Why are so many techies dysphoric?It must be said that some people in tech are closeted or unaware trans people, and it's probably significantly more of the population than we might think given that a lot of trans people wind up drawn towards tech as a field. In these cases, the dysphoria makes a considerable amount of sense. However, even at the outer limit, that would account for no more than a quarter of tech people, which isn't enough to explain the general prevalence of dysphoria that we observe in the tech community. This means that we need an explanation for why our tech industry is so dead-eyed and void of emotion or motivation that isn't just that they need estrogen.

It's as though many people in the tech industry have no real desires at all beyond the desires that they're told to have by their wider social circles.

The pattern in the tech world seems to be a distorted mirror of this, where some entity pushes a propaganda narrative and, like clockwork, the core influencers of general tech opinion shift their desires to match

Whether it's talking about race science and eugenics, the blockchain and NFTs or our current LLM situation, the core voices in the tech community (which is to say the people who have a disproportionate influence on general opinion within tech) are consistently willing to pick it up and go along with it, regardless of how obviously the narrative has been deliberately engineered and almost as though they have no real desires or internal motivation of their own.

I drew the conclusion that software developers are almost uniquely vulnerable among educated and professional people to being taken in by propaganda.