Advertisers vs Ad Blockers - as long as the Ad Blockers are blocking the vast majority of junk, I feel like team principles is winning. Like they have more nerd power to outsmart the lesser nerds working on team mercenary.

But there are places like Facebook where that is not the case. And even in Youtube, team mercenaries has recently won some territory from team principles.

What happened to tech is straightforward, though: the iOS App Store in 2008. The subsequent 'gold rush' was a pivotal moment where Wall Street types (including college students) went into tech. There actually was a great article (Wired? WSJ?) I read about the phenomenon from circa 2010, as the shift was underway, but I've never been able to relocate it since.

It's not 'what happened to nerds' so much as 'what happened to tech that subordinated the nerd to the finance people' and the answer is 'the easy money'

This reminds me of the way people think of the olden days when stuff was made of real wood and metal as "we had integrity! people built things to last!", projecting intentionality and generosity onto to the same machinery that built agent orange or rube goldberg machines for cigarette smoke to avoid liability for killing millions of people. We didn't build things out of metal because we had integrity, we did it because we didn't yet have advanced petroleum-derived plastics and shit. If they did, they'd have done that instead.

Reminds me of the difference between "peaceful" (capable of harm, electing not to be harmful) and "harmless" (incapable of harm even if you wanted to). I think it's a mistake to imagine the nerds of the past as peaceful. In terms of status, power acquisition, etc, they were harmless. Had you handed them the tools and understanding of today, they'd have acted no different, IMO.

When it was just about the "love of technology" and the building of the skills involved, things were different...

The reason you can’t see us anymore is because you don’t know how to look. Money and the major social platforms will never direct your eyes towards us. You must look at the independent spaces that are hiding in plain sight.

I also think its another variation of that trope that the people that seek power are the very ones you don't want to have it. And those that don't care about it are the ones we need to seek it. Take Woz for example.

Attention Economy/Social Media platforms exploited that piece of human nature. Its not just nerds trying to capture Attention but everyone. I have a cop buddy complaining about how top people in the police dept are competiting with each other for likes and views. Everyone gets trapped cuz pool of Attention to fish in is finite.

How do we get out of this situation? Platforms including HN have to be forced to show people that 1 View they get is actually a fraction because that viewer is going and reading 20 other things. By not showing it reality warps.

Arguably because of the media

https://x.com/i/status/1588231892792328192

The tech industry is essentially performing at baseline.

Now we have to figure out a new way forward. We need a way to put what needs chaining up back in its chains without harming the innocent weirdos. I don't have an answer. There might not be one. But it is the challenge.

The reality isn't even that they went away, necessarily. Or that it was all a lie. There were always exceptions and it always took some level of good faith between our different institutions to keep them working well. At some point, that good faith interaction got hijacked and it has quickly spread as a rot to all things.

The asset liquidation analogy is perfect. For about the past ten year, I think the Cambridge Analytica hearings are a good turning point, tech has realized that their warm and fuzzy persona is no longer valuable cultivating and so there’s been a very rapid burn down of that persona into the hyper capitalist power hungry one we have today. It has always been the case that money and power were motivating factors but until that was laid fully bare there was value in pretending like it wasn’t the only factor.

I also think OP fails to understand how much more competitive tech culture is now.

Visit and talk with undergrads at a top CS program like Stanford, Cal, UIUC, MIT, etc. The culture is different because this is a much more competitive generation. When the acceptance rate into a top CS program is in the 1-5% range and laurels like being a Valedictorian, NHS member, JV or Varsity team member in HS, and taking 6-7 APs are viewed as table stakes, you get a degree of viciousness, competitiveness, and steel-eyed execution that older Americans just aren't used to.

Honestly, I like it. It reminds me of the culture and mindset I'd find amongst my Chinese peers in the 2000s and 2010s when they built China.

What happened is that tech companies got so large that they are now essentially defense contractors. You can't both be a countercultural rebel, the kind who would evoke 1984 in a TV ad, and be a CEO and/or significant owner in a trillion dollar company.

At some point, the company's interests align with domestic and foreign policy and the company becomes a tool of the state, which is interesting because that's the accusation levelled at Chinese companies but it's exactly what Google, Meta, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, Amazon, etc have become. They're deeply entwined with government contracts and defense that alignment is impossible to avoid.

You saw this as Tim Apple [sic], Sundai Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk and Sam Altman all bent the knee at the last inauguration. All of them paid 7 figures to be there.

Idealism, disruption, etc are fundamentally incompatible with being a multi-billionaire.

If there was this shift, it was always superficial. To a certain degree, nerds were always 'terrifying overlords'. It’s just that once they accumulated enough power, there was no longer any point in maintaining that façade

It isn't really about "nerds", more about a certain type of founder.

A true title (also dispensing the unnecessary swear) would have been: "What happened to the honest founder?". I wouldn't have clicked that, probably wouldn't even have noticed. That's OK, I'm not the target audience.

I clicked the original title though and even read it but honestly felt a bit lured in on false premises. Classic clickbait, little reputation lost, 5 minutes attention won.

It took me utterly by surprise when, after finishing my PhD, I decided it would be less damaging to my soul to go into finance. Even more surprising, I think I was right.

Yes some still exist, but I think the tend to be working in non-tech jobs or maybe in Corp IT and working on their own items in between.

I've never had a happy nerd boss because they seem to be content to be my coworker instead.