What I think a lot of people fail to put together, is that this is the end-game of the early ideologies of the internet. The ideologies of the tech nerds now are directly descended from earlier, more decentralized ideologies.

Think about internet piracy and the change from Napster to Bittorrent.

In the tech world, even since the early days, tech was seen as a way to route around bad laws. In the early days, copyright laws were viewed as overly draconian (they are, but that’s not the point), so piracy flourished by routing around the legal framework.

What has happened is the power and wealth of some people with those ideologies have grown so big, they now view all laws that prevent them from doing whatever the hell they want as “bad laws to route around.” That’s why you have Musk buying Twitter and forcing his opinion’s down everyone’s throat (routing around traditional media). That’s why you have Jack Dorsey dumping his money into Nostr, because he thinks the worst sin on the internet is censorship (routing around attempts to rein in disinformation/misinformation).

It can be seen at OpenAI where they knowingly used books3 to initially train their AIs, which was well known to have been sourced from piracy. OpenAI doesn’t care about the provenance of the data as long as they can legally route around the copyright issue and make a fuckton of money in the process.

Anyway, it’s a deeply libertarian ideology that was accidentally spurred from earlier, more anarchist ideologies, within the tech community. I would peg tech nerds from the 90s as more anarchist, and tech nerds of the modern era as having bought into the technolibertarianism that began to grow out of it.

Like Steve Wozniak is your standard real tech nerd from the 70’s who was the actual engineer behind Apple products, while Steve Jobs was literally the marketing guy yet only the marketing guy got remembered.