I think it's two groups, or at least two ideologies. There's a very large streak of what I think of as hyperindividualism: I do what I want. It's not stated, b

I think it's two groups, or at least two ideologies. There's a very large streak of what I think of as hyperindividualism: I do what I want. It's not stated, but in practice it implies that any downstream negative consequences to others are negligible or even morally necessary. This predominates especially when the bulk of the audience sees themselves in the powerful person in the story. There's also a strong streak of what I'd call compassionate individualism, where people identify with the less powerful person in the story. This can involve moral outrage on their behalf, and generally includes a more nuanced balancing of the individual rights of different people. A good example is how HN talks about rising tech companies versus very dominant ones. On the way up, we tend to identify with the entrepreneur-CEOs in charge. But once they're large enough to harm either the HN audience or the tech ecosystem, the narrative tends to switch. E.g., Microsoft as the evil empire, or the way Google, Apple, and Facebook get a lot more skepticism. Often it's the same people and the same behaviors, it's just that we're at the sharp end of the stick. So here it's Facebook and slavery. Given that most of us don't intend to keep slaves and we've become suspicious of FB's power, it's easy to identify with the slaves. But phrase it as an abstract issue in distributed systems and censorship resistance, and people will identify with the engineer/rebel character.