Pissing civilisation away with the bros
“One of us”: We’ll go to Mars and end racism, but we won’t ever give a fuck about anybody but ourselves.
There’s something about the pitch in the culture of tech that hasn’t sounded quite right lately. Maybe it’s always been there, lurking behind the scenes; maybe in times past it took a different form, with different excesses and odours; maybe, it’s a recent development, although I find that unlikely. You’ve probably heard this ax ground before by some variety of leftoid: I’m talking about the bros.
Who are they? What do they do? What do they stand for? What is really going on here?
Firstly, it should not be misunderstood that the bros are just men. Nor are they right-wing. Bros are all the people who flock together and think they are more enlightened and/or invincible than everyone outside. This includes your model Muskrat as much as it includes your local woke HR mafia. Tribe above everything, including reason.
As for what they do, by the numbers it’s make-work more or less ‘round the clock. Bros start sub-reddits where they openly game the jobs market and trade notes about the latest-and-greatest methods for fucking the system. They also think that anyone not doing likewise is foolish and deserves to be poor. Never mind the reality that such bros are usually leeches on whatever sorry companies hired them, caught like barnacles onto some company that is either incompetent or has decided to wrap them up as fodder in some other high-flying bro meta-game like with FAANG. “Gotta hire everyone so no one else can. Gosh, we’re so much smarter than everyone else.”
As for what they stand for, if we’re being honest, they don’t stand for anything. This is why most bros will never shut up about whatever pet causes they have – YIMBY, anti-racism, being vegan, pronatalism, working out, etc – these people have no hobbies that they are not psychologically wed to as a means of avoiding suicide. They then cope with this unhealthy psychology by deflecting its reality with habits that are healthy, because of course, if working out is so obviously good, you can’t call me out for coping with it to a ruinous extent. And if you do, all of my “online friends” will happily dog-pile you for it, which proves how right we all truly are. Bigger number win. This is really sad.
A big theme that is doubtless pervasive with all sorts of bro cultures regardless of their stripe is drugs. Everybody does drugs, and by everybody I mean literally everyone knows somebody who does. Criticising drug use writ large is a surefire way to piss everyone off.
The problem with drugs is pretty straightforward: it’s a trade-off between functioning and brain damage, and it’s rare that anyone making this trade is getting a good deal. Droves of people use drugs just for the fact that it makes them high; these people are corpses in the making, and it’s an open question whether they’re really living at all.
Other people, usually with careers or parents with careers, get dragged into the pharmaceutical version of this nuthouse. For plausible deniability, pharma will drag out their dependence and delusion over an order of magnitude greater time frame and with an order of magnitude greater variety of drugs, but the outcome is still the same: you’re a druggie, but it’s all legal.
The industry has quickly collapsed into a local minimum of least resistance, rallying around the explosion of ADHD diagnoses created by intolerant (and probably drug-addicted) school faculties, the resultant dispensation of kiddie meth, and the vicious cycle repeats.
Why are drugs so pervasive in bro cultures? It’s tough to say for certain, but I think it’s the outcome you get with any critical mass of lonely people of low intellect or intrinsically poor character (i.e. inborn personality issues). George Carlin famously ranted about this in his material on the ‘five deadly male subcultures’: the car and machinery culture, the police and military culture, the outdoors and gun culture, the sports and competition culture, and the drug and alcohol culture. These all overlap, and for the most part I have been talking about the last of those five. Maybe tech is just a modern rendition of the first.
One last thing: I’d like to reiterate from my point earlier where I mentioned that people latch onto hobbies perceived as healthy to deflect the criticism that they’re unhealthily obsessing over it. This kind of preemptive deflection is everywhere these days. I don’t believe it was so common in decades prior, because it wasn’t until the ubiquity of the Worldwide Web that people were so forced to deal with the simple gotchas of their critics.