jwz: Today on Sick Sad World: How The Cryptobros Have Fallen:

In the 80s and 90s, hacker culture was flush with tech utopians who thought that computer networks in general, and cryptography in particular, would allow them to route around the world's problems. These nerdy, young, sheltered, wealthy white men believed that you could code your way to freedom and good governance, and they could thereby avoid the yoke of whatever oppression they were suffering.

For many of these people, the oppression they felt seemed mainly to be paying taxes, or being told that they couldn’t hoard guns, or that they simply couldn’t get to do whatever they wanted to do whenever they wanted to do it. That latter particularly sociopathic part of hacker culture now calls itself “black hat”, but the Libertarian end of it, that metastasized out of hacker culture and took over the tech industry in toto.