Formerly vaguely liberal-moderate, more recently moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the collapse of socialism. (This sentence is a typical intellectually lazy american conflation of the russian totalitarian system with “socialism.” Here I say “lazy” rather than simply “uninformed” because by rights I am inclined to expect a well-educated man like Eric Raymond to be more nuanced than this while yes, thoroughly disagreeing with a system of governance or politics that does not conform with his libertarian ideas.) There is a strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. (Verging on Randian objectivism in fact, which appears to be where a significant minority segment of north americans are collapsing to since the ongoing end of the american empire has become undeniable. It’s quite weird really, looking on from the outside, though certainly not beyond range of being affected, so to speak.) The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both paleoconservatism and “hard” leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.