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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

Why is that? I have noticed that the deeper you get into infosec the furrier it gets. Has anyone studied that? I feel like there's something to that.

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I think it has to do with the timing and history of the internet, which carried a bunch of correlated groups (not just those two) forward together.

Both are fairly niche groups with no real geographic concentration. When someone can't cast around for a local club in town, the internet becomes a game-changer for finding the far-flung and diffuse others in the group. Then once you've found those other people (and related furry/security media to consume/publish) computers are again the way to get anything done, as opposed to snail-mail, phone calls or physical travel.

It might have something to do with the furry community being queer majority from early on, and starting in a time where information security was a personal matter of life and death.

If actual research exists, Furscience might know: https://furscience.com/general-inquiries/

How early on is that? What I remember of furry culture from the early-mid 1990s internet was pretty straight, at least to judge from all the announcements of heterosexual marriages, all the porn going around, and prominent internet-furry voices. I was a bit surprised when furry culture saw a resurgence in wider internet culture during the Tumblr era and now was strongly linked to non-cishet themes.

Bi and similar are also queer. A lot of what appears "straight" is by and for people who are some variety of not monosexual. I've actually seen rants from people outside the fandom claiming it's "all straight men" using example art that I knew for a fact was made by someone who was neither straight nor a man.

Here's a good documentary that gets into the history of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY

That and cultural specificities make furry costumes an intelligencia budget item

I wrote a blog post a few years ago that explores some hypotheses, but this is not a scientific paper by any means.

https://soatok.blog/2021/06/02/why-furries-make-excellent-ha...

Computer industries have correlated psychometric selection effects with a bunch of subcultures. Many of these select for e.g. what is colloquially referred to as "autism", although that term refers to several probably-unrelated things in different contexts.

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