The following is an opinion piece focused on current events. These views are entirely my own.
The tech industry in America is under a lot of pressure to adapt and change to the whims of the incoming administration. This is not what I see as business strength but rather as business fear. The tech bros are scared. They aren’t scared of the American political hellscape, they aren’t scared of the incoming administration and its regulators, they are afraid of the fact that over the last few years we’ve been clawing back power over our technical lives for ourselves. They need us more than we need them.
They need us more than we need them.
Tech bros are trying to align themselves with the individuals that will allow them to best continue the life they’ve come to enjoy. They don’t care about individual users. They don’t care about free speech. They don’t care about privacy. They care about money. They want to see more regimes like Trump who can be easily swayed to make pen and paper a thing of the past. Where freedom of choice is irrelevant. Where the authoritarian mindset is supreme and everyone knows it. If the Democrats or liberals were going to push policies that aligned with their agendas they would be all about it too.
DEI is a good thing. We need diversity. Just looking at all the people that are praising Trump’s incoming 47th presidency makes me ill because they’re all so white, so middle class, and so moronic. The constant refrain of “So-and-so is a DEI hire” and similar whining from the conservative right is indication enough that DEI was working. Because in their over-inflated egos there’s no possibility that they couldn’t have possibly been the lacking in skills, although, if you ask me, most of them wouldn’t be skillful enough to find their way out of a paper bag with a GPS. All rolling back DEI is going to do is make it absolutely clear that these idiots have no idea what they’re doing. That none of them possess a fraction of the skills they seem to think they do and more important, that they’re all absolutely racist, classist, and a whole bunch of other -ist and -ism words.
I said this was going to be talking about their insecurities and I’ll get there in a few moments. I’m just trying to get some long overdue venting done and out of the way before I come unglued. Every day I hear about the new individuals that are going to be leading our American government and I have to laugh. Each one is less qualified than the last and each one is an oligarchic puppet.
I used to be a conservative, believe it or not. What ruined it for me is the truth of the matter…that conservative politics is self-destructive because it relies on fear-mongering, hate-spewing, and belittlement. Once you start running out of people to be afraid of, to hate spew against, and to belittle you start to realize that conservative politics doesn’t offer individuals very much. Unless of course, you happen to make something like 300k USD a year and then you might be eligible enough to play golf with a few of them, assuming their more important friends are busy and they were going golfing anyway.
As you can see, the more you start to really dig into the whole ‘tech bros falling to conservative politics’ the more you really start to understand that at the heart of the issue is the fact that these idiots aren’t even all that interested in who the president is, they’re are more interested in what the presidency is. And what the presidency has become is a person who can bully others in government to giving into their agendas. They accuse those who leave their platforms of virtue signalling but they’ve already signaled their own virtues for long enough. They are very few and far in-between.
As we leave their platforms behind, as we activate VPNs and disable ads across as many of our devices and services as possible all of which don’t put a dime in their pockets they realize they’re losing the one thing that they can’t live without. People who will rely on their services. I think, we’re going to hammer this objective home over the next year or so. I’m encouraging all of you to continue to do these exact things. Do whatever you can to limit your reliance on Big Tech and the weasel, weak, and pathetic losers that make up their leadership. Find social media platforms that are free and decentralized. Go back to writing on paper with pens. Send letters to your loved ones. Develop new correspondences away from the public eye. Take meaningful walks in nature and spend more time ‘disconnected’ from their reality and you will find that they hold less and less power over you all the time.
Like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four by the incomparable Orson Wells (1949 Secker & Warburg) discover the joy of writing by hand. Keeping your thoughts your own and breaking away from the mindless agenda of scroll/advertise/buy buy buy. Breaking the cycle can be hard but it will have real world benefits for you and even more real world consequences for the dude bros that are clinging to their imaginary power. Anything you can do to break free from their tools and resources and you should do so. It’s not going to be 100% but every step you take towards tech independence is a step you’ll be taking towards freeing yourself from the shackles on your mind.