> 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.