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As someone who is old enough to remember how tech people used to be (and is more or less one of them), this change makes zero sense to me.
IMAO, this sort of thing is where, "the past is a different country," saying gets its teeth. Again, IMAO and all that, but the barriers to tech were higher and different, the PMC hadn't yet metastasized, kids could still fail out of public schools, colleges were not yet degree factories with extra steps, TFR decline wasn't quite a Thing beyond the Doomers, the American monoculture had yet to be fractured by the internet, Western ideology seemed ascendant in the larger world, Social Media had not yet been unleashed upon the world, etc. etc. etc.
Somewhere in my head there lies an ill-formed effortpost on these themes. If I can keep myself from getting too turgid in my prose, I may even write it and perhaps post it.
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The progressive tech weirdos purged all the other tech weirdos who didn't keep their head down, so the only ones you'll hear from are the progressives.
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