Ask HN: Why is leftism the dominant ideology at most big tech companies? - it
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brsg
Demographics alone probably explain this well enough in the US. Tech workers
skew heavily young and skew heavily college educated. If you sample any
population with those demographics - in this political environment - you're
going to get some pretty anti-trump sentiments. Although maybe not necessarily
"leftist"

Personally, I think Twitter (or any social media) gives the impression that
this group is more radical than they probably are as a whole.

~~~
schoen
But in 1995 or 2000 tech workers also skewed young and college educated and,
at least according to my own recollections and a couple of authors I mentioned
elsewhere in this thread, their politics did not seem very leftist then. What
changed?

~~~
hindsightbias
The Overton Window.

Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama were not radically divergent from each other
politically and socially. Where social policy diverged, it was obviously
electoral, not personal. Every single one of these candidates would have/did
support stuff like “strong” borders or DOMA until they didnt in practice or
somber reflection.

We have a populist rebellion against the status quo and educated youts aren’t
Ayn Rand, Goldwater or Milton Friedman fans anymore.

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omg_ponies
This isn't going to be a productive discussion - OP has not defined any of the
key terms, and should at least do some work first. At least write a short
essay to elaborate on the questions you're interested in, and what your
current thoughts are.

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schoen
I don't think this topic is going to lead to a very HN-rules-and-norms-
respecting discussion. :-(

One thing that I was wondering about related to this, which might be a
slightly more concrete question and easier to talk about:

In 1996 Paulina Borsook wrote an essay which she later expanded into her 2000
book _Cyberselfish_ , in which she argued that Silicon Valley was super-
libertarian in a way that she strongly disliked.

There are still people on the left who feel that Silicon Valley as a whole is
disagreeably indifferent to income inequality and class issues. (This is sort
of like Thomas Frank's complaints: you worry about culture war topics, but you
should worry about income inequality instead.) But I doubt many of them would
see Silicon Valley as libertarian in anything like the way that Borsook
experienced it. Nor do libertarians or conservatives, many of whom say it's
now become uncomfortable or risky for their careers to express their views in
Silicon Valley.

How did we get from a 2000 Silicon Valley in which someone is writing a book
like Borsook's to now?

Edit: actually, an even more famous example of roughly the same idea is
Barbrook (as opposed to Borsook) on "The Californian Ideology"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology)

which is from 1995.

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sushshshsh
H1B workers are in tech, Dems support H1Bs, as a result

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dragonwriter
> Why is leftism the dominant ideology at most big tech companies?

It's not.

Big wage-labor-dependent investor-owned companies and leftism aren't
particularly compatible.

Non-economic-class identity politics, a bourgeois distraction from leftism,
are popular at many big tech companies, because they provide a veneer of
progressivie image without seriously challenging, and in fact deflecting the
most serious challenges to, the capitalist economic order.

Now, from the perspective of the far right this looks kinda like leftism since
it's somewhere off to the left of the far right, and US political dialogue is
shaped by the far right doing a very good job of shaping the media by working
the refs over a period of decades.

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burfog
The main reason goes well beyond tech companies, to all large organizations.
In the workplace, leftists are more discriminatory regarding political
ideology. People on the right are often willing to hire and promote people on
the left, but that graciousness is not reciprocated. Leftists fire Trump
supporters. Over time, this leads to complete control.

There are minor reasons too. One is that many tech workers are young people
fresh from university indoctrination, but without children and mortgages.
Another is that many tech workers come from outside the USA. Besides that fact
that many non-USA places are more leftist, there is a selection bias caused by
the fact that these people are not dedicated to staying in their own
countries; they are fundamentally more globalist than the people that they
leave behind.

~~~
rbecker
> Besides that fact that many non-USA places are more leftist

While I agree with the statement about selection bias of immigrants, I have to
take issue with this part of your claim. The countries most relevant to tech
companies (India and China) are very nearly (or entirely, depending on your
standards) ethno-nationalist. India is currently trying for demographic change
in Kashmir [1], and I won't waste your time repeating the plentiful coverage
of China's efforts to maintain their 91.6% Han majority.

[1]
[https://apnews.com/e9b74f494df8592c3b87944d570dc039](https://apnews.com/e9b74f494df8592c3b87944d570dc039)

~~~
burfog
Look at the whole picture. China is not known for God, guns, free speech,
right to life, and rugged individualism.

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uberman
The legions of open source advocates are necessarily socialists (at least with
respect to information sharing in general and software specifically).

Socialism is central to modern software development. If it was not then there
would be no "free software foundation", "no open source", no plethora of
"copy-left" licencing. I don't say this as if it is a bad thing. Clearly we
are centuries of person years ahead software wise as a result of this
socialism.

This individual behavior stands in stark contrast to the behavior of most tech
companies as a whole that are clearly not "leftist". There is nothing leftist
about NDA agreements, confiscation of IP and anti-poaching agreements to
control wages. There is nothing leftist about dark ui patterns, shifting terms
of service and harvesting of personal information and micro-transactions.

~~~
burfog
The term "open source" comes from Eric S. Raymond, a major advocate of it. He
is just about as far from socialist as a man can be.

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znpy
It's worth nothing that such leftism is usually accompanied by an enormous
hypocrisy.

Many people will complain about working conditions of people with lower skill
level, most of them are not going to quit over that and renounce the fat
faang-style paycheck.

Same for massive surveillance, pervasive tracking, and unionisation and many
more topics.

Anecdotally: I've seen a few people turning their eyes the other way as soon
as Amazon or Google started dropping monthly cash bombs on them.

So the question could actually be: what is the _actually_ predominant ideology
in big tech companies?

~~~
schoen
I understand what you're getting at, but I don't think "hypocrisy" is the
right word in most cases -- that's a very strong charge.

As I mentioned in another comment, some Silicon Valley leftists are not that
interested in income inequality and are more interested in culture war stuff.
In that case they're already not hypocritical for making a lot of money, even
if other parts of the left think their priorities are misplaced.

On the other hand, people who _are_ especially concerned about income
inequality might think that their preferred way to address it is by having the
government increase the minimum wage and/or expand the welfare state. In that
case they might be perfectly happy to earn a high income themselves while also
trying to support politicians who want to do these things (say, like Bernie
Sanders).

This has also come up when critics of redistributive policies ask why
proponents don't simply donate more of their own money to the government, to
which the proponents will say that their priority is to change public policy
(which might scale better than relying on individual decisionmaking).

Related:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics)

In my view, people who don't prioritize or practice prefigurative politics
aren't necessarily hypocritical.

~~~
bradlys
It’s important to note that most leftists aren’t decrying FAANG techies making
$300-500k/year. They’re hating on the wealthy.

Techies are wage slaves as much as anyone else. They just have a higher scale
of cost and income.

~~~
znpy
Most techies earn a lot more of the people they're supposedly fighting for.
Compare the salary of an average Amazon warehouse worker to any developer, and
you'll find a staggering pay difference.

