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It’s worse than this. Having been in the room with many of them (long ago, before I knew they were psychopaths), the tycoons who are left running the industry have an active contempt for ordinary people, including their own workers. They actively want to oppress, control and punish them.

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They think this is their right, and they’ve been told so for many years by folks like Curtis Yarvin. Those sycophants, whom they’ve had on payroll for the better part of two decades, have told them they should be literal kings ruling over everyone as serfs. And they believe it.

Everything laid out in Project 2025 was talked about openly as far back as 2010, and amplified by big VCs as far back as 2014, but most big CEOs didn’t start to fall in line until 2017 or so. By 2020, they pushed out most execs who didn’t agree with (or at least silently accept) this thinking.

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It's not a coincidence that the crazies really came out of the woodwork halfway through Obama's second term, and that finance/big business felt emboldened because they'd been rescued and that the tech guys made themselves into celebrities to be worshipped and followed bad confluence of events

The greatest frustration is that warning everyone about this did nothing. Most of those raising red flags were women, usually women of color. Now nearly all are gone — left the industry, or their careers ruined, or dead. You can look on Yarvin’s blog for his post attacking me. In _2012_.

They said straight up they wanted to disenfranchise women and people of color. They said they wanted to dismantle the federal government. And the likes of Thiel funded them for building the plans on how to do it. And _nobody cared_ when this shit was pointed out. People thought you were crazy.

Bannon has spent decades beseeching people to read an obscure book that preaches that Indian people are subhumans who eat literal shit and should be rounded up in cages.

So, it’s not a conspiracy, and you are not imagining it. The biggest and wealthiest tech leaders are genuine fascists. They are leading an active and intentional systematic attack on labor. And they have radicalized each other while sidelining or removing the remaining decent execs in the industry.

The thing that tipped me off were those weird articles on "bossism" a few years ago, like it was a new idea to treat employees as serfs. I never had an idealistic view, but I thought they at least believed in the marketplace. As soon as workers exert market pressure, though, it's back to feudalism.

Thank you. I am a woman in a STEM field and have been tech-bro-adjacent much of my life. I took classes with people like this, went to conferences with them. It has been glaringly obvious to me for decades. Even many who aren't billionaires foster the ideas in your thread.

Yeah. This is sadly true. When Jeff Lawson was hounded out of Twilio, that was a big turning point for me (I know, that's maybe not as Big Tech as most people focus on, but Jeff's a real one and is now off owning The Onion and building clean energy, so...).

And they will kill, just to make an example so that others don't get too frisky - look at Jason Arday, driven to suicide by the relentless right-wing media in the UK, which picked up on a story written by a guy who has traceable connections to Thiel.

It really clicked for me when I saw somebody write that "fascism is capitalism in decline." They bleed the system so dry that it's falling apart so they use the authoritarian power of the state to prop itself up and keep the profits coming.

Don't get me started about what was happening to women in the tech industry at that time. Couldn't even get the "good" men to admit what was going on right under their noses. Just. Wouldn't. Register. Concluded it wasn't important. Very frustrating. And yes, the minority women suffered the most.

Having been in the room among psychopaths (young & dumb & unknowing) as early as 2003, especially in 2007-2012, I can confirm the 'giant, bubbling cauldron of doom' that you speak of & it is neither joke, nor fiction, & indeed, a truth ppl refuse to hear or see or name its consuming presence...

the mind-bending part for me is it doesn’t seem like the utopian rhetoric has shifted that much from 20 years ago, but the political orientation seems to have done nearly a complete 180

Conspiracy does not mean false or absurd. A conspiracy is when one or more people work together (conspire) to commit a crime. So absolutely it was a conspiracy.

I wrote about Peter Thiel and Elon Musk for SPLC in 2012, but I didn’t take them seriously enough. They weren’t household names and I underestimated and flat-out lacked the imagination to consider the possibility of how things are now.