The Strange Self-Referential World Of The Tech Bros
How vast wealth creates a psychological isolation from the rest of humanity
For those readers who may not be familiar with the phrase “tech bro” it means a (probably white) man who made most of his fortune in the world of high technology. Examples of tech bros include Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Andreesen, but there are many more in this category and even more who earnestly aspire to join them.
The tech bros all have several features in common. Almost without exception they come from privileged backgrounds and while they are moderately intelligent they are nowhere near as clever as they imagine themselves to be. The most obvious indicator of intellectual deficit comes from their tendency to imagine everything in the world behaves like computer software. Health and longevity can be “hacked” and the human mind can be “uploaded to the cloud” and the only thing standing between humanity and colonizing the stars is time, money, and — of course — more technology. The complexities of real life are simply ignored because, hey, these guys are rich and so they must be really, really smart. Smart people don’t need to sweat the details. Smart rich people just set the course, give orders, and wait for reality to adjust itself to their fantasies.
