I agree w parts of this & am personally more optimistic on SV than Fred is, but to clarify my quote, I think that the group of people who are like “fuck morality” (tech right / eacc scene) is p different and in fact explicitly opposed to the insect suffering / EA scene
Yeah, you probably have a better picture than me because I've actually never lived in the Bay Area, but it seems to me that the categories by which people sort the tech scene are sort of arbitrary. I know this is true to some extent for all groups, and actually it might be what currently divides the left and the right, in that the former is formed by consensus on ideology and the latter by shared goals.
In that sense, e/acc is a real thing, a big tent formed by people of various ideologies (including some leftists) who all want the same thing. But it's unclear to me that the tech right meaningfully exists, versus just being the term used to refer to the population which happens to be right-wing and in tech. And maybe this is what's giving you the vibes that there's this dangerous group out there that doesn't care about morality or anything. But actually to me it's just a minority of individuals who don't care about anything and therefore aren't a real threat.
It would be interesting to see survey results for how people identify themselves in 2025, either with categories for things like "tech right" or individually as "conservative" and "techie". There was an ACX reader survey recently (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2025), although presumably that skews disproportionately EA.
Edit: To elaborate, I think the mistake you're making is starting out assuming that tech is powerful, and so it's dangerous that there's some people in it who are amoral. But tech is not a throne, it's a process. Maybe it's a naive belief, but I'm pretty optimistic that if you don't believe in anything, you can't stay in this red queen's race.
I agree w parts of this & am personally more optimistic on SV than Fred is, but to clarify my quote, I think that the group of people who are like “fuck morality” (tech right / eacc scene) is p different and in fact explicitly opposed to the insect suffering / EA scene
Yeah, you probably have a better picture than me because I've actually never lived in the Bay Area, but it seems to me that the categories by which people sort the tech scene are sort of arbitrary. I know this is true to some extent for all groups, and actually it might be what currently divides the left and the right, in that the former is formed by consensus on ideology and the latter by shared goals.
In that sense, e/acc is a real thing, a big tent formed by people of various ideologies (including some leftists) who all want the same thing. But it's unclear to me that the tech right meaningfully exists, versus just being the term used to refer to the population which happens to be right-wing and in tech. And maybe this is what's giving you the vibes that there's this dangerous group out there that doesn't care about morality or anything. But actually to me it's just a minority of individuals who don't care about anything and therefore aren't a real threat.
It would be interesting to see survey results for how people identify themselves in 2025, either with categories for things like "tech right" or individually as "conservative" and "techie". There was an ACX reader survey recently (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2025), although presumably that skews disproportionately EA.
Edit: To elaborate, I think the mistake you're making is starting out assuming that tech is powerful, and so it's dangerous that there's some people in it who are amoral. But tech is not a throne, it's a process. Maybe it's a naive belief, but I'm pretty optimistic that if you don't believe in anything, you can't stay in this red queen's race.