rules someone else thinks are stupid?

You won't see PG writing an article about how it's bad to deny a 15 year old medical information on puberty blockers. That is, undeniably, censorship in its very simplest form: it's the suppression of information out of a belief that it is in some way dangerous to let people know about it. But most of the people who claim to be so concerned with censorship won't say a word against it, and a lot actively support it, because it stops being "censorship" when it's something they like.

And, of course, the idea that the anti-woke crowd is "anti-authoritarian" is kind of laughable right now, given their response to the incoming administration.

The change isn't that his (or other tech elites') ostensible values have changed. It's that their ostensible values have become increasingly transparently hypocritical. PG hasn't become less of a hacker: it's "hacker culture" itself, especially as represented and hijacked by venture capital, that is not what we (or at least what I) hoped it was.