this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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What is it about tech folks being magnetically attracted to right-wing ideologies?
Negative bias. We notice these anomalies more than we notice the ones that don't disappoint their mothers.
Nobody even knows who Arthur David Olsen is.
Survivorship Bias
Survivorship bias.
Right wing tech folks abuse their workers and customers, which brings in money to grow the company. Which makes their companies enormous.
If you treat customers and workers fairly, you'll earn much less money, slowing down the growth of your company. Which ends up eliminating you via competition.
Companies can only be ethical if governments force them to be so. Otherwise their future is doomed.
please don't say tech folks. his degrees were cs and business administration. hes a business guy not a tech guy. just like gates.
I used to follow 37signals and they were very much not a typical tech company at the time.
They never did fremium data collector bullshit, they just sold basecamp and their other app subscriptions. They were an early saas take that for what you will.
In those days 37signals ran as what is now called a lifestyle startup and had only a few employees spread across the country who would meet up to work together as few weeks out of the year.
This is all from memory though, and I stopped following them and switched to node or ruby + Sinatra around the mid 2010s though, so I’m not sure what has happened since, but this blog post is batshit conservative bullshit. Guess it’s time to trash my old Rails books with the Harry Potter ones.
Less about "tech folks" and more about folks that tend to drive followers. For good or for ill, a horribly large ego can drive adherents. If someone believes in their stuff hard enough, it tends to inspire others to think there must be something to it.
With people like him I'd say it's about a combination of being contrarían in general, being surrounded by yes men, and looking up to rich assholes.
More generally, we can all fall for reactionary crap if we don't see it for what it is and if it speaks to some grievance we have. We need to be smarter and look at historical patterns, the fascists never helped any workers, they just got countless people killed, and letting them rise to power eventually leads to someone, either you or someone you care about, being next.