The industry’s liberal reputation is misleading. Its reactionary tendencies – celebrating wealth, power and traditional masculinity – have been clear since the dotcom mania of the 1990s

No, this isn’t Silicon Valley in the age of Maga. It’s the tech industry of the 1990s, when observers first raised concerns about the rightwing bend of Silicon Valley and the potential for “technofascism”. Despite the industry’s (often undeserved) reputation for liberalism, its reactionary foundations were baked in almost from the beginning. As Silicon Valley enters a second Trump administration, the gendered roots of its original reactionary movement offer insight into today’s rightward turn.

At the height of the dotcom mania in the 1990s, many critics warned of a creeping reactionary fervor. “Forget digital utopia,” wrote the longtime technology journalist Michael Malone, “we could be headed for techno-fascism.” Elsewhere, the writer Paulina Borsook called the valley’s worship of male power “a little reminiscent of the early celebrants of Eurofascism from the 1930s”.

  • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
    11·
    1 day ago

    Surely Ayn Rand’s simplistic and regressive view of society being mixed into the crunchy granola liberalism/hippie sloganeering of the “California Ideology” was a huge warning sign.

  • TheObviousSolution@kbin.melroy.org
    83·
    1 day ago

    It really isn’t. This seems like rewriting history for views, although it’s still an interesting read. This article is basically:

    At the root of this reactionary thinking was a writer and public intellectual named George Gilder

    - followed by an explanation of how his influence started and grew there, followed by a fair degree of mental gymnastics to how well-it-didnt-seem-to-be-there-but-it-really-was.

    Societies change, I’m sure his and a number of factors less colluded that the article suggests also did contribute to it, but it wasn’t the same. IMO the biggest transition has been from Silicon Valley being fostered to create an investment hotspot to Silicon Valley being targeted by increasingly classist special interests that were losing their competitive traction because of how much influence its innovations were having on the rest of the world.