Technology

Not specifically about podcasts, but I think there’s a minority (?) of privacy/security enthusiasts who are pretty overtly right-wing libertarians, often because those technologies are anti-establishment.

yeah--the "techno-libertarians", as i've personally taken to calling them. that tendency was also the case on reddit in the early days (and to some extent still influences the site's cultural lean) and seems to be particularly common among stereotypical Silicon Valley types. a big calling card of that group is usually waxing poetic about the need to preserve almost unfiltered freedom of speech even though no website trying to preserve that has ever gone well.

There's a dude who does Linux videos.

Kind of went off the rails one day after one of the really bad mass shootings happened and he got all worked up about gun control.

I think this was actually after Trump was elected. Might have been the Vegas shooting. I remember because it was also when DuckDuckGo was getting shit from these people about not promoting Russian propaganda, which "interferes with free speech" or whatever the fuck one of their talking points is.

Actually, it might not have been after one of the shootings. But it was definitely around the time these people were complaining about DDG (and I think that was a while after the Vegas shooting) and it kind of devolved into complaining about gun control.

I didn't really watch him much, but I haven't bothered since. Can't even remember the channel name. Some bullshit. Dude was obsessed with xmonad.

Tech involves objective facts, scientific reasoning, and logic

Maybe the making of tech is, but its application and relevance in modern society is, at the end of the day, a sociological phenomenon.

I think this is where "compartmentalization" comes in. Similar in concept to how you are forced to wall off sadness when a loved one dies so that you can continue to live your life, I think there are mentally competent right wingers, but they wall off the logic and reasoning so that it applies only to machines. They do this because if those ideas of logic and reason get beyond the wall/outside of the compartment, the meaning of their lives falls apart.

engineering types do seem to fall off the conservatism cliff more frequently than other science-adjacent professions. so do surgeons, for some reason? at least from what i've observed. i think something about high performance, high pay jobs that require specialized education can make a person more vulnerable to brain worms.

Tech involves a lot of do x, y, and z to get outcome a with no ambiguity. That appeals to a lot of the right wing.

Tech also involves corporate $$, “disruptive” (read: anti-worker) innovation, etc. the general skew of tech as an industry seems center-right to me plus lots of tech bros fully engaged (sometimes “ironically”) with the alt right.

At the local level, tech bros form natural partnerships with right wing interests around gentrification and policing.