> DURAN: In April 2009, Peter Thiel wrote an essay in which he said he no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible and suggested that women and other people getting the right to vote marked the end of freedom being a thing you can have with democracy. At least, of course, as we can see for white men, he was talking about. Well, this caused a lot of outcry and criticism of Thiel, who had to go back and say, I didn't mean to say - I'm not saying that women shouldn't have the vote, etc.
> Peter Thiel wrote an essay in which he said he no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible and suggested that women and other people getting the right to vote marked the end of freedom being a thing you can have with democracy.
This is true that Peter Thiel wrote ti
> At least, of course, as we can see for white men, he was talking about.
This is spin. He wasn't talking about white men. He was talking that as long as people are allowed to vote to take things from others to give to themselves they will.
And, it can be argued, that in the end that will end up with worse outcomes for everyone. (not saying this is true, I'm saying it can be argued that it's a possibility)
IMO, what Thiel wrote is essentially that women and non-whites are beneficiaries of welfare and leaches on society, and that they therefore will vote to transfer wealth from the white men who create it (according to Thiel).
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
I believe this topic was flagged for political reasons, which constitutes an abuse of the system. This is an important topic for the tech industry. Avoiding it won't make it go away.
Alternatively, if this topic is too hot for discussion, it should be frozen but allowed to remain on the front page, because this book is newsworthy. I intend to read it.
I believe the go-to response from leadership here is that there's other places to discuss political news, and that if it doesn't encourage curious, thoughtful discussion, it shouldn't exist here. So they probably won't address the flagging system as they truly believe it's working as expected.
There are, that's why we discuss most political news elsewhere. But there's no more informed place to discuss tech news, that's why we want to discuss crossover topics here.
The painful thing is that there's a non tech related political item on the front page at least every other day, so it's very clear that certain topics are just too close to home for some people here.
I mean, Garry Tan is precisely the kind of person being criticized here. Rich tech CEOs with illiberal beliefs and limited care for the rights of other people.
I'm trying to build my own software that maybe someday people will pay for. I've also worked really hard to reduce my family's hard costs (paid off mortgage and car, grow lots of our own food, full solar+battery off-grid setup, biogas digester for cooking gas, etc).
I started the NOVC Alliance[0] for people like me that want to build software outside of the mainstream SV/VC culture. Think of it as "BPA Free" for software.
Tl;dr: anti-vc, not anti-capital. It's for those building without institutional equity capital structured around venture-scale returns, which is what tends to result in enshittification imo.
Increasingly, I find myself thinking that the right path is not to build software... It's to be good at software and then find a concrete problem and use the fact that you know software to attack it.
... But I'll admit that what those problems are I can't rightfully say.
I've been in this field for 15 years and it's about as far left as any industry can get. We were doing land acknowledgments at product demos a few years ago.
> California’s Civil Rights Department, which sued Tesla in February 2022 after a three-year investigation, documented specific language in its complaint: the n-word, “porch monkey,” “monkey toes,” “boy,” “hood rats,” “go back to Africa,” plus the Spanish-language slurs “mayate” and “negrita.” One worker told investigators he heard slurs 50 to 100 times a day.
The agency also alleged the factory was effectively segregated, with an area where Black workers were concentrated known internally as the “porch monkey station.” Workers reported coworkers displaying Confederate flag tattoos to intimidate them.
The EEOC’s own federal complaint, filed in September 2023 in the Northern District of California, adds graffiti: swastikas, threats, and nooses scrawled around the facility, going back to at least 2015. Then-EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows called it “shameful racial bigotry.”
Among more than 200 worker declarations gathered in the state case, about two-thirds said they saw anti-Black graffiti. Dozens said complaining got them retaliated against, including fired.
I've been in this industry for 34, and it's always been full of people who are at heart authoritarians, who believe that they would do a better job than anyone else, and are seriously lacking in self-awareness.
At the employee level, there is generally widespread support for liberal social ideas (though often not liberal economic ideas).
At the leadership level there are a ton of illiberal people who think that things like democracy are bad and spend huge sums of money to push these belief.
I think that's why it's a bit of a shock to many to see leadership tilt so hard towards fascism.
Personally, I think the gap is between the leadership and the rank and file software engineers - the heady days of the post dotcom boom and bust where there was heavy overlap between those two categories are over, and a lot of Silicon Valley looks like traditional business now - an owner class that is setting the pace and the tone and the direction without much input and an employed class that is doing the work and lacks the raw mobility we saw at the height of the boom and bust (i.e. the perpetual capacity to walk off the job immediately into a new one).
Plus, I strongly suspect that some of it is reaction. These companies are based in the US. When the people of the United States have elected Donald Trump twice, one does start to wonder if the correct business decision is to follow the populism. Perhaps skepticism of the efficacy of democracy is justified when this is what democracy has yielded.
Simply not true. There was huge Trump support from VCs before elections and after Trump won he instantly got direct support from most of US tech sector. All the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses were not supporting him before because of optics.
Yes, but the leaders that are spending time and money pushing their political beliefs are the fashy ones. People like Thiel and Musk. Garry Tan and Sergey Brin. Ellison and Andreesen. Even Bezos (although less fashy) reshaped the Post editorial staff into a reactionary place.
The rank-and-file are just too ignorant and racist to realize they’re fascists — eg, their erasure of Japanese culture and arson attacks by masked paramilitaries against Asian small businesses in 2020.
If you think calling yourself an “anti fascist” while burning minority businesses is opposing fascism, you probably also think North Korea is a democratic republic.
Thiel, Musk, Zuckenberg, Ellison, Karp, Yarwin ... like common. Among leaders, there are kind of fascists and ... no one at all, maybe Gates? Industries that are left dont have sieg heiling leaders. Or, you know, have those counteracted by other kind of leaders.
Even the billionaires were mostly donating to Kamala. Yes Elon was a giant blast of cash but his rightward shift is not representive of the industry.
And are we forgetting that Stephen Miller kicked him out anyway?
Tech religiously believes in science, education, immigration. The values are fundamentally incompatible with the right.
But for whatever reason the left has decided that we failed some purity test or simply wants to pick on "the nerds". I don't know what the strategy is here, but it doesn't seem like a good one.
The “nurture” explanation that I’m more inclined to, which is more optimistic, is that our culture changed, that people became risk-averse; science became feminized, bureaucratic, and regulated
... The Boomer kids were weaned off violent childhood literature like Tintin and the Hardy Boys and fed a diet of Dr. Seuss.
One specific change that would accelerate drug development would be getting rid of the need for double-blind studies. If a drug is safe, you would just let people use it and not slow things down massively with a double-blind study.
Same link. Theres another interview with him - I can't remember which - where he proposes to test new Alzheimer drugs directly on patients because (paraphrased) they die anyway.
You’re assuming the land acknowledgements are supporting their nominal values, rather than the friendly pink sweater of modern fascism.
You can look at how, eg, “woke” values (ie, that “left wing” ideology) is directly driving the erasure of Japanese culture by self-appointed white people who Know Better (TM). When their major export is colonialist erasure of other cultures, I don’t take the performative-but-useless land acknowledgments as anything but metaphoric white hoods.
They happily burned many Asian small businesses while chanting “Black Lives Matter!” those same years.
Erasure of Japanese culture? Wow, that must've been the topic of non-stop public discussion in Japan if that was even remotely true. Point us to an NHK article discussing this non-existent event.
> DURAN: In April 2009, Peter Thiel wrote an essay in which he said he no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible and suggested that women and other people getting the right to vote marked the end of freedom being a thing you can have with democracy. At least, of course, as we can see for white men, he was talking about. Well, this caused a lot of outcry and criticism of Thiel, who had to go back and say, I didn't mean to say - I'm not saying that women shouldn't have the vote, etc.
“How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk...
that's a spin.
> Peter Thiel wrote an essay in which he said he no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible and suggested that women and other people getting the right to vote marked the end of freedom being a thing you can have with democracy.
This is true that Peter Thiel wrote ti
> At least, of course, as we can see for white men, he was talking about.
This is spin. He wasn't talking about white men. He was talking that as long as people are allowed to vote to take things from others to give to themselves they will.
And, it can be argued, that in the end that will end up with worse outcomes for everyone. (not saying this is true, I'm saying it can be argued that it's a possibility)
If that's what he was talking about he would not have said "women and other people".
IMO, what Thiel wrote is essentially that women and non-whites are beneficiaries of welfare and leaches on society, and that they therefore will vote to transfer wealth from the white men who create it (according to Thiel).
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
(edited to remove a redundant word)
Yet women are the ones who go through hell and back actually making members of society.
These “pro” business advocates never seem to want to pay for that service. That Thiel is gay is even more egregious.
He was talking about white men. White men vote to take from others and give themselves too. Trump vote was to large extend that.
Thiel is supported of that. He happily votes to take others and give himself.
Gays like him would have been forced to wear pink triangles in his utopia state.
I believe this topic was flagged for political reasons, which constitutes an abuse of the system. This is an important topic for the tech industry. Avoiding it won't make it go away.
Alternatively, if this topic is too hot for discussion, it should be frozen but allowed to remain on the front page, because this book is newsworthy. I intend to read it.
41 comments. Hardly "too hot".
Flagging is systematically used to remove certain topics. This is just another instance of that.
I believe the go-to response from leadership here is that there's other places to discuss political news, and that if it doesn't encourage curious, thoughtful discussion, it shouldn't exist here. So they probably won't address the flagging system as they truly believe it's working as expected.
> there's other places to discuss political news
There are, that's why we discuss most political news elsewhere. But there's no more informed place to discuss tech news, that's why we want to discuss crossover topics here.
The painful thing is that there's a non tech related political item on the front page at least every other day, so it's very clear that certain topics are just too close to home for some people here.
I mean, Garry Tan is precisely the kind of person being criticized here. Rich tech CEOs with illiberal beliefs and limited care for the rights of other people.
Text-only version: https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5925350
Previously on the book (2025):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46066482
Comment removed - I regret commenting here.
where do you plan to go?
I'm trying to build my own software that maybe someday people will pay for. I've also worked really hard to reduce my family's hard costs (paid off mortgage and car, grow lots of our own food, full solar+battery off-grid setup, biogas digester for cooking gas, etc).
I started the NOVC Alliance[0] for people like me that want to build software outside of the mainstream SV/VC culture. Think of it as "BPA Free" for software.
[0] https://novc.fyi
Very Cool.
I see your NOVC Alliance is all about no VC funding. But what about other investors?
The full standard is outlined here [0]
Tl;dr: anti-vc, not anti-capital. It's for those building without institutional equity capital structured around venture-scale returns, which is what tends to result in enshittification imo.
[0] https://novc.fyi/standard
Increasingly, I find myself thinking that the right path is not to build software... It's to be good at software and then find a concrete problem and use the fact that you know software to attack it.
... But I'll admit that what those problems are I can't rightfully say.
Very much applies to this place too.
The filtering process that’s been happening here over the years could be studied.
See also: "America’s Oligarchic Techno‑Feudal Elite Are Attempting to Build a Twenty‑First‑Century Fascist State"
- Article: https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2026/02/16/amer... - HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47198912
Aaand flagged
"unmasking"?
I've been in this field for 15 years and it's about as far left as any industry can get. We were doing land acknowledgments at product demos a few years ago.
Tesla partly settles racism lawsuit as hundreds of workers press on
https://electrek.co/2026/07/27/tesla-partly-settles-racism-l...
> California’s Civil Rights Department, which sued Tesla in February 2022 after a three-year investigation, documented specific language in its complaint: the n-word, “porch monkey,” “monkey toes,” “boy,” “hood rats,” “go back to Africa,” plus the Spanish-language slurs “mayate” and “negrita.” One worker told investigators he heard slurs 50 to 100 times a day.
The agency also alleged the factory was effectively segregated, with an area where Black workers were concentrated known internally as the “porch monkey station.” Workers reported coworkers displaying Confederate flag tattoos to intimidate them.
The EEOC’s own federal complaint, filed in September 2023 in the Northern District of California, adds graffiti: swastikas, threats, and nooses scrawled around the facility, going back to at least 2015. Then-EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows called it “shameful racial bigotry.”
Among more than 200 worker declarations gathered in the state case, about two-thirds said they saw anti-Black graffiti. Dozens said complaining got them retaliated against, including fired.
I've been in this industry for 34, and it's always been full of people who are at heart authoritarians, who believe that they would do a better job than anyone else, and are seriously lacking in self-awareness.
Lip service is certainly there but it's not like we have unions or really anything that isn't just marketing.
> union
The Teamsters went for Trump in 24. Having a union doesn't mean you're immune from facism.
At the employee level, there is generally widespread support for liberal social ideas (though often not liberal economic ideas).
At the leadership level there are a ton of illiberal people who think that things like democracy are bad and spend huge sums of money to push these belief.
> there is generally widespread support for liberal social ideas
I'd encourage you to look at any HN discussion about women's issues.
”far left” just shows your own bias.
No?
I don't understand how you say that with a straight face when Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are around.
I think that's why it's a bit of a shock to many to see leadership tilt so hard towards fascism.
Personally, I think the gap is between the leadership and the rank and file software engineers - the heady days of the post dotcom boom and bust where there was heavy overlap between those two categories are over, and a lot of Silicon Valley looks like traditional business now - an owner class that is setting the pace and the tone and the direction without much input and an employed class that is doing the work and lacks the raw mobility we saw at the height of the boom and bust (i.e. the perpetual capacity to walk off the job immediately into a new one).
Plus, I strongly suspect that some of it is reaction. These companies are based in the US. When the people of the United States have elected Donald Trump twice, one does start to wonder if the correct business decision is to follow the populism. Perhaps skepticism of the efficacy of democracy is justified when this is what democracy has yielded.
Aside from Elon and some crypto weirdos (if crypto even counts as tech) most of leadership went for Kamala in 24.
Today of course it's difficult because if you don't give Donnie a gift basket he blows a temper tantrum and hits you with tariffs.
Simply not true. There was huge Trump support from VCs before elections and after Trump won he instantly got direct support from most of US tech sector. All the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses were not supporting him before because of optics.
Yes, but the leaders that are spending time and money pushing their political beliefs are the fashy ones. People like Thiel and Musk. Garry Tan and Sergey Brin. Ellison and Andreesen. Even Bezos (although less fashy) reshaped the Post editorial staff into a reactionary place.
There is no gap.
The rank-and-file are just too ignorant and racist to realize they’re fascists — eg, their erasure of Japanese culture and arson attacks by masked paramilitaries against Asian small businesses in 2020.
If you think calling yourself an “anti fascist” while burning minority businesses is opposing fascism, you probably also think North Korea is a democratic republic.
Angry, historically ignorant, and stupid.
What exactly are you talking about?
Thiel, Musk, Zuckenberg, Ellison, Karp, Yarwin ... like common. Among leaders, there are kind of fascists and ... no one at all, maybe Gates? Industries that are left dont have sieg heiling leaders. Or, you know, have those counteracted by other kind of leaders.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/07/campaign-spe...
Even the billionaires were mostly donating to Kamala. Yes Elon was a giant blast of cash but his rightward shift is not representive of the industry.
And are we forgetting that Stephen Miller kicked him out anyway?
Tech religiously believes in science, education, immigration. The values are fundamentally incompatible with the right.
But for whatever reason the left has decided that we failed some purity test or simply wants to pick on "the nerds". I don't know what the strategy is here, but it doesn't seem like a good one.
The “nurture” explanation that I’m more inclined to, which is more optimistic, is that our culture changed, that people became risk-averse; science became feminized, bureaucratic, and regulated
... The Boomer kids were weaned off violent childhood literature like Tintin and the Hardy Boys and fed a diet of Dr. Seuss.
https://www.harvardsalient.com/p/interview-with-peter-thiel
One specific change that would accelerate drug development would be getting rid of the need for double-blind studies. If a drug is safe, you would just let people use it and not slow things down massively with a double-blind study.
Same link. Theres another interview with him - I can't remember which - where he proposes to test new Alzheimer drugs directly on patients because (paraphrased) they die anyway.
This does not sound like science.
Miller kicked him out due to ego clash, not some kind of incompatible politics.
Donating Harris does not make one left, much less far left. It is utterly centrist pro-business donation.
> Tech religiously believes in science, education, immigration.
It does not. There are plenty pro Musk, anti immigration, anti science anti education for all people here. Especially among leaders.
Musk is spending billions again in 2026. Kicked out? He has never been more aggressive in influencing politics.
You’re assuming the land acknowledgements are supporting their nominal values, rather than the friendly pink sweater of modern fascism.
You can look at how, eg, “woke” values (ie, that “left wing” ideology) is directly driving the erasure of Japanese culture by self-appointed white people who Know Better (TM). When their major export is colonialist erasure of other cultures, I don’t take the performative-but-useless land acknowledgments as anything but metaphoric white hoods.
They happily burned many Asian small businesses while chanting “Black Lives Matter!” those same years.
Erasure of Japanese culture? Wow, that must've been the topic of non-stop public discussion in Japan if that was even remotely true. Point us to an NHK article discussing this non-existent event.