Gwern Wonders about Furries

Gwern, one of the core online Rationalists, has put up a list of questions to ponder, which is worth reading. But meanwhile, here is Gwern on Furries:

One of the core demographics of Patreon, by amount spent, is the “furries” subculture commissioning artwork & other things catering to their fetishes; furries are also well-represented on image boorus, providing some of the largest & best tagged databases (even larger than Danbooru), and historically were (along with fanfiction) one of the most extreme userbases of del.icio.us; further, furry conventions are surprisingly robust, catering, among other things, to fursuit makers selling extremely expensive (and often custom) fursuits; even further, furries appear to be extremely overrepresented among tech workers (an autism spectrum connection?). 

I’ve kept noticing furries within a few degrees of me (an artist acquaintance does SFW furry commissions, an online acquaintance learned English thanks to furries, another told me of furry IRC channels for just techies coordinating projects & trips & donations, yet another told me that it was not uncommon to see furries suited up in datacenters, the Damore lawsuit materials mention furry groups in Google along with ‘otherkin’, and so on), public examples of furries like SonicFox are increasingly common, and I’ve begun to wonder. In general, furries seem to be bizarrely rich, well-connected, and capable—the Quakers of fetishes. . . .

If this is true, why are furries so rich and well-funded, and why tech, specifically? Why so many so recently, not just offline, but in their safe spaces online? When did ‘furries’ become a thing? I have yet to run into a clear reference to them before the 1970s–1980s, typically vaguely ascribed to convention dynamics, and they may primarily postdate even that. . . .

I wonder if the appeal is simply that Furry is a way for grown-ups to "play" as they did in childhood, which many people seem to miss. The suits provide a sense of anonimity that helps let those feelings free while forcing a certain level of sexual innocence.