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• @kellenoffdagrid@lemmy.zip 2026-09-16 18:29

  Unfortunately there’s fertile ground in these circles. Forgive the short novel ahead, this is a part of computing history that I find really interesting and important. TLDR at the end for ya. Since the very beginning of the F/OSS movement, the kind of philosophies the engineers were comfortable with leaned toward a very individualist, libertarian kind of thinking, though they often identified with anarchy. See crypto-anarchis[m|ts] for example – they focus on cryptography being a core part of safeguarding people’s individual liberties. On its own, those ideas are generally good, but the context these ideas were fostered in tended to have a higher influence of profit incentives at play, which is naturally at odds with more collectivist/communal goals. With the prevalence of slightly right-leaning, libertarian thought in early F/OSS circles, you can see the lineage up to 90s-era and modern-day cyber-libertarian thought. The tolerance those philosophies often afforded to positions further “right” of them have allowed influence from technofascists to gain a stronger hold over time. If you haven’t read The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán, that’s a good resource. TL;DR: lots of libertarian thought was present since the beginning, which afforded a certain tolerance for more right-wing, authoritarian beliefs that wealthy individuals and other non-government agents tend to align with when they’re creating networks of power that essentially replicate the same kinds of fascist conditions that libertarians claim to hate.

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