Comment by rcpt
1 day ago
"unmasking"?
I've been in this field for 15 years and it's about as far left as any industry can get. We were doing land acknowledgments at product demos a few years ago.
1 day ago
"unmasking"?
I've been in this field for 15 years and it's about as far left as any industry can get. We were doing land acknowledgments at product demos a few years ago.
I've been in this industry for 34, and it's always been full of people who are at heart authoritarians, who believe that they would do a better job than anyone else, and are seriously lacking in self-awareness.
Tesla partly settles racism lawsuit as hundreds of workers press on
https://electrek.co/2026/07/27/tesla-partly-settles-racism-l...
> California’s Civil Rights Department, which sued Tesla in February 2022 after a three-year investigation, documented specific language in its complaint: the n-word, “porch monkey,” “monkey toes,” “boy,” “hood rats,” “go back to Africa,” plus the Spanish-language slurs “mayate” and “negrita.” One worker told investigators he heard slurs 50 to 100 times a day.
The agency also alleged the factory was effectively segregated, with an area where Black workers were concentrated known internally as the “porch monkey station.” Workers reported coworkers displaying Confederate flag tattoos to intimidate them.
The EEOC’s own federal complaint, filed in September 2023 in the Northern District of California, adds graffiti: swastikas, threats, and nooses scrawled around the facility, going back to at least 2015. Then-EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows called it “shameful racial bigotry.”
Among more than 200 worker declarations gathered in the state case, about two-thirds said they saw anti-Black graffiti. Dozens said complaining got them retaliated against, including fired.
Lip service is certainly there but it's not like we have unions or really anything that isn't just marketing.
> union
The Teamsters went for Trump in 24. Having a union doesn't mean you're immune from facism.
At the employee level, there is generally widespread support for liberal social ideas (though often not liberal economic ideas).
At the leadership level there are a ton of illiberal people who think that things like democracy are bad and spend huge sums of money to push these belief.
> there is generally widespread support for liberal social ideas
I'd encourage you to look at any HN discussion about women's issues.
”far left” just shows your own bias.
No?
I don't understand how you say that with a straight face when Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are around.
Thiel, Musk, Zuckenberg, Ellison, Karp, Yarwin ... like common. Among leaders, there are kind of fascists and ... no one at all, maybe Gates? Industries that are left dont have sieg heiling leaders. Or, you know, have those counteracted by other kind of leaders.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/07/campaign-spe...
Even the billionaires were mostly donating to Kamala. Yes Elon was a giant blast of cash but his rightward shift is not representive of the industry.
And are we forgetting that Stephen Miller kicked him out anyway?
Tech religiously believes in science, education, immigration. The values are fundamentally incompatible with the right.
But for whatever reason the left has decided that we failed some purity test or simply wants to pick on "the nerds". I don't know what the strategy is here, but it doesn't seem like a good one.
The “nurture” explanation that I’m more inclined to, which is more optimistic, is that our culture changed, that people became risk-averse; science became feminized, bureaucratic, and regulated
... The Boomer kids were weaned off violent childhood literature like Tintin and the Hardy Boys and fed a diet of Dr. Seuss.
https://www.harvardsalient.com/p/interview-with-peter-thiel
One specific change that would accelerate drug development would be getting rid of the need for double-blind studies. If a drug is safe, you would just let people use it and not slow things down massively with a double-blind study.
Same link. Theres another interview with him - I can't remember which - where he proposes to test new Alzheimer drugs directly on patients because (paraphrased) they die anyway.
This does not sound like science.
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Miller kicked him out due to ego clash, not some kind of incompatible politics.
Donating Harris does not make one left, much less far left. It is utterly centrist pro-business donation.
> Tech religiously believes in science, education, immigration.
It does not. There are plenty pro Musk, anti immigration, anti science anti education for all people here. Especially among leaders.
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Musk is spending billions again in 2026. Kicked out? He has never been more aggressive in influencing politics.
I think that's why it's a bit of a shock to many to see leadership tilt so hard towards fascism.
Personally, I think the gap is between the leadership and the rank and file software engineers - the heady days of the post dotcom boom and bust where there was heavy overlap between those two categories are over, and a lot of Silicon Valley looks like traditional business now - an owner class that is setting the pace and the tone and the direction without much input and an employed class that is doing the work and lacks the raw mobility we saw at the height of the boom and bust (i.e. the perpetual capacity to walk off the job immediately into a new one).
Plus, I strongly suspect that some of it is reaction. These companies are based in the US. When the people of the United States have elected Donald Trump twice, one does start to wonder if the correct business decision is to follow the populism. Perhaps skepticism of the efficacy of democracy is justified when this is what democracy has yielded.
Aside from Elon and some crypto weirdos (if crypto even counts as tech) most of leadership went for Kamala in 24.
Today of course it's difficult because if you don't give Donnie a gift basket he blows a temper tantrum and hits you with tariffs.
Simply not true. There was huge Trump support from VCs before elections and after Trump won he instantly got direct support from most of US tech sector. All the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses were not supporting him before because of optics.
Yes, but the leaders that are spending time and money pushing their political beliefs are the fashy ones. People like Thiel and Musk. Garry Tan and Sergey Brin. Ellison and Andreesen. Even Bezos (although less fashy) reshaped the Post editorial staff into a reactionary place.
There is no gap.
The rank-and-file are just too ignorant and racist to realize they’re fascists — eg, their erasure of Japanese culture and arson attacks by masked paramilitaries against Asian small businesses in 2020.
If you think calling yourself an “anti fascist” while burning minority businesses is opposing fascism, you probably also think North Korea is a democratic republic.
Angry, historically ignorant, and stupid.
What exactly are you talking about?
You’re assuming the land acknowledgements are supporting their nominal values, rather than the friendly pink sweater of modern fascism.
You can look at how, eg, “woke” values (ie, that “left wing” ideology) is directly driving the erasure of Japanese culture by self-appointed white people who Know Better (TM). When their major export is colonialist erasure of other cultures, I don’t take the performative-but-useless land acknowledgments as anything but metaphoric white hoods.
They happily burned many Asian small businesses while chanting “Black Lives Matter!” those same years.
Erasure of Japanese culture? Wow, that must've been the topic of non-stop public discussion in Japan if that was even remotely true. Point us to an NHK article discussing this non-existent event.