I gave a talk last year at XO Ruby about how it’s felt like the vibes have been off in tech for some time.
I feel differently about the overall tech industry vibes a year-ish later, but one thing has gotten decidedly worse: fascists remain way too comfortable and powerful in tech.
Case in point: DHH has developed this annoying habit of going on increasingly racist tirades on X and his blog, complaining a lot recently that there are too many non-white people in Europe. It’s transparent white supremacist bullshit, and people take notice.
But not enough people notice. Recently, he went on a press tour for his new Linux distro, and my YouTube feed has been filled with videos of dudes (because of course it’s all dudes) credibly reviewing it and singing its praises as an OS while completely ignoring the racist bullshit DHH is spewing on the regular.
And it gets even more discouraging because DHH has managed to secure over $12 million in funding from a bunch of other tech buddies including the CEOs of Shopify and Stripe, and 1Password also decided to throw a six figure sum into the mix.
DHH was already independently wealthy before this, and there are hundreds of other open source projects that are way more load-bearing to modern tech infrastructure what are way less fascist who could have used that $12MM more. But these contributions weren’t actually about helping a fledgling software project; they were rich, powerful racist dudes in tech propping up their even more racist buddy.
This pattern is absolutely not isolated to tech, but the tech world is my home, and that feels like more of an affront. In many ways tech and the internet are my home in a deeper and more existential way than any physical place is my home. And for much of my adult life the industry has grappled with these issues in the open and for awhile I felt like they made decent progress.
But that progress has been blown apart in recent years. I’m sick of seeing my home become overrun with far-right crackpots.
I’m sick of seeing the bad guys winning.
On a deeper level, I’m frustrated that the far-right is so well organized while we aren’t. They are rich and well-connected. If you are in law school there’s a Federalist Society chapter, ready to groom the next generation of lawyers to become judges SCOTUS justices and authors of Project 2025. They’re super methodical, spending decades stacking the deck in their favor, and they can do it because they have the resources and the ability to be patient.
But everything the right is doing and pushing for is broadly unpopular, and that weirdly gives me optimism.
It takes a massive and expensive machine of propaganda and pushing on the fairness of elections themselves to keep the far right in power because every policy they make really obviously sucks, is wildly unpopular, and makes life visibly worse for people. It requires that the rich spend tens of billions literally owning the social networks we communicate on so that they can tip the scales in favor of their causes.
And the more unpopular the right’s platform becomes, the more money it takes to keep that afloat.
So even though the bad guys are catching mad Ws right now, it can’t last forever.
The tech industry has a lot of DHHs unfortunately. But I think it has more non-DHHs, and I think it has more conscientious people who think and care deeply about the specific corners of the world they are committed to making a better place. I’m trying to do that too, in my own little weird ways.
For my own spirit, I need y’all to start being louder. You don’t have to spout your anger (but you can if it helps you feel better). I just want to hear about what you care about so I can celebrate that y’all exist and care about those things.
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