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As an old, I don't really play video games. But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?
Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.
Video games companies need developers who are competent, willing to work for low wages, and willing to tolerate long working hours. This is a tough sell. Competent devs in the US can easily earn 200-500k with cushy working conditions. Why get paid less than half as much and be subjected to semiannual death marches?
As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios.
There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs? Conservative men tend to work in the field that pays them the best, allowing them to support their family. They aren't out there making children's toys.
Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?
I mean, it's the political orientation of devs.
From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals. It's an unfortunate truth, but conservatives have to face reality here -- there is no hidden trove of right-leaning engineers waiting in the wings to take over.
By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.
I do think there's probably a poorly-researched difference in political alignment across the software spectrum: there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if more left-leaning developers are prone to be more involved with public development (open source, conferences, etc), while self-driven solo developers (Linus circa 1993, Carmack, and such) have a different bent.
Turbo-lib here meaning the PMC version of limousine liberal -- performative and extra.
The libertarian streak is definitely present -- although it took a bit of a backseat during COVID -- but it's not as defining of a feature as liberalism. Moreover the rise of FAANG has lead a lot of those with libertarianish sentiments to think of government as the agent for vindicating liberty against the excesses of private power. I tend to think that's rather a silly view, but here we are.
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By “tasked with thinking” you mean what they think about/do on the job?
I’m curious as to what your perspective is on how that influences the politics of these groups, but IMO defense developers skew much further right than the others not because of the type of engineering work, but rather because working for the military/MIC codes as Red Tribe
Yes, that's what I was trying to describe. Front-end web development is a lot heavier on "user experience" and, for lack of a better term, art, while something like fintech C++ developers are concerned about absolute minimal latency (processor cache misses, pipeline hazards, memory access patterns), and your automotive embedded developers are tuning physical control systems. My guess would be that user-facing developers, especially for non-business users, are more likely to lean more progressive because they really do need to worry more about accessibility (internationalization, screen reader support, color-blindness-friendly palettes) than kernel developers, which seems to me to at least loosely fit the people-focused vs. thing-focused spectrum that seems to already have a bit of a political valence.
I agree that the further backend/lower-level you go, the more systematizing, as opposed to empathizing, engineering becomes.
However, I think this maps to the greater autistic-ness (in the colloquial sense) of backend/low-level devs (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this held true even for the strict medical definition of autism). It’s not obvious to me that greater autistic-ness maps cleanly to more right-wing political views; for example, anecdatally, transwomen represent greater percentages of engineers as you go deeper into backend/low-level infra work, but I’d be shocked if any of them identified as Red Tribe in any way.
Perhaps there is a case to be made that autistics tend towards individualist rather than collectivist views. But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.
I would argue that they are both quite individualist, but don't get marked as individualist because invididualism is so baked into American society that it's invisible to Americans. Both Republicans and Democrats discuss their ideas in terms of individual rights ("2A! Religious freedom! Freedom of speech! Right to life! My body, my choice! Constitutional right to an abortion, that SCOTUS took away! Trans people's right to exist! Civil rights!") and while there are grumblings of genuine collectivism in both parties, such views don't have much power.
Collectivism believes that rights come with duties -- and even the French Revolution's great document included disussion of "the rights and duties of man and the citizen." When's the last time American discourse had a real discussion of "the duties of man and the citizen?"
I mean, read some of the stuff even the French Revolutionaries wrote:
And my favorite two:
But of course American discourse involves no discussion of such things; they're anathema. Even the farthest of the far right would shudder at saying such things out loud! Even our legal system involves many complex financial instruments designed "by stratagem or ingenuity" to avoid taxation, and a major theory of American legal thought argues that there is nothing immoral about breaching a solemn contract!
Pure libertarians are definitely individualist, but also marginal, because most Americans have some level of collectivist ideals even if they fall well short of the global and historical norm.
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