(Or, How the Tech Bros Came to Murder the Tech Nerds)
How did we get here?
I was there, in the haughty & accelerated days of the original dotcom boom, when eavesdropping at a coffee shop1 would reveal tales of websites and e-commerce and code deployments; software and server purchases en masse; the blooming of a million new opportunities to be exploited for untold riches; and the rising new pinnacle of innovation that would save us all.
The original premise of the internet, which I’d heard as early as ’93 while still in high school, was that it was to transform the world by leveling the playing field for everyone2. Now, anyone from a white kid in Palo Alto to a brown kid in Indonesia to a black one in Brazil3 would be able to study the greater workings of the world, educating themselves on most any worthy topic, and then become friends over email and chat. In these naive days, the vision of the internet was still that of an “information superhighway”, built on a foundation of academia and free knowledge. Commercialization was incidental – build the brilliant idea, bring in the users, and hit the IPO lottery – this was to be democratic liberation for the global community.
And for a while there, innovation proceeded as if to fulfill that promise. Early free knowledge projects4 like wikipedia or cddb or imdb, plus new digital storefronts – the birth of e-commerce – like ebay and amazon, proffered more than a shiny new coat of paint. These were new consumer-oriented means of transacting – the buyer could browse from the privacy of their own home for the exact little thing they need – without expending gas, or time in traffic, or any other modern inconvenience. It was supposedly a shift to putting power back in the hands of the consumer – to peruse, to compare, and ultimately to know.
Chat rooms, forums, and blogs proliferated. Idiosyncratic communities sprouted up around the weird, arcane, and obscure, leading to the concept of the long tail – infinite content for a finite audience – where most every last community could create an existence5. Search engines were engaged in feature-based, cage-match death fights to win users – cash burn be damned.
Eventually Google showed up and one by one, AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, WebCrawler, Yahoo, and all the rest wilted under the tyranny of the page rank patent and Google’s superior engineering. See, they didn’t build a company so much as a campus; a masterful abomination of software serfdom, as if Walt Disney had raped Jack Welch, bearing an adult playground designed to keep you occupied – and working – for all the live-long. Dry cleaning? Onsite. Child care? Onsite. Food? Everywhere onsite (just don’t take it home). No wonder the rout.
And being in the charming Mediterranean climate of Palo Alto and the high-paying salaries for fresh, young, single, childless programming talent, everyone from the back-east tech seminaries6 wanted to be there. So attracting the brightest and freshest talent was effortless, and soon established Google at the top of this new web hegemony, leading to a culture of engineering excellence. Many of the technologies that allow web companies to achieve internet scale today were developed in this culture.
Nerd7 culture.
So much so that when you’d listen closer at these coffee shops, you’d hear discussions of the merits of a binary search, or heapsort vs quicksort, or arguments over whose min-stack implementation had the fastest runtime. Such was the lingua franca of the age.
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Later, Apple came to introduce a new lineage – a post-IPO culture shift, with the introduction first of the iPhone, then the App Store, and later the iPad and all other manner of chicanery. This is a company that specifically designed its wireless mouse to be unusable during charging, by the placement of the charge port, in the hopes that you will then buy a second mouse8.
This movement was not a nerd movement; it was (and remains) the most vicious corporate attack on the American public ever. The App Store, and its “attention economy” gambit, is the embodiment of all the wrong lessons learned during the anarchic desktop wars of the 80’s, the political connectivity wars of the 90s, and the invasive adware lessons of the ’00s.
Instead of open, competing platforms, Apple created a “walled garden9“, with hard content protections10 and corporate-curated choices11 making it as difficult as possible to leave. The smartphone would exist for the benefit of its progenitor, not its user.
Yet in its early days, the Wozniak hangover still existed, and in spite of itself, the device and its apps did lead to some measure of nonviolent vicissitude, when the Arab Spring was organized on Twitter by users on these new “smartphone” devices. Longtime tyrants across Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and eventually Syria were all conquered, in some way, by the emergent use of the smartphone by the opposition.
But humans are nothing if not learning creatures, and the wrong body populace learned the wrong lessons from the falls of these despots. The same mass-/social-media techniques used to overthrow a dictatorial government were the same techniques that could get an oligopolistic, fascio-capitalist installed in the White House.
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It took a dozen years of persistent cunning and propaganda, but here we are12. Over that time, the nerds were replaced, one by one, by the bros13 in leadership roles at all the heavies, and the big dogs ate up the little fish, leading to the current techno-monoculture. The idea that tech could change the world never left, but whose world became paramount and unspoken, in the Ayn Rand sense of improvement. The bros, like a recrudescent plaque of locust stock brokers from 1987 or house-flipping estate speculators from 2007, invaded the tech world with the single-minded premise: maximize shareholder value.
Tools once built for communities are now actively hostile towards its users, spying and manipulating and selling out. Propaganda, dis-, and mis-information all spew from the most popular sites like a diarrhea fountain in a sludge pond. Visionary CEOs have been supplanted by the banal business bot, whose only role is to spout fetishistic pabulum nonsense about how they’re continuing to change the world for the better, and to decide who to lay off on the Monday after record quarterly earnings.
- Specifically, one of Cafe Borrone in Menlo Park, Palo Alto Roasters in, er, Palo Alto, and Franklin Street Cafe in Redwood City ↩︎
- Never mind the financial prerequisites of mildly esoteric software, expensive short-lived hardware, a phone line, and an Internet Service Provider ↩︎
- Not a black kid in Africa though, that would take several more years ↩︎
- Mostly not free now ↩︎
- Even on the internet, there are communities of pornographers, terrorists, gore, drug- and human-trafficking, and all other brutalities of human behavior ↩︎
- MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, etc ↩︎
- Nerd ↩︎
- Profit-motivated chicanery ↩︎
- This is not the internet, and there are no pornographers, terrorists, gore, or other depravities to be found on Apple devices. At least not intentionally ↩︎
- See U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ↩︎
- Not everyone likes U2 ↩︎
- See U.S. presidential election of 2024, and subsequent conversion in 2025 to the Fascist States of the Confederacy ↩︎
- Bro ↩︎
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