Every once in a while, I realize that I have huge disagreements with the Bay Area startup culture. It's always surprising to me. As a libertarian-leaning software engineer, I would have expected to find "my people"
One of the more innocuous examples recently was when @AOC tweeted about how companies do fine without cities giving huge tax breaks and other special treatment. I thought this was great! VC Twitter disagreed.
Another example, one that worries me far more, is how much support and admiration Peter Thiel gets. Between Palantir and his non-ironic support of Trump, I don't see how anyone could think he cares about other people's rights.
So I think there's this distinction that I keep coming back to, of two very different camps. There's the "let me do what I want" concept of libertarianism. Then there's the very different "people should not be coerced, their rights are important" concept of libertarianism.
These two camps are not allies! If "let me do what I want" often means violating other people's rights, these camps must be enemies.
You can see exactly how this camp would emerge: You start a company, but there's all kinds of red tape holding you back. You're now very much against government overreach and incompetence. Then, the success of your company depends on getting a special deal, grabbing user data...
This rights-free, unfettered, pro-business viewpoint is the natural result of starting from a perspective of only wanting your business to succeed. That's the crazy thing to me - it doesn't require malicious forethought, just a lack of thinking about rights.
But this viewpoint is just as dangerous as the rights-free, unfettered pro-government viewpoint. People say, "the government is the only one who can put you in prison! So they're not the same!" But they forget that it's the company's software used by gov that put you in prison.
