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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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The rhetoric is mostly aimed at tech billionaires, but then why do regular codemonkeys feel the need to defend them?

They largely don't. The modal tech worker's thoughts on political economy are essentially those of a factory worker in 1850. They're distrustful of management, and they don't adore billionaires. They worry about foreigners (H1Bs) coming in and stealing their livelihoods. The fact that Yarvin happened to be a tech worker before his writing took off is mostly a coincidence.

But I can't shake the feeling that all of this debate about "techno-fascism" (or whatever) is operating at a high simulacrum level, concealing the true reasons why people get so animated about this and why they choose the sides that they do.

It's mostly illusory. It's a blob of vaguely interrelated stuff:

  1. The populist left hates billionaires like the populist right hates immigrants. Peter Thiel is a billionaire and also happens to have right-wing political ideas, so he serves as a foil for them to get really angry about.
  2. There's some latent animosity at "nerds" (especially the weird-looking, awkward ones) for becoming elites. Some of it is elite overproduction, while some of it is subconscious (or sometimes quite blatant) physiognomic prejudice.
  3. There's lingering hatred over SSC-adjacent "gray tribe" for not becoming fully woke.

Wrap up all of those with cherrypicked examples and you can make a bad political book on the "threat of the nerds" it seems.

The fact that Yarvin happened to be a tech worker before his writing took off is mostly a coincidence.

No, I don't think it is a coincidence, the tech sectgor self-selects for a kind of high functioning socially unbothered mode of thinking unafraid to explore ideas and themes that are outside the current overton window.

They largely don't.

Speaking just for myself & generalizing a bit too casually: a key difference is that the billionaires are content to leave me alone.

If NPR staffers run the government, I'd get taxed a bunch (boo), get more diversity trainings and scolding PSAs from NGOs (boo!), and see more of society's decisions being made via the kind of theatrical protests that theater kids are good at and I find distasteful.

If Musk/Bezos/Zuck run the government, I them to blow a bunch of investor cash on tech projects, take control of a city / town/ slice of Hawaii to run as fiefdoms, and maybe be a demanding jerk of a boss to the people who work for them.

The actual theater kid offer amounts to "give us a path to have power over everything in society so, among our many other projects, we can stop Musk/Bezos/Zuck from blowing investors cash and running their local towns like a fiefdom."

I already don't live in Hawaii or Starbase and so the upside isn't there and the downside is pretty bad. So I don't want the theater kids in power, which ends up looking like me "supporting" Zuck / Bezos / Musk despite those 3 not really being politically aligned.

This tracks. I don't hate Zuck / Bezos / Musk either, though I don't like them. Musk in particular was a massive disappointment when he let his mind go to the gutter with all the Catturd-esque right wing brainrot. Though I'd still prefer a cabal of tech oligarchs in charge over Trump or a deranged Woke-pusher, mostly by process of elimination (i.e. tech oligarchs would be the least-terrible). I'd vastly prefer Obama to any of those losers but the median primary voter hates people like that now.

Musk will forever have my deference for neutralizing Twitter, that amalgam of glowie psy-ops and something awful goon "weird twitter" the likes of which "journalists" loved to screen shot and declare it news reporting.