The Term "Tech Bro": Some Thoughts on its Pejorativeness

The term "tech bro" has been fairly ubiquitous for some time--and its derisory connotation widely recognized.

In considering that it seems to me that this reflects a particular reality of American discourse, namely that frank and open criticism of capitalism as such, and the "bourgeois" outlook associated with it as such, is virtually impossible within the American mainstream. The result is that the expression of any feeling toward capitalism and the bourgeois outlook other than hearty approval is likely to be distorted or at least oblique--with one result that this expression often takes the form of denigration of some group that seems to represent those things at their most offensive. Such a group is likely to display, for example, what even that strident arch-defender of capitalism and bourgeois values Friedrich von Hayek called "the often intolerable and offensive" quality that is the "smug pride of the successful," and all that goes with it, not least their hyperbolically expressing their view that their success was all their own, and the misfortune of those to whom life has been less kind likewise all their own, justifying the "Why should I pay for them?" and "Let them eat cake"-type obliviousness and callousness toward the rest of the population they express so ceaselessly.

Thus has it gone with the yuppie, whose "smug pride of the successful" with all its baggage went along with their presenting the world with a bourgeois who cast cultural traditionalism and its concessions to anything more than mere selfishness aside (with all the charge this had for those with whom such attitudes sat uneasily or worse amid the broader shock of the Reagan era).

Thus does it also go with the tech bro, which I suppose could be regarded as a subspecies of yuppie, one whose annoyance to many may be exacerbated by certain traits distinct to that subspecies, specifically a blend of the worst traits of both "nerd" and "frat bro"--in their one person uniting the social awkwardness and "geeky" obsessions of the nerd with the entitled, arrogant, swaggering, bullying demeanor of the fraternity member, producing an obnoxiousness that is more than the sum of its parts, as seen in the way the tech bro can seem to combine the nerd's "creepiness" with the frat member's perversity, the nerd's clumsiness and general "ickiness" with the frat bro's aggressive overconfidence.

Of course, many insist that most of those who do the actual, important, work of the tech business do not fit the tech bro stereotype at all, many of the tech world's most prominent figures certainly do embody the stereotype in a way that makes Jon Favreau's Pete Becker on Friends seem a prophecy about the caste long since been fulfilled.

Moreover, its grating on the nerves of those on whose nerves it does grate is massively amplified by the insanely disproportionate attention such people have got relative to the rest of the business world. Driven by the inclination of propagandists for neoliberalism to hold up "tech" as the great legitimator of their never-popular and ever more unpopular theories, policies, model, and justification for everything that has followed from it, "neoliberal apologetics" also held "tech billionaires" (or rather, tech billionaires as they wanted others to see them) up to the public as their superiors in intelligence and virtue and models for emulation in that insulting "Perhaps this will have a humanising effect on the dog-stealers" way to which the champions of aspirationalism are so prone, to a chorus of "He's so smart!" from their fanboys and "How can I be just like you?" from the Tracy Flick ultra-conformists. Bound to repel a great many persons in itself, making matters worse is how, far from shifting course as the market populist claptrap fell by the wayside and Silicon Valley appeared to more and more people as just another rapacious corporate Big controlling and exploiting working people, a Big Tech just like Big Oil and Big Pharma, these propagandists doubled down on the narrative, as the press went on playing fawning courtier to them, and indeed witless trolls like Douglas Coupland punched down at the critics of such figures from the pages of the Guardian, with the last seeming in its way suggestive of the broader tendency. Rather than supporters of existing arrangements using public admiration for tech billionaires to win the public over to the economic model they are supposed to represent, it can appear that they are shoving images of tech billionaires in the faces of the public--often, as those billionaires graceless exult in triumph after unearned triumph as a provocation to that part of the public unhappy with what they represent, the presentation an act of gleeful punching left and punching down by not just avowed right-wingers but "centrists" who despise even the "liberal," let alone the leftist, because they so fear and hate the working people on whose behalf they speak up. This course of action makes little sense--except as an indication of how our political life makes less and less sense from the standpoint of officialdom's "democratic" pretensions, anything like rational debate in the attempt to persuade ever more remote from what passes today for "discourse."