Nothing happened. It was always like this. Geeks got unduly put on a pedestal. They got a reputation that was never earned. They’re not any different than your typical psychopath executive.

I grew up in a town where a lot of these types of guys have become multimillionaires since 2010s tech boom. One person manages some hundreds of millions of dollars AI investment portfolio. That was before the GPT explosion. I have no idea how big they are now but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s billions.

Growing up they were almost all psychopathic. Lying, cheating, backstabbing type of people. Nothing like the timid altruistic geek that pop culture proliferates. The more normal people did not go into tech. The actual timid types have had modest middle class careers in tech.

They don’t hide it on their own boards. The right wing spaces. It’s a real thing they do.

The two things we’re talking about are not mutually exclusive. There are people who spent too much time in those “performative space”. They get incited by agitators too. It’s a clusterfuck.

It is. A big tell is their vernacular. It’s not leftists. It’s someone else pretending to be.

Another one is their interests or hobbies. They do not talk about these topics the same way the people they pretend to be because they are not the people they pretend to be.

I’ve been chronically online enough to be able to get a sense of it. They often slip. Some times it’s so obvious it’s a kid who is trying to copy the more adept ones.

A lot of minority subreddits on reddit are so fake too. It’s 21st century blackface minstrel shows. Easy to dupe casual users. If you’re chronically online long enough you can tell.

ETA: This is conspiratorial as the people who get caught all the time forgetting to switch their alt accounts. Can’t reply to the mod for some reason so I guess I’m done here.