I find these sorts of conversations tiresome. Almost nobody who isn't interested in particular parts of the tech remotely knows who DHH is. He managed to secure some funding for his Linux distro. None of this directly translates to the broader political landscape.

I think you and others that pretending that this is the case, is borderline delusional.

I am quite aware how it works. What you are describing is nationalism which isn't what is happening online these days. Nationalism is an older form of propaganda / State control. I am not a Libertarian/Ancap but this is a concise description of the mechanism.

> Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State’s advantage. If “Ruritania” was being attacked by “Walldavia,” the first task of the State and its intellectuals was to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack was really upon them and not simply upon the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of “nationalism” has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles.

https://mises.org/online-book/anatomy-state/how-state-preser...