Removed

Thanks to my private goddess of bitly nirvana I have never been "cool", or "geek" --- don't even know how to recognize geekness. Checking wikipedia did not help. I can say, that a fellow traveller called me "hardcore nerd" a few years back. Although I'm old enough, I never participated in some culture netnews/irc/bulletin board/forum/facebook/twitter/whatever thing. I'm boring, and that keeps me out of trouble.

In other words: I have no clue, what you are trying to say.

I don't know whether to consider myself lucky or deprived to have never gotten with the "culture" despite possibly qualifying for it in the "interests leaning tech-ward" sense.

I say "lucky" in that I swear "culture" invariably attracts fundamentalists who degrade what was simply a culture into a religion of sorts.

As for me and my house, we shall serve The Tech! :-)

Ironically, describing anything as a "dog whistle" is a huge red flag.

What you describe is typical of the incorporate and destroy mentality. Dumb something down enough to be digestible by the norms, then other anyone outside of the harmless version.

RE people defending invasion of privacy: even if an opinion has a pulse, it can still be a bot opinion.

I always felt those averse to spy/malware awareness and general, common sense personal security/privacy/safety practices to be ignorant of life in the 21st Century. That is, those who always say "I have nothing to hide" or "I could print my texts and emails, I don't give a shit" are blatantly ignorant, reckless with their own privacy/dignity online, and should just subtract themself from the online privacy/safety narrative, because "I don't give a shit" is not an argument against, nor defense for, anything at all (because them giving a shit does not register with what I do or don't do online).

So being "into" FOSS and small projects and sustainable software/hardware, expansion of programming knowledge, broadening one's skillsets, protecting privacy (in general) and also being off/away from a multinational corporation's members/customer/user books, is nothing one should shy away from or be hesitant in discussing openly, proudly.

Just my take