@GhostOnTheHalfShell
> Evangelism is good. Better would be to convince them to leave and start a co-op improving the fediverse

These are no mutually exclusive. Let's throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, eh?

> this is how they see tech

Any sentence that ascribes general motives to a "they" is conspiracy theory. I find this unhelpful. Same with the slur "techbro", which completely misses the point. "Useful idiot" sounds more like a slur, but at least it identifies the problem.

"Technology is an alternative to politics" is a direct spoken quote of Peter Thiel.

There's about 50 years of history to this in one sense, but local to Ca, Silicon Valley is dominated by RW Libertarians / An-Caps.

Or do you think Musk, Theil and a host of other SV execs spewing white nationalist sentiments is just for show?

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
> There's about 50 years of history to this in one sense, but local to Ca, Silicon Valley is dominated by RW Libertarians / An-Caps

You're not seeing the forest for the trees. The ideology of the vulture capitalists of the Valley - and the tech press with tongues inserted firmly into capitalist arseholes - is an entirely separate beast from the diverse range of motivations among the people who work in their companies. Or tech company unions wouldn't exist, for a start.

no argument there. I have a large set of people I knew from one company who all now work at Google.

So you may have a point about this one engineer's input, but they are in the end employees for whales who got there by being ruthless. It is entirely possible that the process is political and not technical.

I understand what you're saying. In fact, I think we're digging the same tunnel from the opposites ends ; )

Nice people still end up participating in evil when they work for corporations. For *structural* reasons that are certainly beyond their individual control, and mostly beyond their collective control. But knowing that (some) nice people work for nasty corporations, we need to be careful *not* to endow anyone who works for one with its motives and behaviours.

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@GhostOnTheHalfShell
So what does that mean from a strategy POV, when an Meta engineer arrives in a W3C working group related to AP? Pretty much what I said in the OP. For *structural* reasons, we need to be cautious. But because we're assuming good faith, and evaluating this engineer on their individual merits, we can also be bold. Make common cause with them against the people above them in the corporate hierarchy, who they may quietly resent even more than we do.

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