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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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and as AI becomes more undeniably scary, that may begin to eat into the Red political base

How many software engineers [or others directly threatened by AI] are not Blue-no-matter-who, though? Those are the people mostly worried about this (and partially because capex on data centers kind of ate the market's appetite for software, though one notes that once those data centers are available there still needs to be software engineers capable of using them)... but from what I can tell most of them (except for perhaps Dallas/Fort Worth) do not vote Red so why cater to them?

If nothing else, Red really needs AI to be too cheap to meter [and very cheap to develop] because control of it (and therefore access) is currently in the hands of misaligned intelligences their political opponents. So their tactic is going to be about maintaining the existing "you want your men in government to make sure that your enemy can't use AI to explode your world" threat and not a more general/civic-responsibility "AI will explode the world" message from Blue (and indeed they are in fact guilty of lying about this- stamping their culture war views into their models, claiming that's "safety", then letting development in the real X-based directions rip). Techno-luddism is kind of a Red stereotype in the first place anyway.

The strategy from Blue should arguably be more of what they're already good at: credentialism. You need humans to check that the output is correct, so why not seek some legal protections for that should that change overnight? (That way, even if the highly credentialed [= average Blue voter] are reduced to universal-basic-jobs, it's not going to upend the social order; they'll still be well-paid simply for being the kind of person who is better than average at computers. The fact the Blue side is full of Progressives may significantly degrade their ability to make this point precisely because they were the ones who entangled "safety" with "can't do a wrongthink" in the first place.)

Astra+ level models with very low error rate and 300 tok/s output totally can replace most knowledge workers.

Until it comes time to actually interact with a human being or check its work, of course; if work X isn't done properly and something screws up the superintelligence is still not accountable.

The red can very easily win over decent-enough AI from big tech through a combination of normal corporate bargaining, democrats embracing socialist policies that directly threaten their bottom lines, and of course the stick.

How many software engineers [or others directly threatened by AI] are not Blue-no-matter-who, though?

In my personal experience of having known many of them, most software engineers don't care much about politics and don't pay much attention to it.

How many software engineers [or others directly threatened by AI] are not Blue-no-matter-who, though?

More than there would appear. Many were purged during the height of woke, but most of those ended up somewhere else and hid their power levels better. Some managed to hide their power level the whole time.

How many software engineers [or others directly threatened by AI]

You think I meant job displacement? I meant actual scares. I mean loyal Trumpists going full Alex Jones when they realize the Skynet is coming. It would be pretty easy to scare people into Luddism, to the extent that it overpowers current partisan split (not entirely, of course, but moving it by 10% or so).

The loyal Trumpist position is basically 'we can just pull the plug/flood the datacenters- we don't need to worry about AI alignment because if it stops doing what we tell it to, we'll just hard reboot'. Trumpists going full Alex Jones will target Trump's enemies with ridiculous accusations(because that is what Alex Jones does; this isn't a Why Files type esotericist. He's worried about people), true, but the actual response to Skynet is to turn off the datacenters- the median red triber does not believe a computer can defeat people, for that reason.