Live data from Hacker News

Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

bloomberg.com

41–50 of 293 posts

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#41
post #2

Can someone explain why SV tech workers are more left-wing to me as an outsider? I always thought these tech workers were more libertarian.

Libertarianism started on the far left - The "original libertarian", the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque, attacked Proudhon, the "original anarchist" for being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian" for his regressive views on women.

Right-libertarianism was an attempt to unite the libertarian parts of the left with socially liberal elements on the right against authoritarian ideologies; their main distinction are views on property rights and on whether or not de jure vs. de facto rights matter most.

As such it is often hard to place people with libertarian views firmly on a traditional left-right axis. You'll find a variety ranging from the far left seeing private property as illegitimate restrictions on liberty (Dejacque applauded Proudhon's famous "property is theft"), to right wing libertarians who see private property as fundamental to liberty (often invoking e.g. Ayn Rand, Hayek and von Mises), to people in between who want various trade-offs (e.g. mostly protecting property rights but seeing a need for some level of welfare provisions)

My experience is that engineering in general tends to have a lot of socially liberal people, many of whom could probably be described as libertarian, but that the left/right position of their views is often a lot more ambiguous.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#42
post #2

Can someone explain why SV tech workers are more left-wing to me as an outsider? I always thought these tech workers were more libertarian.

I work at one of the companies often cited as having very left-wing employees, and my impression is that the media heavily overplays this.

I would instead say there is a small but very active group of employees that push a left-leaning political agenda, and most of these people tend to have non-STEM backgrounds (I don’t know why this is the case, but it is what I have observed). Most of the software engineers and data scientists that I work with do not really enjoy discussing politics (at least at work) and have views that lean more libertarian. Four of the people I work with are closet conservatives, and there are some issues I would say I am conservative on as well, but no one ever really brings these topics up at work.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#43
post #2

Can someone explain why SV tech workers are more left-wing to me as an outsider? I always thought these tech workers were more libertarian.

[flagged]

> the left wing tends to be more science based

Sorry, but the left wing is not "science based" at all when it comes to the social sciences - their attitude to social issues is very much religious in nature (see any mention of "socialism" and "wealth taxes" as perhaps the clearest and least controversial example) and "the antithesis of the enlightenment". Both sides are playing this game.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#45

Breaking up big tech companies is undoubtedly good for the workers, create more competition in hiring. It would probably send money downwards and be a huge boon to innovation tbh.

> Breaking up big tech companies is undoubtedly good for the workers, create more competition in hiring. Many of the largest tech companies are only large because of their cost centers. If we split up google what would likely happen is that youtube and gmail would simply die.

If we split up google what would likely happen is that youtube and gmail would simply die

Or compete on a level playing field with Vimeo, Fastmail and so on. Everyone wins if Google is split up. Even Google shareholders, who will finally get some nice dividends when the ad business money isn't being diverted to prop up the rest of it.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#46
post #2

Can someone explain why SV tech workers are more left-wing to me as an outsider? I always thought these tech workers were more libertarian.

Disregard your SV stereotypes and think about San Francisco stereotypes. Or Oakland stereotypes. Or SF stereotypes from a generation back. They're still here. The bay area, despite being an insulated bubble, is still really not homogeneous. The media loves to portray it as homogeneous, but that's really not the case.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#48
post #2

Can someone explain why SV tech workers are more left-wing to me as an outsider? I always thought these tech workers were more libertarian.

I think it's generational. SV in the Gen X era was highly libertarian. The Millenials in SV seem to be mostly left wing or even socialist. Broadly speaking that is, exceptions abound.

A lot of social democrats start out as libertarians and then move left once they see the bigger picture of power dynamics beyond the individual.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#49
Turkeys voting for Christmas. If you break up the large companies, this system will collapse. The reason why Facebook and Google are allowed to light massive stacks of shareholder cash on fire (in pay and acquisitions) is because they have a monopoly which churns off cash, and are protected by supervoting shares.

Very good for investors though. They can buy the monopoly and sell all the OSS/moonshot bullshit.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#50

Pretty telling that the idea of voting against one's own financial self-interest, even as a single part of a large platform, is a wild idea to these business journalists.

It actually can be self-interested. If you work for AWS, why would you want to be inside of Amazon, who you subsidize with your bsuiness’s profits? A lot of the subsidiaries would be massive companies in their own.
Post reply on HN