Many HNers (and this is a hard group to categorize, because there's still a lot of diversity of thought) are still in the honeymoon phase with the positive-sum promise of technology and the startup economy.

I believe in these things very strongly, but I'm also old and experienced enough to know that we, the good guys, have real enemies. They aren't stupid, and they're not weak. We seem to think we can out-compete them by being smarter, more productive, and earnestly working toward a better world. We act is if we'll be able to peacefully render them irrelevant and that they won't know what is happening (or care) enough to fight. Well, perhaps. Time will tell. I am not yet at the point of saying we need to take AK-47s against our corporate masters (please don't do that; your aim probably sucks and weapons are nasty things even when used well). However, I am also not optimistic enough to believe that they will surely opt for graceful decline and let us build this better world that we want. Perhaps they will, content to be very rich (in a world whose prosperity begins to dramatically increase, probably around 2025-40, rendering them less relatively wealthy and powerful) but increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps they won't. My experience with the upper class is that they are mean-spirited, ethically depraved people. Their weak point is that they underestimate us, because we're less than human to them, and because they see us as intellectually inferior. However, if we underestimate them, then we are making the same mistake.

Most of my HN "enemies" (and that's too strong a word, because I don't dislike them and they don't know me) are Googlers who were shocked when I exposed unethical management, in a very visible way, in October 2011. When you wave a whistle in the public ("whistle" as in whistleblowing) some people act as if you're waving a gun, and especially those who can't stand to hear the truth about their utopia. This reaction is ridiculous, because a lot of the people who get up in arms and fight whistleblowers have nothing to fear. They are too in love with the Woodbury with the quaint coffee shops, not the real Woodbury with the fascistic Governor and the zombie gladiator fights.

What's sort of amazing about whistleblowing is that you don't get the worst opposition from the powerful people you are exposing. They know they're doing wrong and will often make some concessions (but rarely enough). The mindless and often vicious opposition that you get is from other peasants who are shocked and upset at what appears to be going down. In the Philippines, this is referred to as the "crab mentality", whereby crabs in a bucket prevent each other from escaping and they all die. That's what you see when subordinate employees go to the mat to defend unethical managers who wouldn't lift a finger to do anything for them.