For decades, the conventional wisdom about Silicon Valley was that it leaned progressive. And by many measures (like donations by Big Tech employees to political candidates), the industry has been aligned with the Democratic politics that dominate the San Francisco Bay Area. But contrarian alternate worldviews held by prominent voices like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried have emerged that not only counter old narratives but are actively merging with right-leaning political movements. And combined with the anxiety and aspirations created by artificial intelligence, these new social currents are taking on a cultish zeal. Dr. Timnit Gebru, a prominent AI researcher

This article is a few months old, but it’s rather eye opening.

  •  The Bard in Green   ( @thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz ) 
    8•1 month ago

    Too complex to explain to anyone who’s not a politically / culturally curious intellectual (or who even just lacks a lot of the sci-fi / gaming and science nerd inspired philosophical context).

    A lot of these breakdowns of the weird and out of touch thought coming out of upper class technocrats and their acolytes are missing this kind of bridge: a simple way to explain this to anyone who wouldn’t read more than the first paragraph of this article. No one like that is going to try to parse an acronym like TESCREAL.

    My main thought about this is that “Right” and “Left” aren’t even the right terms and using them gives people the wrong impression of what’s happening. It’s better to say that techno-authoritarians with their heads in the sci-fi clouds are attracting followers from the intellectual and better educated side of the “disaffected young men” pool and are aligning themselves with more traditionally conservative authoritarians for the sake of political convenience. They don’t want the government or left wing populism getting in the way of their profits and science experiments, so their support lines up with the party that wants to sabotage the government.