People connected to LessWrong and the Bay Area surveillance industry often cite David Chapman’s “Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” to understand why their subcultures keep getting taken over by jerks. Chapman is a Buddhist mystic who seems rationalist-curious. Some people use the term postrationalist.
Have you noticed that Chapman presents the founders of nerdy subcultures as innocent nerds being pushed around by the mean suits? But today we know that the founders of Longtermism and LessWrong all had ulterior motives: Scott Alexander and Nick Bostrom were into race pseudoscience, and Yudkowsky had his kinks (and was also into eugenics and Libertarianism). HPMOR teaches that intelligence is the measure of human worth, and the use of intelligence is to manipulate people. Mollie Gleiberman makes a strong argument that “bednet” effective altruism with short-term measurable goals was always meant as an outer doctrine to prepare people to hear the inner doctrine about how building God and expanding across the Universe would be the most effective altruism of all. And there were all the issues within LessWrong and Effective Altruism around substance use, abuse of underpaid employees, and bosses who felt entitled to hit on subordinates. A '60s rocker might have been cheated by his record label, but that does not get him off the hook for crashing a car while high on nose candy and deep inside a groupie.
I don’t know whether Chapman was naive or creating a smokescreen. Had he ever met the thinkers he admired in person?
The sewer-deep Islamophobia from “luminaries” like Richard Dawkins didn’t help, either. One thing that is perhaps easy to miss now in looking back at “New Atheism” is how much it inhabited a shortly after 9/11 cultural space.
And regarding the point above that the analysis needs “Explicit acknowledgement of the role of capitalism and colonialist tendencies in corrupting subcultures”, the term New Atheism itself was a branding gimmick imposed from outside (codified by and perhaps first used in Wired magazine, of all places, AFAIK). The people who were already “in” it looked around and asked, “OK, what exactly is new about it?”. As far as actual arguments went, there was little if anything that Paul Dirac had not already said in 1927.
Shermer is a “sociopath” in the GMS taxonomy. But he rose to prominence in the '90s, co-founding the Skeptics Society in 1991 and publishing Why People Believe Weird Things in 1997. He was considered the old guard by those who came to skepticism/atheism via the '00s blogosphere, who were some combination of “geeks” and “mops”. So, there’s not really the linear order to it that the neat and tidy GMS story calls for.