Paul GrahamVerified account

It was Cambridge Analytica - it gave journalists the long-sought breakthrough they needed to peg a right/left narrative around Facebook. The rest played out via the usual tit-for-tat tribalism/one-upmanship we've seen elsewhere.

One could blame this more on the rise of social media as a significant delivery of traffic to press where a headline and snippet drives clicks. This started shifting in 2010 meaningfully

Tech used to be niche for the overall economy. Now tech is the commanding heights of the economy. The commanding heights are *always* political. Rising power of tech is fundamental cause. Political fad today is PC, so that was the form chosen by Gozer The Gozerian.

Blaming the press for the political spotlight on tech is like blaming tech for the decline of traditional newspapers - both are pointing the finger at a middleman when the root causes are forces that have been set in motion for years

I suspect it it because such views reflected an aspect of people’s lived experience. I remember how SF changed particularly around 2012, which changed receptivity to a lot of those stories in correlation with how I saw Facebook algorithms and feeds change.

Hmm, but it feels like a lot of tech workers themselves now are more concerned about politics, sometimes more than actual tech stuff etc. A lot of them are basically activists. Even their timelines are basically 95% politics, 5% maybe about tech, building stuff, projects etc.