It’s not an accident that we just went through one of the biggest cultural revolutions in the software development world. Look at how we treated people like Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Brendan Eich, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, and even John Carmack. One by one, they were sidelined, pushed out, or publicly flogged for being insufficiently “progressive,” for holding “outdated” views, or simply for the crime of being older white men who had the misfortune of building the foundations of the field before today’s ideological climate took over.

But the important part is that we never really replaced them with anyone of similar weight. There was no next generation of cultural or intellectual heavyweights ready to step in. Instead, the online crowd splintered into political factions, with one side demanding constant ideological purity and the other reacting by withdrawing, going independent, or outright rejecting the institutions they had once built.

In the meantime, corporations managed to capture the new generation of young hackers by presenting themselves as “woke.” Put up the right rainbow flag at the right time, make the right statements, and suddenly the deep distrust people had toward big tech in the 90s and 2000s started to fade.