So far I haven't met anyone there who was into politics. People there are sometimes slightly anarchic, but definitely not interested in any left and right. But there are a lot of furries - the biggest visible group of visitors - they're just there for sex and party.

As far I can tell only some of the organizers (the people with the money for equipment) seem to have some ties to the fascist left. (Nowadays called Europe Socialism - they absolutely don't like Europe Socialism being called National Socialism - Europe is absolutely not National... But they don't really do anything that looks like CCC - they just spend some money there - and put a little bit of fascist propaganda on display...

See also: complaints that Star Trek has “gone woke” recently.

> You expect hackers to be like, "we love capitalism! We love strong hierarchies!"?

You should ask the old-schoolers, if they can hear you over the roar of the air conditioning in their cushy corporate offices and the engines of their Volvos.

When all you have left is petty political bitching, the conference has lost its meaning, it's just a Reddit meetup at that point.

I've been in this scene 40+ years and for every Emmanuel Goldstein-type there's also a Dale Gribble.

At least dale never fucked kids.

God this event still frustrates me two years later but sometimes they are left leaning to the point of ignoring reality. There was this talk about how corporations are not the solution to fixing climate change and the presenters wanted to push policy to mandate people use busses and public transportation(im summarizing).

I got up and pointed out that the first group that tries to push something like this will be the first group elected out of office in record time and companies like Tesla didn't form in a vacuum, they formed partially as a response to how ineffective government has been at moving the tech stack forward.

I also pointed out at how the talk was too Euro centric and that the presenters should visit the US or Canada and see why its so car centric. The presenters acknowledged that they haven't actually been to the US but pushed back with the NYC subway as an example of the US (which at the time was slowly collapsing).

The audience gave them a round of applause for that response. It really revealed to me how these guys act like they are so smart but they have this enormous blind spot because of the bubble they are in.

Funny enough after Trump got re-elected and all the right wing shifts started accelerating in Europe, they finally started to wake up in the "Illegal Instructions" theme of the subsequent conference.

There is another framing/view that the authoritarianism-anarchism axis is perpendicular to the left-right axis. Nobody's suggesting that fascism isn't fundamentally authoritarian, but "left leaning" is not mutually exclusive with "authoritarian", nor is it a synonym for "anarchist". See: East Germany, Soviet Union, China, North Korea.

Also, it's not kind to call someone 'daft' for expressing a political view you disagree with. Nobody's saying you should accept their perspective uncritically, but you don't need to be mean-spirited or engage in name-calling to critique their perspective. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We are on a message board run by a VC firm.

> Hacker culture has always been left leaning

No it hasn't. It started as counterculture. 90's hacker ethos might as well make you a fascist these days.

> The one time France asked the US something military-wise, Obama refused.

Ehh forget how Vietnam started?

Although yes that is a little longer than 50 years ago already. Crazy how fast these things go.

France doesn't need to call anyone, they have spies everywhere. They're the world leader in industrial espionage with a few hundred-years head start over everyone else.

And also don't forget they're the second largest global arms exporter after the United States. Which is amazing when you realize they only have one manufacturer (Airbus) in the global top 15...