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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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You're correct that the rate of autism is quite high among programmers, but I think there's even more competent non-woke programmers. So yeah, these companies hire people who are woke, and non-woke people do not apply at these companies.

Here's my personal intuition-based view: All larger companies are political, and often woke and generally left-leaning. Smaller companies and individual developers tend to be neutral or at least non-woke. To escape the bullshit, and the producers who have a hostile relationship with their producers, you just need to avoid mainstream products. It's not just video games, it's basically everything. A personal rule of mine is "everything sucks once its gets big and popular enough". It seems to tie into enshittification, in that companies only initially try to please users. After a while, they try to please investors and business partners and shareholders - not the users who consume the product.

Non-woke publishers can get devs, but it's politically dangerous to not be woke, since there's a constant pressure against you, and the media is likely to harass you, you might even get in legal trouble. See for instance how Steam is accused of allowing hateful content because some users have Pepe profile pictures. So it's not that there's too few non-woke developers, but that there's too few non-woke companies, especially at the top.