I have an imperfect "canary in the coalmine" test for whether/where the principled/idealist nerds have the power vs the mercenary/cynical nerds have the power:
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.
I’ve been very involved with the DNS blocking scene- and it’s extremely easy to circumvent. I always wonder if there are some principled nerds on the architecture side purposely designing things to be easily blocked with DNS blocking. Or perhaps the mercenary nerds are just that inept. Maybe a mix. I also don’t think the numbers of users with DNS blocking are large enough for the mercenary nerds to care about. However, the math for LoE to bypass DNS blocking has certainly changed recently.
I would happily, delightedly, see the entire internet disappear in a puff of smoke, to remove ads from the world. Honestly, I'd be happy to see everything on the internet except the wikipedia vanish regardless, at this point.
Much of the mundane world - tv, bus stops, and so on seems to have ads. While in my nerd domain, my computer, I don't see ads at all. So it would seem that open source software is letting me live without ads on the internet, from home.
I was even annoyed at the ads in a paper newspaper I was leafing through, I'm not just used to them and I think some of them were a bit dishonest and scummy.
What happened was the set of available moves and rewards has incrementally changed. What has not changed is that nerds are humans, and humans are terrible at resisting increases in status, power, wealth, etc. If the glorified nerds of the past had been offered the same roads to status and power, they would have taken them.
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.
Humans are good at resisting things outside their comfort zones. Strong incentives select for people who don't have to leave their comfort zones to pursue them.
Most of the nerds I knew when I was young were nerds because they valued their interests more than the "boring mundane stuff" around wealth, status, and power. Some of them changed their minds later, but most of them didn't. Once you start seeing yourself as a "person interested in X", it gets difficult to become something else.
completely agree re: the average human, of any time period, with the same options, will make roughly the same choices - especially in the face of powerful incentives.
the tl;dr though of my article is that, DESPITE these absurdly attractive short-term incentives, it is in each individual company's best interest as well as the best interest of the tech industry as a whole to return to the public narrative of nerd values: passion for niche interests, obsessive, loving relationship w/ one's intellectual work, and humility re: talking about yourself/being 'in the spotlight'. the Founders' Fund MAFIA video in particular was a bad move because it ran counter to the idea, however delusional, that founders would prefer to spend time on their work than being influencers.
Exactly, not just money for founders but money for engineers themselves. The same thing that attracted these personalities to other fields in the past (sales, business, etc.) which made the most money now attract them to tech.
People are pointing to money, which yes absolutely is a factor. But what's also important to recognize is that tech has gone mainstream with smart phones, and what people do with that tech is basically 'TV'. Thus society-wide harm is now possible and, unfortunately, desired because that's also what ends up making money.
In the movie Revenge of the Nerds, they basically rape someone. So I dunno, being a "nerd" doesn't necessarily imply you're also a good person. Mark Zuckerberg is definitely a nerd, and he's also a piece of shit.
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.
Where the self-identifier of "nerd" as "I don't care that I don't know how to make people like me" is given precedence over "I care more about esoteric knowledge than about how to make people like me"
> Where the self-identifier of "nerd" as "I don't care that I don't know how to make people like me" is given precedence over "I care more about esoteric knowledge than about how to make people like me"
I no longer really give a rat's ass whether people like me anymore, because a lifetime of being bullied over nothing more than my choice of hobby/career has taught me that I'm just gonna be widely hated for simply enjoying learning new stuff, no matter what else I do or how nice I am to people. (To the contrary, I'm hated and abused more the nicer I try to be.) Literally two people in my life have encouraged that joy of learning; My mother and my fifth grade teacher. Everyone else has tried to shut that down at every available opportunity (with the exception of the rare few others I occasionally find that also love learning). Fine. Hate me. Like I really care anymore. Not worth the effort to engage on that level anymore for literally no gain whatsoever. Hah-ha. I'ma nerd. Whatever. Get over it.
You must live in the Americas. I live here in MidWest USA and there's an anti-intellectual culture, unless you're somewhere on the coasts, or pacific northwest. Hate to generalize but that has been my experience
Bro, welcome to the human condition. This is literally everyone. Not just you. You can however choose to be a geek, a quirky person, or a nerd, unproductive and not showering because you don't care if you offend others (and then being angry when others treat you like someone who doesn't shower). It's hard and hurts, I get that. Relationships are hard. Not assuming everyone hates you is hard. Not assuming one throwaway comment/joke someone makes defines how they see you is hard. But embracing the nerd won't help. Be a geek who solves problems. I knew high school was going to suck for me. I played DND. I listened to metal. So I joined the football team. I switched from nerd to geek.
You are lucky you got to experience so many people championing you, most people have way less or none. Please try to stop going to court in your head over how the world has offended you. As a grey beard, I lived there and ruined my life over it. Shockingly "I XYZ because 123" is not actually a productive/great life ethos or way to live life.
Hope that wasn't too harsh. I'm sorry you are hurting. I can hear the hurt in your comment. I can relate so hard to it. I am sorry you are hurting. Wish I could offer a hug.
I respect Moxie a lot and it greatly diminishes my opinion of him that he agreed to be part of this. I hope he got paid a lot for this, and that he’s plowing the money back into something worthwhile.
Many of the most prominent American tech leaders these days are of Indian origin. The social stigma to tech is not present in Indian culture, which stems from India having been under British colonial rule and the accompanying de-industrialisation of India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India
'Humans have Limited capacity to pay Attention to anything but Unlimited capacity to receive Attention'. Nerds included.
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.
the former nerd type was based on not having social and economic power. people wit social and economic power are inevitably drawn to be assholes (which is what nerds used to know).
I think the comments that the tech industry was always a bit terrifying and this piece can both be accurate. It is the case that the public perception has changed significantly due to lighting trust on fire and that the trust might not have been that deserved in the first place.
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.
Money attracts those who seek money and those who seek money for the sake of money will as one would expect prioritize money above other things such as ethics as there is a natural feedback loop there.
There's always been mean nerds and happy nerds. The mean nerds have a chip on their shoulder, are insecure, and are trying to prove something. I had a boss like this - he blew up at me in private because I disagreed with him in a meeting with the partners, as if I have to support him in anything he says or does. Lol. As if.
I've never had a happy nerd boss because they seem to be content to be my coworker instead.
I could similarly ask what happened to journalists? Or the politician that cared about their stated principals.
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.
Principals were always a liability. It is literally a key point in countless interactions. Is why "holding hostage" works. They are literally playing against a principal.
Similarly, lying has never been a virtue. But, joining people to your lie has always been a powerful way of gaining support.
I honestly don't know when or how things changed. My gut is, oddly, that the stakes all just changed. Used to be, you could literally retire to a homestead and you were living on your own. That just does not exist at all in the same way, anymore.
The nerds you are looking for are still here. We just got pushed out of the leadership of the tech industry by evil people who are not nerds.
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.
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
Oh ffs. How does one draw a line from Dennis Richie, Ken Thompson, Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy, even Linus Torvalds to 'terrifying overlord'? The fact is that those people who were closet 'terrifying overlords' weren't actually nerds to begin with, because they lacked the essential quality of humility.
A bit the article falls into the trap it warns against.
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.
In my lifetime I have seen the tech ethos shift slowly, then quickly, from “don’t be evil” to “don’t be a pussy.”
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.
Indeed. The most self-important butthurt dweeb I knew in college is now a self-important butthurt founder-influencer with a massive following on X of the sort of unkempt right-winger engineers who are driven by high school revenge fantasies. Good for him, I suppose, as unhappy as he still seems to be.
100% agreed. I saw it somewhere else that the tech industry has burned all the transformative good will it had earned over the years and is now seen as the key villain in joblessness, societal discord and loneliness. What the fuck did happen? Edit: this isn't just an old man thing, this is the new generation saying this
Technologists don't control technology, and many technologists foolishly think that staying out of politics is some kind of virtue, just like how people scientists should only science. Then we find that scientists don't control science anymore.
To be terse but generalizing a bit, technologists used to want to solve problems and make things easier. At some point, under the influence of MBAs it became how do we make loads of money leveraging technology’s network effects?
I think that technologists are doing themselves a disservice by blaming the problems within their industry on MBAs. Many of the problems we see in the tech industry, and the reason why public opinion is not exactly positive, are primarily due to ideological factors. Whether you call it Californian ideology or whatever, many people in the tech industry think only in terms of efficiency and value. And if something isn’t efficient or doesn’t add value, it should be streamlined away and made obsolete, whether it be systems, processes, markets - or humans.
Who are the folks leading their finance organizations? Also who compose their boards of directors?
Also Google buying double click was an inflection point. Ads were kind of annoying up till then but they had not become the gross monstrosity that now exploits users and corrupts business.
Generally the MBAs and money have been in control since before the 1980s, maybe since 10 years ago in web tech. A difference in 2026 is the politicians allow them to do whatever they want.
At least in the US, most tech leaders and middle managers never did an MBA. Most are engineers who climbed the ladder into management.
Edit: Can't reply
> “Making money off of shareware” is no longer enough
Based on this I am guessing you are at least 10-15 years older than me and probably grew up in the 1980s and experienced the 1990s internet
> how do we make this company into an investment multiplier
> It’s a different mentality. It about unicorns or bust now
This is how startup funding has been since the beginning. You sure as hell weren't raising from Bessemer or Sequoia in the 2000s without also being able to answer whether you had a path to successful monetization.
Why would anyone give you their money if you cannot justify how you would make them more money?
Could be so but once their companies get on the path to getting listed they get advice from their banks or investors and either or both have one thing in mind: how do we make this company into an investment multiplier? Also often founders are paired with business types to make companies more viable.
“Making money off of shareware” is no longer enough (never mind that it’s a non-starter now that everything is needs to be saas these days.)
It’s a different mentality. It about unicorns or bust now.
I’m pretty certain they are not a moderating force. I think the lead-up dot-com bubble its subsequent burst and the following hunt for unicorns was begot by a different breed of people than those pursuing the technology sector before them. After the Netscape IPO more people started going into CS as a way to get a foot in the door to massive riches rather than the pursuit of technology as a way to solve human problems. The Woz vs Zuck, for example.
The Netscape IPO happened 31 years ago. Over half of all Americans alive today were either in elementary school or not around yet.
It's the equivalent of someone in the 2000s trying to enforce standards and norms from the 1950s-60s.
The reality is, the tech industry has essentially always been like this, and any period in the 1980s or early 90s that y'all look back to just isn't actionable in 2026 and fails to understand how different Americans are today versus when you started in the tech industry.
It's a shift in mindset and feels a bit "man yells at clouds". I think this really underestimates how jarring Jobs and his peers were to the older generation of techies who themselves were jarring to the even older ones (eg. remember all the hate Jobs and Gates would receive from Stallman types?).
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.
> Honestly, I like it. It reminds me of the culture I'd find amongst my Chinese peers in the 2000s and 2010s when they built China.
I dont like it. It might have built china but this isnt what built modern america. I dont think this focus on personal achievement, rather than slowing down and doing societal good is conducive to creating new technologies. Its hard to monetize new technologies, so if your in it to make the number go up, then youll just copy and optimize what already exists. You need to want to help people to make new things
I can't agree with you given candidate evaluation is arbitrary, badly targeted, and privilege centered (school/company pedigree). The latter drives ability to get exposure to disciplines and tooling and often a specific stack could be picked up easily by others with a little time/training. HR looks for safe signals and is happy to ignore good talent that doesn't check all the boxes, especially in a market like this.
It's interesting seeing an example of the sociopathy the article is talking about in the wild. This account backs up basically every single stereotype about the tech industry these days. I don't agree this attitude has ruined the industry though, it's actually ruined the entire world.
Don't be surprised if the sociopathy and destruction you love so much comes back to haunt you, though. I'm sure you'd think that was great anyway.
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.
The tech giants have been spared regulation and oversight, in a way that has allowed them to cement their position at the top. Not only does this enable the sort of egregious abuses we've had to become used to, it also stifles innovation and competition - to the detriment of everyone, including their own shareholders.
The USA risks trapping itself in a spiral of oligarchy, reminiscent of Russia in the late 1990s.
Seriously, the fuck has happened to nerds? I expected to see some name-dropping in the post, probably some mentions of GNU / Richard Stallman. What have I found? Jobs and Woz, you're sure nerdy as hell, Mr. Apple-Fanboy.
nerds stopped existing around the 1990s when money was poring into tech. The bros moved from marketing into tech for the money, pushing out nerds. An example of this is all the bloatware being created.
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 have an imperfect "canary in the coalmine" test for whether/where the principled/idealist nerds have the power vs the mercenary/cynical nerds have the power:
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.
There are currently multiple trivial ways for a layman to block all YouTube ads.
mostly true - but youtube has experimented with forcing a "loading state" for ad block users that was the same duration as the ads they would have watched. https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1l7b3c8/strange_lo...
Clearly the original comment is from a mercenary nerd who has not heard of DNS blocking of ads.
I’ve been very involved with the DNS blocking scene- and it’s extremely easy to circumvent. I always wonder if there are some principled nerds on the architecture side purposely designing things to be easily blocked with DNS blocking. Or perhaps the mercenary nerds are just that inept. Maybe a mix. I also don’t think the numbers of users with DNS blocking are large enough for the mercenary nerds to care about. However, the math for LoE to bypass DNS blocking has certainly changed recently.
If you are using a real computer or can sideload apps.
For some definition of layman, I guess.
I would happily, delightedly, see the entire internet disappear in a puff of smoke, to remove ads from the world. Honestly, I'd be happy to see everything on the internet except the wikipedia vanish regardless, at this point.
Much of the mundane world - tv, bus stops, and so on seems to have ads. While in my nerd domain, my computer, I don't see ads at all. So it would seem that open source software is letting me live without ads on the internet, from home.
I was even annoyed at the ads in a paper newspaper I was leafing through, I'm not just used to them and I think some of them were a bit dishonest and scummy.
Compared to the 40 ft led screen blaring images out to everyone 24h a day in central London I will take the newspaper any day. Drives me nuts
What happened was the set of available moves and rewards has incrementally changed. What has not changed is that nerds are humans, and humans are terrible at resisting increases in status, power, wealth, etc. If the glorified nerds of the past had been offered the same roads to status and power, they would have taken them.
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.
Humans are good at resisting things outside their comfort zones. Strong incentives select for people who don't have to leave their comfort zones to pursue them.
Most of the nerds I knew when I was young were nerds because they valued their interests more than the "boring mundane stuff" around wealth, status, and power. Some of them changed their minds later, but most of them didn't. Once you start seeing yourself as a "person interested in X", it gets difficult to become something else.
completely agree re: the average human, of any time period, with the same options, will make roughly the same choices - especially in the face of powerful incentives.
the tl;dr though of my article is that, DESPITE these absurdly attractive short-term incentives, it is in each individual company's best interest as well as the best interest of the tech industry as a whole to return to the public narrative of nerd values: passion for niche interests, obsessive, loving relationship w/ one's intellectual work, and humility re: talking about yourself/being 'in the spotlight'. the Founders' Fund MAFIA video in particular was a bad move because it ran counter to the idea, however delusional, that founders would prefer to spend time on their work than being influencers.
Oh that's easy... "money".
When it was just about the "love of technology" and the building of the skills involved, things were different...
Exactly, not just money for founders but money for engineers themselves. The same thing that attracted these personalities to other fields in the past (sales, business, etc.) which made the most money now attract them to tech.
Yup. Once something starts making money the tourists come in and ruin everything.
People are pointing to money, which yes absolutely is a factor. But what's also important to recognize is that tech has gone mainstream with smart phones, and what people do with that tech is basically 'TV'. Thus society-wide harm is now possible and, unfortunately, desired because that's also what ends up making money.
In the movie Revenge of the Nerds, they basically rape someone. So I dunno, being a "nerd" doesn't necessarily imply you're also a good person. Mark Zuckerberg is definitely a nerd, and he's also a piece of shit.
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.
Where the self-identifier of "nerd" as "I don't care that I don't know how to make people like me" is given precedence over "I care more about esoteric knowledge than about how to make people like me"
> Where the self-identifier of "nerd" as "I don't care that I don't know how to make people like me" is given precedence over "I care more about esoteric knowledge than about how to make people like me"
I no longer really give a rat's ass whether people like me anymore, because a lifetime of being bullied over nothing more than my choice of hobby/career has taught me that I'm just gonna be widely hated for simply enjoying learning new stuff, no matter what else I do or how nice I am to people. (To the contrary, I'm hated and abused more the nicer I try to be.) Literally two people in my life have encouraged that joy of learning; My mother and my fifth grade teacher. Everyone else has tried to shut that down at every available opportunity (with the exception of the rare few others I occasionally find that also love learning). Fine. Hate me. Like I really care anymore. Not worth the effort to engage on that level anymore for literally no gain whatsoever. Hah-ha. I'ma nerd. Whatever. Get over it.
You must live in the Americas. I live here in MidWest USA and there's an anti-intellectual culture, unless you're somewhere on the coasts, or pacific northwest. Hate to generalize but that has been my experience
Bro, welcome to the human condition. This is literally everyone. Not just you. You can however choose to be a geek, a quirky person, or a nerd, unproductive and not showering because you don't care if you offend others (and then being angry when others treat you like someone who doesn't shower). It's hard and hurts, I get that. Relationships are hard. Not assuming everyone hates you is hard. Not assuming one throwaway comment/joke someone makes defines how they see you is hard. But embracing the nerd won't help. Be a geek who solves problems. I knew high school was going to suck for me. I played DND. I listened to metal. So I joined the football team. I switched from nerd to geek.
You are lucky you got to experience so many people championing you, most people have way less or none. Please try to stop going to court in your head over how the world has offended you. As a grey beard, I lived there and ruined my life over it. Shockingly "I XYZ because 123" is not actually a productive/great life ethos or way to live life.
Hope that wasn't too harsh. I'm sorry you are hurting. I can hear the hurt in your comment. I can relate so hard to it. I am sorry you are hurting. Wish I could offer a hug.
[dead]
In 90s tech the terms Woz is a geek, Zuck is a nerd.
I respect Moxie a lot and it greatly diminishes my opinion of him that he agreed to be part of this. I hope he got paid a lot for this, and that he’s plowing the money back into something worthwhile.
It's like Joey Allegra was just announced as the magazine sales winner. https://moxie.org/stories/money-machine/
Right up there with finding out Grimes was with Elon.
Maybe we should open our minds a bit, and also remember that a parasocial relationship (speaking for myself) isn't really knowing someone.
He's a fed for sure.
Evidence?
20 years in and my coworkers are about the same. What's changed is the public perception.
Arguably because of the media
https://x.com/i/status/1588231892792328192
You don't think tech leaders have changed at all, in any way?
Many of the most prominent American tech leaders these days are of Indian origin. The social stigma to tech is not present in Indian culture, which stems from India having been under British colonial rule and the accompanying de-industrialisation of India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India
I don't there's any reasonable way to have a conversation about trends when you're only talking about a dozen famous people.
Yes Elon lost his marbles but my colleagues have not suddenly become "tech bro" that we constantly hear about today.
'Humans have Limited capacity to pay Attention to anything but Unlimited capacity to receive Attention'. Nerds included.
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.
the former nerd type was based on not having social and economic power. people wit social and economic power are inevitably drawn to be assholes (which is what nerds used to know).
I think the comments that the tech industry was always a bit terrifying and this piece can both be accurate. It is the case that the public perception has changed significantly due to lighting trust on fire and that the trust might not have been that deserved in the first place.
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.
Money and power corrupts, that’s what you need to know.
Money attracts those who seek money and those who seek money for the sake of money will as one would expect prioritize money above other things such as ethics as there is a natural feedback loop there.
There's always been mean nerds and happy nerds. The mean nerds have a chip on their shoulder, are insecure, and are trying to prove something. I had a boss like this - he blew up at me in private because I disagreed with him in a meeting with the partners, as if I have to support him in anything he says or does. Lol. As if.
I've never had a happy nerd boss because they seem to be content to be my coworker instead.
I could similarly ask what happened to journalists? Or the politician that cared about their stated principals.
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.
> I could similarly ask what happened to journalists? Or the politician that cared about their stated principals.
It’s all the same. What happened is that principals became a liability and lying became a virtue.
Principals were always a liability. It is literally a key point in countless interactions. Is why "holding hostage" works. They are literally playing against a principal.
Similarly, lying has never been a virtue. But, joining people to your lie has always been a powerful way of gaining support.
I honestly don't know when or how things changed. My gut is, oddly, that the stakes all just changed. Used to be, you could literally retire to a homestead and you were living on your own. That just does not exist at all in the same way, anymore.
The nerds you are looking for are still here. We just got pushed out of the leadership of the tech industry by evil people who are not nerds.
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.
>Charming nerd to terrifying overlord
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
The "Revenge of the Nerds" movie series follows this arc too - when them being oppressed to becoming the oppressors.
Yep, even just in the first movie: as soon as the chief nerd has a chance, he assaults one of the jock's girlfriends.
All those nerds were sex offenders.
https://www.illinoislawyers.com/blog/so-many-crimes-in-reven...
The movie has definitely not aged well but was a "family favorite" growing up in the 90s...
A more realistic movie than anyone realized
Oh ffs. How does one draw a line from Dennis Richie, Ken Thompson, Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy, even Linus Torvalds to 'terrifying overlord'? The fact is that those people who were closet 'terrifying overlords' weren't actually nerds to begin with, because they lacked the essential quality of humility.
A bit the article falls into the trap it warns against.
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.
My theory: When smart people are bullied, they sometimes turn into tyrants once they gain power.
What in modern Western society hasn't lit trust and good will on fire for money and power in the past 20yr?
The tech industry is essentially performing at baseline.
Still disappointing. There was a time when we aspired to be better than baseline.
In my lifetime I have seen the tech ethos shift slowly, then quickly, from “don’t be evil” to “don’t be a pussy.”
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.
I guarantee you they’re all pussies though.
Indeed. The most self-important butthurt dweeb I knew in college is now a self-important butthurt founder-influencer with a massive following on X of the sort of unkempt right-winger engineers who are driven by high school revenge fantasies. Good for him, I suppose, as unhappy as he still seems to be.
When too much money is involved, evil people enter. Soon, the good people are pushed out.
Wealth inequality.
100% agreed. I saw it somewhere else that the tech industry has burned all the transformative good will it had earned over the years and is now seen as the key villain in joblessness, societal discord and loneliness. What the fuck did happen? Edit: this isn't just an old man thing, this is the new generation saying this
Technologists don't control technology, and many technologists foolishly think that staying out of politics is some kind of virtue, just like how people scientists should only science. Then we find that scientists don't control science anymore.
Politics is about the negotiation of control.
>_foolishly_ think that staying out of politics is some kind of virtue
Sounds like a very bold assertion to me.
> the transformative good will it had earned over the years
Had it? The last time I felt like it did was mid-00s with Google, but I was a teenager back then and it's easy to be naive when you're a teenager.
To be terse but generalizing a bit, technologists used to want to solve problems and make things easier. At some point, under the influence of MBAs it became how do we make loads of money leveraging technology’s network effects?
I think that technologists are doing themselves a disservice by blaming the problems within their industry on MBAs. Many of the problems we see in the tech industry, and the reason why public opinion is not exactly positive, are primarily due to ideological factors. Whether you call it Californian ideology or whatever, many people in the tech industry think only in terms of efficiency and value. And if something isn’t efficient or doesn’t add value, it should be streamlined away and made obsolete, whether it be systems, processes, markets - or humans.
Yep. You can try blaming it on MBAs, but the people that did this (e.g. Ellison, Andreessen, Musk, Zuck, and so on) are not MBAs.
Who are the folks leading their finance organizations? Also who compose their boards of directors?
Also Google buying double click was an inflection point. Ads were kind of annoying up till then but they had not become the gross monstrosity that now exploits users and corrupts business.
Who cares? Do you think the CFO is secretly controlling the actions of Zuck/Musk/Ellison/etc.?
Generally the MBAs and money have been in control since before the 1980s, maybe since 10 years ago in web tech. A difference in 2026 is the politicians allow them to do whatever they want.
At least in the US, most tech leaders and middle managers never did an MBA. Most are engineers who climbed the ladder into management.
Edit: Can't reply
> “Making money off of shareware” is no longer enough
Based on this I am guessing you are at least 10-15 years older than me and probably grew up in the 1980s and experienced the 1990s internet
> how do we make this company into an investment multiplier
> It’s a different mentality. It about unicorns or bust now
This is how startup funding has been since the beginning. You sure as hell weren't raising from Bessemer or Sequoia in the 2000s without also being able to answer whether you had a path to successful monetization.
Why would anyone give you their money if you cannot justify how you would make them more money?
Could be so but once their companies get on the path to getting listed they get advice from their banks or investors and either or both have one thing in mind: how do we make this company into an investment multiplier? Also often founders are paired with business types to make companies more viable.
“Making money off of shareware” is no longer enough (never mind that it’s a non-starter now that everything is needs to be saas these days.)
It’s a different mentality. It about unicorns or bust now.
Do you really think Zuckerberg is only evil because he's getting evil advice from his banks?
I’m pretty certain they are not a moderating force. I think the lead-up dot-com bubble its subsequent burst and the following hunt for unicorns was begot by a different breed of people than those pursuing the technology sector before them. After the Netscape IPO more people started going into CS as a way to get a foot in the door to massive riches rather than the pursuit of technology as a way to solve human problems. The Woz vs Zuck, for example.
> After the Netscape IPO...
The Netscape IPO happened 31 years ago. Over half of all Americans alive today were either in elementary school or not around yet.
It's the equivalent of someone in the 2000s trying to enforce standards and norms from the 1950s-60s.
The reality is, the tech industry has essentially always been like this, and any period in the 1980s or early 90s that y'all look back to just isn't actionable in 2026 and fails to understand how different Americans are today versus when you started in the tech industry.
Fucking MBAs
Most of the leaders of big tech are (former) engineers
It's a shift in mindset and feels a bit "man yells at clouds". I think this really underestimates how jarring Jobs and his peers were to the older generation of techies who themselves were jarring to the even older ones (eg. remember all the hate Jobs and Gates would receive from Stallman types?).
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.
> Honestly, I like it. It reminds me of the culture I'd find amongst my Chinese peers in the 2000s and 2010s when they built China.
I dont like it. It might have built china but this isnt what built modern america. I dont think this focus on personal achievement, rather than slowing down and doing societal good is conducive to creating new technologies. Its hard to monetize new technologies, so if your in it to make the number go up, then youll just copy and optimize what already exists. You need to want to help people to make new things
I don't think you read the article, it's not about competition.
I read the article, but the attributes which OP views as negative are just the general traits of hypercompetitive people.
The only way to win is by hook or by crook - that is what you learn in hypercompetitive environments.
Edit: Can't reply
> Yours is the kind of attitude that has ruined the industry
If you can't compete you will be made redundant.
Honestly, in some aspects that is what I appreciate about the Chinese mindset - much more competitive.
I can't agree with you given candidate evaluation is arbitrary, badly targeted, and privilege centered (school/company pedigree). The latter drives ability to get exposure to disciplines and tooling and often a specific stack could be picked up easily by others with a little time/training. HR looks for safe signals and is happy to ignore good talent that doesn't check all the boxes, especially in a market like this.
> If you can't compete you will be made redundant.
Self-defeating attitude that you will regret later in life. Best of luck.
Yours is the kind of attitude that has ruined the industry. Congrats.
It's interesting seeing an example of the sociopathy the article is talking about in the wild. This account backs up basically every single stereotype about the tech industry these days. I don't agree this attitude has ruined the industry though, it's actually ruined the entire world.
Don't be surprised if the sociopathy and destruction you love so much comes back to haunt you, though. I'm sure you'd think that was great anyway.
> Honestly, in some aspects that is what I appreciate about the Chinese mindset - much more competitive.
Then go live among them? Maybe you’ll be one of the millions killed the next time they do their thing lmao.
Simple: These aren't nerds. These are grifters selling you a product using product packaging (nerdface) that you find appealing. Enjoy your purchase.
This misses what happened entirely.
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.
And that entwinement runs in both directions.
The tech giants have been spared regulation and oversight, in a way that has allowed them to cement their position at the top. Not only does this enable the sort of egregious abuses we've had to become used to, it also stifles innovation and competition - to the detriment of everyone, including their own shareholders.
The USA risks trapping itself in a spiral of oligarchy, reminiscent of Russia in the late 1990s.
Seriously, the fuck has happened to nerds? I expected to see some name-dropping in the post, probably some mentions of GNU / Richard Stallman. What have I found? Jobs and Woz, you're sure nerdy as hell, Mr. Apple-Fanboy.
nerds stopped existing around the 1990s when money was poring into tech. The bros moved from marketing into tech for the money, pushing out nerds. An example of this is all the bloatware being created.
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.