It's so frustrating when you are looking for posts to secure your browser or mobile and it's filled with comments like "Le gubberment bad". Or how not platforming Nazis is "1984 censorship george orwell"! I mean, from a Marxist point of view, distrusting the US government is good but the reasons that these rats give for their actions is infuriating to read.
We all know why libertarians are there. :libertarian-alert:
My two cents is that most of the conservative ideology is a coping mechanism against a world that is considered dangerous, that you should protect yourself against and that you cannot trust. So same as most rifle associations or preparedness groups and so on are filled with these people, so is cybersecurity.
Something happened in tech, that made all of the people going into it turn libertarian or worse. Californian ideology maybe? Idk.
I think a big part of it is STEM education, its very indoctrinating. You spend 4 years socially alienated, because the work is brutal, and the whole time the educators and administrators tell you its because youre better than other students and thats why youll make more money.
they also worry their decidedly mainstream ideology will, all of a sudden turn them into persecuted victims because that's the only way to cope that their ideology has ruined the world.
The only way to realistically to get a job in cyber security is via federal contracting. The only other option is being a legit superstar and having enough love of the work that you can create value via bug bounties and audits by just doing you.
So you either have a proof of concept of meritocracy(so good at your shit, companies will suck you off for you to join), or an okay engineer forced into a heavy culture of "stopping the bad guys" and "making positive change in the world" by, ya know, doing sketchy secret technically illegal things.
Tons of these guys are also veterans who were the guys blowing dust out of routers in some bumfuck desert FOB then got a degree with the GI bill and can make big bucks in a similar culture by leveraging a veteran status to get their foot in the door at a contractor. Even if they were just in chair force and spent several months obsessively masturbating to anime somewhere in Qatar doing basically private security for a guy with a solid gold Lamborghini.
The ultimate irony is the distrust for big government while grinding the gears that run the anti-privacy machine.
For people who just browse the subreddits, who fuckin knows.
Short Answer: the 60s.
Slightly shorter Answer: The left/right split in the STEM stoner crowd during the 80s as some of them got rich. See also Transhumanism, Space Nerds.
This is actually common among IT field, so not just cyber security and privacy.
Most IT dorks, from devs to helpdesk, grew up reading sci fi. Quite a few of those authors are libertarian, like Heinlein, Neal Stephenson, etc. They like what they read so the IT dorks get indoctrinated into their favorite authors beliefs, which happens to be libertarian beliefs, so the dorks check out libertarian stuff and eventually get into Any Rand. From there it's a downward spiral. Add the early 80s hacker ethos into the mix and you get cyber security nerds who are libertarian.
One thing I've noticed though is that those dorks with tiny bit of self awareness and social consciousness tend to pull out of their spiral due to realizing they're being insufferable asshats and not wanting to die alone. Sometimes, it's because a friend gave them a different author to read like Octavia Butler, and it helped pull them out.
TL;DR Most IT dorks are scifi nerds and most scifi is written by libertarian authors. Indoctrination, pure and simple.
One of my close family members is a superstar self taught computer security expert, works from home and is highly paid. He also is some form of libertarian or ancap. He's the most unhappy paranoid person I've ever met, everyone is out to get him apparently.
One thing that blew my mind was he brought up and was very upset that tax money went towards covid vaccines.. I didn't say anything further because we were talking with more family.
Don't know why, but it's very real
