We tend to reserve the word "tech" for new technology especially. Cars, power tools and horse wagons were also new sexy technology once upon a time, but no-one calls companies making those products "tech companies". The categorization from "tech" to "normal stuff" happens when a technology becomes ubiquitous part of our society rather than play stuff of early adopters and hackers. Arguably this has recently happened also to social media, internet advertising and many other internet technologies so maybe we should move on and recategorize those things as what they are instead of "tech".

So what is "tech" now, if we take the definition to be "new technology not yet widely adopted by everyone's grandmother"? Maybe some of the blockchain stuff? Nuclear fusion? Reinforcement learning based AI agents? Self-driving cars? Hyperloop? Homomorphic encryption? Nerve implants? Robots capable of moving in unpredictable environments (like Boston Dynamics has)? Artificial meat? Space ships?

I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy.

History (particularly twentieth-century history) is caked in the blood of people killed by technologies that were originally conceived of by people pursuing what they thought was innocent (or, at least, amoral) knowledge. The Pugwash conference (https://pugwash.org/) grew from the need of those who built the atom bomb to wrangle the ramifications of their technology.

A hacker without ethics is a terrible risk. We should have discourse on the human side of what we do.

> talking about tech has always tended to lead to a certain amount of political discussion, especially in terms of things like encryption policy, DRM, etc.

Growing up in the era of peak Slashdot it was hard not to view politics through the lens of technology. There were politicians trying to take away my games, and restrict my speech, and put me in jail for downloading MP3s. Fighting those battles through the years has definitely formed my political views.