Let’s start with “tech bro”. The internet coughs up a definition to the tune of “a hypermasculine man employed in the technology industry”, and as long as we successfully unpack the problematic choice of adjective then perhaps we can run with that.
We may presume that “hypermasculine” taps into the cultural trope of a male-gendered personality which, typically in an aggressive style of braggadocio, understands the world in various dichotomies like problem/solution, success/failure, wins/losses, etc. Such a person’s ability to cut through complex issues using these dichotomies is often called “cold logic”, which societally speaking is positioned antithetically from “emotion” (gendered feminine). Cold logic is also widely celebrated as an effective business methodology.
If that contextualises the “bro”, then the “tech” must come from the post-2000 and especially smartphone-era emergence of entrepreneurs with the above-described traits, a generation of app-launchers who exhibited a Zuckerbergian pairing of youth with audacity, modernity with business sense, folksiness (in demeanour) with ferocity (in decision-making), etc.
Ten years ago, we looked to these tech bros to invent the future: with smartphones providing a novel platform of enhanced digital interconnectivity, they set to work “changing the world” by using crowd power to reinvent everything: taxis, dating, hotels, gaming, banks, money, fundraising, etc.
Of course, by 2022 the novelty of app-mania has given way to scepticism of its underbelly: the “digital shift” may have brought new heights of user convenience but also a pattern of deregulation… with nasty consequences. Uber is still not allowed in Luxembourg because of the basic labour rights its drivers are denied; Airbnb of horrific misuses of its platform; digital currencies remain volatile and mysterious to regular folk; etc.
Neither are the tech bros themselves golden boys anymore. Ten years after beloved screenwriter Aaron Sorkin made a bizarre kind of hero out of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, he wrote Mark with the subheader “Facebook isn’t defending free speech, it’s assaulting truth”. Meanwhile, Elon Musk routinely devalues his own relevancy by launching cars into orbit or via tone-deaf tweets (see above: what he’s missing or ignoring is that people are not “attacking space” but, specifically, his own mission to colonise it in the name of gigantic tech companies). Basically, worshipping these people has become problematic. Their exploitative behaviour has, at long last, caught up with them.
However, the world of entrepreneurship is healthier than ever. More than 70,000 people attended the last pre-pandemic Web Summit, with 100,000 hitting the following year’s virtual version. As a society we’re still hell-bent on technologising ourselves into the future, and a majority still see entrepreneurs as the stewards of that change. Luxembourg has made huge efforts to attract startups, particularly in the finance and space sectors.
Is there hope?
Having spoken to several young CEOs, it strikes me that entrepreneurs have got the message that people--customers, to them--are not just aware of the global climate crisis, but are mortified and consumed by it. They’re late to the game, the entrepreneurs I mean, but at least some of them are here.
But beyond mere awareness, the way some of them talk is different.
“Up until yesterday we were screaming our lungs out, saying, ‘Use our product to do it faster!’ Time was relative: what was fast to you may not have been fast to me. But today that competition has gone out the window because, whether you do it or I do it, we’re both going to lose. We’re both going to die in climate change.”
That’s a quote from Ashwini Oke, CEO and founder of Asets-Lux, in . It was one of the first things she said, and without any prompt related to the climate crisis. Oke’s entire company is devoted to speeding up the time it takes engineering firms to implement novel technologies, the expressed point of which is to enable ecologically minded alternatives to hit the usage stage faster. Because, in her own unminced words, we’re all going to die.
“There is a perception in our culture,” said Filip Westerlund, founder and CEO of Our Choice, a “cicular” fashion company, “that we think we need to throw something away. We live in a linear structure.” His company is positioned as the antidote to fast-fashion and its binwards mentality: Our Choice items are made from organic materials, are designed to last for ages, and can be sent back to the company for repairs. Beyond selling a planet-friendly product, however, Westerlund is also eying a cultural shift, trying to change people’s relationships with their objects.
These two CEOs hardly represent a case study, but they both said things nearly sacrilegious to the tech-bro ethos. Not caring about competition? Keeping your customers from discarding old items, i.e. stopping them from buying your new product line? Yes, we’re living in a nightmare scenario as the world’s ecosystems are on the brink of collapse; but at least these aren’t horrible messages to hear from CEOs.
The circular CEO
It was Westerlund in particular that put “tech bro” in mind. Ten years ago, that’s what you would have called an entrepreneur with his type of energy. He talked a smooth talk, slipping into a casual and highly disarming mode of faux-friendship. A born marketer, if ever there was one, and somebody whom you could imagine cheerfully making cutthroat business decisions.
But while these things are obvious red flags, his message more or less held up under scrutiny. He attacked the throwaway economy, he attacked companies for greenwashing their wares, he called it “problematic” that attendees at a conference said that they wanted brands, not NGOs or governments, to educate them about sustainability.
It’s of course naïve to think that startups nowadays are uniformly revolutionary. As space is privatised, a new subset of entrepreneur is all too eager to repeat our colonial mistake of invading new territories and mining them, building on them, altering them, killing them. (Maana Electric’s Fabrice Testa a “moon base”, a prerequisite for his company’s product--who will build that base, and why, and with whose interests in mind?) And, sadly, the toxicity of the tech bro is excellently preserved in NFT nuts (already dubbed “cryptobros”), who have the absurd ambition of artificially introducing scarcity into a medium whose strength is the precise opposite of scarcity: the internet, an open-access and democratising platform. (NFT stands for “nonfungible token”: the idea is to use a distributed ledger to assign an official document of ownership to a digital asset, even if there is no actual object to “own”. Basically, it’s like pretending that JPEGs can be owned so that someone, and not a poor person, can make money off them. The guy in the tweet below even wants people to own and charge royalties for colours.)
I guess the question is whether Westerlund is an outlier, and to what extent. But if he isn’t, if he represents a generation of CEOs interested in breaking the systems and cycles of competition, ownership, linear thinking, resource extraction, etc., then, yes I might actually sleep better at night.
Why this is important
Businesses are the most powerful voices in our culture. Smartphones, for example, have altered the way we live, sleep, and form opinions, but no journalist writing an op-ed told you to buy one. Apple told you to buy one, and then your peers indirectly pressured you to get one, and then society whispered in your ear that without a smartphone you’d be cut off from the news, games, memes, digital wallets, jokes, gossip, revolutions, videos, music and political movements that comprise our entire goddamn civilisation.
We could debate the vices and virtues of smartphones, but that’s not the point. Nobody nowadays can defend the position that you, you--you, the individual reading this--should give up your smartphone because some critic argues that it’s bad for you. You need your phone to be part of society like you need a car to get to work like you need to pay rent to live in your apartment.
The idea that we are “addicted” to cars and phones is putting it wrongly: addiction implies (although it shouldn’t) a moral failure on the part of the individual; more accurate would be that we’re enslaved to these systems. They make up the fabric of our day. And you can’t ask individuals to tear apart the fabric of their day.
This is why entrepreneurs have a death-grip on our future. Until all the roads and transport networks are totally overhauled, we’ll need to buy cars. Until they can make smartphones without cobalt and other precious materials, we’ll have to keep the mines open. There are a thousand reasons why this is a horrible state of affairs. Businesses have not been kind to the environment, to the common people, to anyone but themselves and their shareholders.
But it would be nice to have them in the fold…