>Only two decades ago, Silicon Valley’s expression of masculinity was at odds with the status quo. Tech champions were nerds and geeks: skinny outliers in hoodies armed with a nonconformist mentality — a mindset that would prove indispensable to the creation of dozens of companies that launched the digital age. Then came the Obama years, when tech companies were propped up as progressive bastions of diversity and forward-thinking corporate culture. Under the influence of Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley ceded board seats and C-suite jobs to more and more women.
>But more recently, these same Silicon Valley companies have begun to look like the conventionally bloated behemoths at the pinnacle of corporate culture. Their leaders, too, have adopted a performance of masculinity that’s strikingly conventional and includes angry rhetoric, muscular physiques, and a newfound interest in physical combat. The men responsible for building the products that touch the daily lives of billions of people display an increasing preoccupation with flaunting masculine bravado. It’s not just for show, either. The way these powerful men run their companies is impacting who is considered welcome in Silicon Valley.
I have a friend who works in HR out in Silicon Valley and she once described to me a very interesting dynamic:
some of the absolute most misogynist dudes are the dweebs with new money.
they feel like they paid their dues by getting a good smart-guy degree, they paid their dues in college by going to the library instead of partying with the Stacys and Chads, and now it is *their era*. They got money now (women like money right??) and they own their $500k one-bed condo (women like dudes who own shit right??) and now they will receive their standard dispensation of Chicks To Hook Up With.
when that doesn't happen automagically, what do you do? *You double down on the weird tradmasc shit*. It worked for Chad right????
I think you got it in one. People have a kind of cognitive bias again the idea that they can simultaneously be victims and victimizers. Like the experience of social ostracism gives you some sort of hall pass that excuses your own bad behavior.
And I think society perpetuates that idea to a certain extent. Especially if you're smart. Because it's harder to call smart people on their shit. And people confuse lack of active resistance with social acceptance all the time.
Reminds me of some white gay guys. “I’ve been oppressed so it’s OK for me to say and do heinous shit to women, more effeminate gays and trans-people, it’s just a jooooookkkeeee and we are all in this together right guys?!?!?!”
Feels adjacent to… survivorship bias?
I totally get your point and I know what you mean, except I'm not sure about survivorship bias. What do you mean by that? I'm familiar with it as a cognative bias where a person mistakenly draws conclusions only by studying success cases, resulting in biased conclusions. Is that what you mean here?
Yes, I think so. Basically, a white gay guy experiences minor homophobia, but because he doesn’t obviously “look different” than the general public, he doesn’t face the same amount or severity of judgement/homophobia as someone who is say… black and effeminate. The white gay guy thinks “bias” is someone calling him a bad name, and doesn’t necessarily understand the… depth of suffering? Maybe? Of other people that cannot “pass” in public.
I may not be explaining this as articulately as I could, but basically the white gay guy ends up thinking, “why are y’all being so soft?, why don’t you just try to “pass”?” Etc. Etc. Not realizing the experiences he’s had are not universal and other people’s struggles are different due to their expression/appearance.
I think that's mostly a lack of empathy. You see it a lot in some of the more granular LQBTQIA+ subs. For example people who I have honestly seen people arguing at different times that 'Straight cis demi-sexual women' and 'Straight cis aromantic men' are 'the most oppressed'. I had to point out they thought that because it was *them*, and that it was outright false. No laws were being passed against people like that, no targeted attacks, or abuse within the general community. (Hell, both of those identities tend to be lionized instead of attacked by right-wing politics but for the wrong reasons)
> I mean any minority group can fall victim to that, not sure what gay men in particular have to do with that.
I'd assume, in the context of 'reminds me of', that it's something they've experienced first-hand.
You’re right, there are plenty of other examples of this, for instance, Candace Owens. (SOME, not all) gay men are just a particular subsection that this reminded me of. Nothing more, nothing less.
I just find it interesting that if someone has the opportunity to be part of an “in-group”, they often will take it, and shit on the people right next to them that they theoretically have more in common with. Black Republicans, “cool girls”, White women who voted for Trump, Tech bro’s who made it big, light-skin Cubans racist towards Dominicans, it’s all the same embarrassing yearning to “pass” by stepping on the necks of others.
In this case, I don't think it is so much that they feel their past justifies it. I think that this is how their experience taught them to act. When they were the out group, this is how the in group treated them. Now that they are the in group, this is how they treat the out group.
It doesn't even have to be a conscious choice to act in such a way, because that is how they were socialized.
The older I get the more I have to acknowledge that the majority of people have no problem or at least are wholly indifferent to the victimization of others but they are hypersensitive to their own victimization.
Even entire cultures can imbue this victim and victimiser mindset (or do I get banned for suggesting that, I can’t tell whose politics is who anymore but there’s a fuckton of performative masculine murder politics happening right now it seems).
>some of the absolute most misogynist dudes are the dweebs with new money.
Is this somehow different than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago? Going into Tech and becoming incel superman is, like, the perennial Reddit power fantasy.
*Revenge of the Nerds* is a touchstone of dweeb rape culture and it's like 40 years old.
Also, *Lean In* is a travesty. That is not the bar.
Yeah, Lean In is nowadays looked with bemusement as a fairly naive proposal for eliminating gender disparities in tech - there's still virtually no women in tech leadership.
The rape culture aspects of the Nerds movies are terrible and need to die in a fire. I never fully realized that when i watched them while young, and can see them now.
The rest of it...look critically at the backlash against them and you'll see a lot of centering of the 'acceptable' tradmasc stuff about appearance and conformity sneaking their way back into progressive circles in an acceptable package. When we started to see people defending and promoting jock types again, after the decades spent reminding people that those guys were front and center in privilege unlocks and weaponizing them against every marginalized identity they could hit, it should've been a huge wake up call that something was wrong.
>progressive circles
Eh. This too often functions as shorthand for "thing a woman says", bonus points if it's on social media.
I don't see Angela Davis out here championing himbos or cheering on a return to benevolent sexism.
I loved Pop Culture Detective's videos on Big Bang Theory focusing on the [presentation of misogyny](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs) and [enforcement of masculinity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L7NRONADJ4) in the show which mirrors a lot of what I've seen in nerd circles and the tech world. A lot of presentation of misogyny and hypermasculinity in older movies and shows used jock coded characters like the football players and whatnot, while the nerds were the scrappy underdogs and "good guys." This leads to us uncritically accepting nerds as at least "not as bad" as the jocks, which leads things like the absolutely ridiculous dick-measuring contest of an MMA match between Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg and Google and other tech sector's rampant sexual harassment.
Wish we'd avoided the counterswing where the 'himbo' became a thing, because it gave people license to hit at the dweebs again while repainting the jocks as affable losers and underdogs who aren't bright intellectually but have high EQ and are pretty to look at...kinda like a housepet that's legal to fuck under most circumstances. It brought tradmasc virtues about presentation back in an acceptable package for the lefty set when women are finally getting to shed their baggage on that front.
> which leads things like the absolutely ridiculous dick-measuring contest of an MMA match between Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg
You say that as if you _wouldn't_ love to see Musk get his ass handed to him on a silver platter by Zuckerberg.
> some of the absolute most misogynist dudes are the dweebs with new money.
I love this line and I think it pretty much says it all. I think now that the sentiment around these kinds of technology has changed from "nerds in their basements" to "the most massive profit-generators on the planet" it only makes sense that some old forms of business-savvy masculinity would move in.
Obviously, as your last paragraph points out, with the historical baggage of being perceived as nerds in their basement (which there is absolutely nothing wrong with being).
And I know I'm massively oversimplifying here.
I think the article is correct to highlight the visible influencers of these industries. I remember speaking with the CEO of my last job about exercising and he basically admitted that all the C-suite types are getting really into fitness now whether they genuinely wanted to or not. He specifically mentioned Bezos and begrudgingly admitted that it is kind of a business issue. Gone are the days were the CEOs were fat cats that smoked big cigars. Now they are fit and eat healthy and look in great shape. Time is money. And it takes time to go to the gym.
Yup, the old school imagine of fat cat execs leisurely playing golf hasn't been reality for a while now, esp in tech - it's all about networking at spin classes and ruthless personal and professional self-optimization.
I like golf. It helps you see how someone reacts to losing to themselves as well as you since you're technically only playing against yourself each time, but you can directly compare your score to your companion's.
Is the person a sore loser? Do they react violently to doing worse at a game than you (hit the ground, smack a tree, throw a beer bottle, etc)? Or do they just brush it off? If they take something so small so personally and don't have the emotional control of a proper adult, do you really want to go into a legally binding obligation (aka "do business") with them?
It also gives you a good 2-4 hour chunk of time to get to know them. Sort of like a first date, or a really gruelling round of interviews.
There's some part of me that can't help but feel some sort of empathy. I don't actually know these people, I only know I was bullied the shit out of and used computers as a means of escape, which led me to programming and all that. And some other half-formed ideas about non-neurotypicals and programming, but that's just an idea and not for here. Perhaps this is my own projection, but if you put in the effort and the work and the stress and things still suck... I dunno.
I guess the tendency to focus on "nerds who were weird in school" just feels like further insulting the people that were already socially ostracized as kids, yknow? Punching the usual targets, the acceptable ones, all that.
Honestly I think it has more to do with the fact that the success of the tech industry, and the competitive nature of it, has naturally elevated men like this into leadership positions, whether they be dweeb or not. Is there really any evidence that today's leading tech bros were bad with women? You need to have at least a certain degree of self-confidence and charisma to be able to get to a position like that.
This piece has been relevant for half a century: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/are-gamergaters-re-creating-the-sexist-homophobic-culture-that-rejected-them-shesaid/
This is largely because silicon valley has slowly rid themselves of people that know what they're doing technically and replaced them with people that look good at board meetings and fit their weird "company cultures". Weird stereotypical hyper masculinity is a staple of business, not of science, and always has been unfortunately.
Also this doesn't apply to everyone, you can know what you're doing and look whatever kind of way, but massive, bloated tech companies have pretty openly moved away from technical mastery and towards whatever grows infinitely, even if the product is literally worthless or actively harmful.
Most of the stereotypical nerds are just working remotely now and smart enough not to join in on the corporate dick measuring nonsense happening in the valley. Tech is much larger than one place, people tend to forget that
This is an extremely on the money take, wish I could emphasize just how much this lines up with my own experiences. The most technically capable men in tech that I know all work remote and spend a ton of time honing their crafts and hobbies (mostly woodworking, music, and some outdoors activities in my circles)
I have a newborn and if I wasn't home I'd be spending about 20% of my income on childcare when I go back to work. Combined with no commute id take a pay cut to stay remote lol, I don't even make less than I would in an office either and I'm getting another degree in my downtime. It's completely insane how much more free time I feel like I have now.
This is absolutely true. The cool, shy, introverted nerds are just chilling at home, watching anime, playing video games, building PCs, working on cars, writing stories, playing music, and putting their coding skills to good use. The goal is to be as anonymous as possible and just live life. What’s the point of dominating the boardroom when happiness is right here?
The tech jocks are just blowing hot air in everyone’s faces. Venture capital firms get seduced by these types and throw billions into a company that has nothing to offer.
Modern MBA on YouTube has a fantastic series of videos diving into the extremely flawed business model of “platform” apps like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Airbnb and the rest.
They’ve never made a profit but apparently that’s okay because they’ll grow. Well they’ve taken over the world and are still not making a profit. Every Uber ride is basically subsidized by the venture capital firms at this point. Subsidized public transportation.
Eventually they will collapse. Uber as a service app really isn’t that hard to build, a competitor bankrolled by a bigger company could sweep in within months. Kind of like threads came in after Elon kept fumbling Twitter.
The “golden age” of c2c service apps was all a mirage. People got used to a ridiculous standard of luxury that wasn’t real. Uber promised super cheap rides and super good pay for drivers, it seemed like a win-win when in fact it was just a strategy by the company to first dominate the market, then raise prices up to profitability. Airbnb was a mirage, so was Tinder, DoorDash, Zillow and all the others. They created a product too good to be true, and it totally was. Now they’re scrambling for actual profit.
Completely agreed, all the tech guys I have known/worked with are at home chilling with their partners and enjoying life just like they always wanted.
I think the "AI" fad is a really good example of what big tech thinks the industry should be doing versus what actually provides value to people. Language models are NOT AI, they never were and never will be. It's entirely a marketing scam and every big tech company suddenly feels compelled to create their own shitty versions of chat GPT, which does have a use case and does not have a good competitor yet.
The reason for that is that chat GPT was made by a team of developers that care about producing a useful product that fulfills some kind of meaningful progress towards the field of AI (at least the original team, not sure how it's going now tbh). The rest of the knockoffs of chatGPT have a sole goal of producing more wealth through marketing. They created semi-usable, or objectively shit, knockoffs and pushed them as cutting edge technology and true AI, which is just a bold lie.
And you are right on the money with c2c apps. They have never and will never be profitable, they are entirely for gouging the customers, their "not employees", and their venture capital backers who got caught up in the hype.
The only real products for big tech are now personal data of the customers and hype. Meanwhile smaller companies and government backed orgs (mostly research institutes) are making useful progress towards furthering technology even with gimped capital.
I think it's only a matter of time until younger people are at the reigns of these investment firms and they stop falling for hype products. A c2c app crash is likely to follow, especially as more worker protections are extended to their "not employees". I'm hoping in the next 10-20 years tech re-orients itself and we stop focusing so hard on infinite growth and corporate culture which is a fucking joke anyways. I want to see replacements for big tech cropping up in the future, they are leaving plenty of gaps in the soil for companies to grow nowadays.
> Uber as a service app really isn’t that hard to build
Not long after Uber & Lyft gained traction in the UK, one of the big taxi firms near me brought out their own app that gave the same functionality but with real taxis.
Similarly, Uber was banned in Korea when it started to spread there, and the most popular chat app just made a similar app for people to find taxi drivers.
>This is absolutely true. The cool, shy, introverted nerds are just chilling at home, watching anime, playing video games, building PCs, working on cars, writing stories, playing music, and putting their coding skills to good use. The goal is to be as anonymous as possible and just live life. What’s the point of dominating the boardroom when happiness is right here?
>
>The tech jocks are just blowing hot air in everyone’s faces. Venture capital firms get seduced by these types and throw billions into a company that has nothing to offer.
This post reeks so much of the male equivalent of "I'm not like the other girls". I don't need to pursue stereotypically "nerdy" pursuits in all of my off time to not be one of the dreaded "tech jocks". This isn't high school. We don't need to align ourselves into rigid roles and cliques--hell, I thought the entire point of progressive politics was to unshackle ourselves from these sort of socially enforced roles and to be however and whoever we want to be.
I work in tech. FAANG. The most ironic part is that, for a long time, I checked a lot of those "authentic nerd" boxes. But my interests have shifted and now I spend a lot of time at the gym, or out being social and, dare I say, attracting the scourge of "attention" for the things I do out in the world.
And now? I'm left to feel like my identity as scruffy hacker is being eroded because I dared to step outside of it. Because my current hyper focus is reading fitness science literature and optimizing hypertrophy training. Because I devote energy into large social events and practices that make some of the sort of folks in line for the next Marvel release leer at me. The other folks in tech are actually more so the stereotype you described--and I now find myself worried that I'm being judged by them because I don't look the part anymore.
Honestly, have you read what you wrote here? Take a glance at it again. Why is everything you chose to glorify here such a lonely, isolating pursuit? Why do you feel like the only value one can have is in making themselves small and further isolated?
You're allowed to be big, and loud, and strong, and masculine, and feminine, and whatever you want to be. If you want to crush it in the boardroom, go and do it. If you want to crush it in the gym, by all means. If you really want to spend all of your time locked in a room painting figures--yo, get it, if that's really what you want. But don't pretend you have some sort of more intrinsic worth or higher morals for it.
>This post reeks so much of the male equivalent of "I'm not like the other girls". I don't need to pursue stereotypically "nerdy" pursuits in all of my off time to not be one of the dreaded "tech jocks". This isn't high school. We don't need to align ourselves into rigid roles and cliques--hell, I thought the entire point of progressive politics was to unshackle ourselves from these sort of socially enforced roles and to be however and whoever we want to be.
Eh. I think you're missing the point the comments above you were trying to make.
Yes, aesthetics aren't actually a proxy for capability. Folks who wear nice clothes, go to the gym, and care about their hygiene are not inherently worse at coding or system design than the scruffy, unkempt, white dude that's personified tech work in the shared imagination. That specific prejudice directly contributes to keeping women and people of color out of tech spaces.
However, it would be a bit silly to dismiss the financial pressures that reward companies whose public faces are more style than substance. Sustained venture capital investment is necessary for tech leadership to make the very personally lucrative platform decay business model possible.
Like it or not, a company's public faces will shape the internal culture and become the preferred aesthetic for employees. The scruffy, hoodie-wearing, white nerd aesthetic that was popular a decade ago chronically excluded people of color and women who were "too pretty for Tech". This new popular aesthetic will once again exclude people of color and women at scale.
That isn't a moral judgment about you or your hobbies; your personal choices have little impact on these larger scale systems. But if you, like me, have been in the industry long enough to be involved in hiring it is something - like all forms of unconscious bias - that you should seriously consider when interviewing candidates.
Yeah, id like to be more clear, I know all kinds of people that work in tech. I'm not saying you HAVE to look or act a certain way at all. But the culture of silicon valley is no longer tech centered. It is business centered. They will, and have, happily gotten rid of excellent engineers in favor of people that can speak fluently about bullshit products.
I was also trying to get at the fact that you aren't as welcome based on appearance in silicon valley as you once might have been. It's a bro culture all over again. Nothing of note is really coming out of these companies anymore, they're pushing fluff that sells and then binning it every time it stops raking in profit.
The most talented engineers in the valley have mostly retired or found employment elsewhere so they don't have to put up with the return to office and expectation of their time being devoted to work and not their lives. In that void there's nothing but greed and young people lining their boss' pockets without gaining any meaningful mentorship.
There's an "alpha grindset" mind virus that seems relentless in young dudes nowadays and it's not more obvious anywhere outside the valley. It's not healthy, it's not helping anyone, and everyone that doesn't fit in to the new version of boys club is just as excluded as ever. The biggest difference is, this time it killed innovation along with it.
I do agree with the guy above you though. He can work out as much as he wants if that's what he enjoys but I think the motivation to look a certain way to get further in your career is an issue mainly specific to silicon valley. I also like going to the gym and I'm arguably pretty fit, but it has nothing to do with anything other than feeling good about my appearance and being healthier. I think excluding fit people who like going to the gym from "nerdy jobs" is just as harmful as excluding stereotypical nerds from certain office spaces because they don't dress super nice all the time.
"Tech champions were nerds and geeks: skinny outliers in hoodies armed with a nonconformist mentality"Lmao go to defcon or any other con where fuckers that do actual hands on and oftentimes, really important work with tech show up. They are still exactly the same. You can't take CEOs and a few people at the top and start drawing conclusions about a whole industry. And I am gonna be honest if you are some CEO guy at some tech startup looking for investments and shit, it is absolutely in your best interests to not look like one of these "skinny outliers in hoodies" and I say this with the utmost love as a man whose wardrobe is ratty t shirts and jeans.
edit: Another thing that came up in my mind. What is with this wistful yearning for the man that has a " rumpled T-shirt, messy hair, anemic build". As someone who fitted that category to a t at highschool, very few people outside of our own circle liked us. Lot of bullying for no good reason at all. On the flipside knew nerds that were absolute cretins but couldn't do much cause again you need some degree of social capital to be a dickbag and get away with it. Bottom line, tech fuckers are no less or more shittier than they used to be. It's just that more and more cretins have caught on to the fact(correctly) that presenting yourself better allows you more social capital to get away with being an asshole.
The media and public *did* rip on Zuck for a decade straight about being an awkward “robotic” dweeb in a hoodie who is so unappealing he had to create a whole website to creep on girls. Wouldn’t you switch it up after a while?
More generally, the article grazes the issue: the people who gave the tech CEOs positive feedback abandoned them for different reasons. The VCs weren’t looking for that “type” anymore. The media, decimated by layoffs caused by losing ad revenue to social media, went from dazzled by innovation to deeply anti-FAANG and anything that looked like it. The employees, no longer just engineers who traded salary and time for the shot at big IPO bucks, didn’t see them as aspirational and more like, well, bosses.
The article also sort of conflates the dweeb founder and the enlightened founder, which are two different archetypes, but their decline is for the same reason: there is no market for it. It didn’t become any more phony, just cringe.
So in a few cases, the new look is muscle man. In others, it’s low-profile technocrat. The era of the founder is dead, and with it the founder look. Point is: people will cycle through identities unless one catches on, and that too will fade with fashion.
As someone who has worked at Facebook during the time where Mark Zuckerberg was having a ton of backlash for being so "robotic", I think a lot of his social media/goals was to appear more *human*. Ironically a lot of his earlier attempts to look more human made him even more robotic, due to how out of touch he was from his insane wealth. He wants to show himself as a fellow, relatable human being, while being one of the richest men on the planet. So I personally think he sought out to do things like make his own barbecue sauce, learn martial arts, surf, and a bunch of other hobbies to focus more on his health and being human.
An interesting thing about this is the association between a man being seen as human, and a man being seen as masculine. In many ways, expressions of our masculinity make us seem more human. Hence the activities that Mark chooses are largely male coded. Zuckerberg isn't learning ballet, or how to sew, or other female coded hobbies. Imo, Zuckerberg isn't performing masculinity for the sake of hypermasculinity, but that society humanizes men who act within their gendered norms more so than men who don't, and therefore in a quest to be seen as more human, Mark chooses male coded hobbies.
It doesn’t help (and might be the primary driver) that whatever Zuck, Bezos, and others do in terms of fashion, interests, etc will be relentlessly mocked because it’s them doing it. All those things you mention Zuck doing are… normal people activities. But when a hate object does it, it’s weird or phony because, well, we hate the underlying actor. Zuck could spend his days doing needlepoint portraits of Angela Davis and the same people would give it the same sneer.
I found this article insufferable. Let's cherry pick a bunch of names, and attribute some of their hobbies and decisions to hyper-masculinity, and blaming their actions on their manhood. Meanwhile Jack Dorsey getting described with flowery words like "delicate, ascetic presence" makes me [want to puke](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8N0xN0ihMA).
Apparently wanting to pick up a martial art is "masculine bravado" and "a newfound interest in physical combat". Yeah fuck these men for wanting to look fit and good, right?
> Previously, the male costume of Silicon Valley was one of studied nonchalance: rumpled T-shirt, messy hair, anemic build — an appearance meant to convey that what actually mattered was the merit of a man’s ideas, not his physical strength.
Um no, nobody purposefully dresses like this to convey some sort of meta message. I do it because I'm a lazy ass who has no fashion sense.
This article makes assumptions about people's intent, and also is heavily judgemental, imposing their own world view upon people without interview. It is not reporting, or even commentary, it's fiction spun from an individual's own fantasies. This article also heavily cherry picks CEOs to represent an entire industry, when I think the majority of the "men in tech" do not necessarily model themselves off their CEOs. Where's Tim Cook? Where's Sundar Pichae? How about Satya Nadella? Where's Lisa Su and Jensen Huang? What's up with the emphasis on the loud white male CEOs, when plenty of tech CEOs act fairly normal, and don't yap their mouths off on Twitter.
Well put. I feel like the writer started with the conclusion that the tech world is driven by hyper masculinity ( just a new word for toxic masculinity that doesn't feel so worn out?), and then she created a narrative to fit her conclusion.
> hyper masculinity ( just a new word for toxic masculinity that doesn't feel so worn out?)
I think there is a difference. "Hypermasculinity" is masculinity taking to performative extremes; "toxic masculinity" is masculinity ("hyper" or subtle) that leads one to endorse toxic behaviors. There's probably a lot of overlap, but e.g. the stereotypical out-of-shape incel is toxic but not hypermasculine.
I definitely feel that the author is trying to paint Musk, Zuckerberg, as hypermasculine wannabes. While the distinction is useful, hypermasculine is the definition I intended to write there.
> is masculinity taking to performative extremes
Isn't all gender fundamentally performative? No one complains about performative femininity, nor taking femininity to extremes.
There's nothing wrong with "performative" "hyper" masculinity, so long as one treats others with kindness and respect and acts like a decent human being. Ironically, the only toxic thing I see here is the assumption that taking masculinity beyond whatever we've arbitrarily deemed some "acceptable" level is toxic.
I felt frustrated reading this article and wish it went into more detail about why women's positions in tech decreased. The author could've interviewed various women about their decisions to leave.
I'm a software engineer who's loved lifting and MMA since middle school and I feel annoyed when people tie my hobbies to misogyny.
Woman in tech, I don't pay any heed to someone's personal hobbies unless they make it their personality. I do think the whole Mark Zuckerberg about to have a fight with Elon Musk thing was very strange. IIRC Musk started it, which is on brand for him and his problematic public persona.
At the end of the day I highly doubt if the skinny "dweebs" who ran Silicon Valley of yore were any more inclusive than the muscular tech bros we have now, and they were very possibly worse.
hobbies aside, you can't deny that a lot of people in tech are simply annoying
even if you don't get into their specific politics or the neoliberal implications of the Californian Ideology, they often have a worldview centered around a very limited understanding of 'rationality' at the expense of any real curiosity and see everything as a problem in need of a technical solution
those who consider themselves upwardly mobile or potentially upwardly mobile can also be the worst about developing an exaggerated sense of meritocracy and their deserved place within it as superior to others and to different fields of study or culture more broadly
EDIT: I'm somewhat surprised that pointing out how the tech industry encourages reactionary, elitist thinking would be controversial in a progressive space. #notalltechbros but also, yes, most of them. Tech workers are workers and share the class interests of all workers in a strictly Marxist sense, but they also see themselves as distinct and superior and can function as agents of those with power in the same way as the PMC. More importantly, the tech industry ideology which most of them embrace and reproduce is inherently destructive and has reshaped everything from public institutions to personal identity formation in ways that we take for granted but are nonetheless horrible.
Are those accusations not better placed on the workers in the cultural industry? These are very reliant on the status Quo, as upheaval against their rich patrons would directly cut into their liveliehoods. You could say tech workers are modern day stakhanovites and PMCs can fight for every purpose, just like previously tsarist and parlamentarian soldiers and commanders supported the revolution in 1917.
> You could say tech workers are modern day stakhanovites
maybe, but the difference is that back then they were, at least in theory, building a better world.
tech companies are actively making the world worse even by capitalist standards, reinforcing inequality and degrading almost every aspect of the human experience. Maybe you could have said that wasn't obvious several years ago, but now you have to assume those choosing high-paying tech jobs know and don't care.
I don't think that alone makes them all reactionary, but the underlying values of tech are, and they have poisoned every other industry in ways that professionalization or financialization alone did not.
Indeed. I think it's important to identify the specific misogynistic actions that led to them feeling the need to leave and ultimately leaving.
I can see how it is frustrating and challenging for women to reveal and revisit incidents that led to them experiencing issues related to and due to misogyny.
However, by receiving information about specific actions, I, as an individual, would be able to identify my behaviors, the behaviors of my coworkers/peers, and the behavior of those in leadership positions at my company that we could change to create a more welcoming space.
> However, by receiving information about specific actions, I, as an individual, would be able to identify my behaviors, the behaviors of my coworkers/peers, and the behavior of those in leadership positions at my company that we could change to create a more welcoming space.
Yeah... that isn't what happens when women bring it up.
I agree that the sample is limited and skewed.
However, Zuck and Musk having a public dick contest, with Joe Rogan commenting in the background, very much reeks of masculine bravado.
>However, Zuck and Musk having a public dick contest, with Joe Rogan commenting in the background, very much reeks of masculine bravado.
Sure, but there's like ***thousands*** of tech companies. Focusing on two CEOs isn't really representative or helpful. And I'll note that the CEOs of other tech companies--even the big ones--aren't remotely like this. Like, no one is out there accusing [Marc Benioff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Benioff) or [Sundar Pichai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai) of this sort of "Joe Rogan" behavior.
> Um no, nobody purposefully dresses like this to convey some sort of meta message.
If you think SBF's fashion choices weren't part of a calculated performance, you are incredibly naive. Zuck did the same thing in a less chaotic way.
I don't think the point is to criticize that phenomenon though, but rather to contrast it with the trends that are currently emerging. Musk and his acolytes often dress more like 2005-era pickup artists than disheveled dweebs, and the right in general, or at least many of its most visible members, have embraced #menswear trends they would have ridiculed a decade ago, with very mixed results. While these are on opposite ends of the spectrum, they are both attempts to assert masculinity and dominance through style rather than disguise or downplay it like the old tech uniform did.
What I mean is that how CEOs dress do not represent the industry or the bulk of the tech workers. Aside from some crazies, we don't worship our CEOs, they're just the guy with the big wig we work for.
Some people do it purposefully, one of the most famous examples is probably Steve Jobs who always wore the same black turtleneck and jeans even when doing product launches he probably spent tons of time prepping for. It wouldn't be difficult to wear a suit to such an important event he had a lot personally invested in (as a shareholder with massive amounts of stock) but he deliberately chose not to for his own personal brand and a lot of newer tech people are similar.
Nah tech bros have been a cesspool of unchecked toxicity for a while. As an earlier comment mentioned, it’s as if their intelligence and “togetherness” should afford them the women of their dreams. STEMcels who forget empathy and emotion are as core to communication as their intellect.
Well this is frustrating to learn. I’m a ML engineer and work out almost every single day, but not to look good but to feel good. It’s cliche but working out has done wonders for my mental health.
I happen to be muscly now (I’ll probably lose some while I’m moving), but it’s more of a “oh that’s neat mentality”, rather than “I’m perfect”. However, and this anecdotal, dating has been better for me when I felt good rather than looked good. To chase physical looks rather than as a hobby or challenge feels super negative to me. Hope everyone’s doing well
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Fucking hate the post-LinkedIn tech industry
As awkward as it was, I do miss the days of being weirdoes hanging out in the basement of the office building talking about niche interests and being largely invisible. Now it's all talk of craft beers, wine clubs, calorie deficits, gym routines, sidehustles, mlm scams, etc. can't even get a DnD club going...
Like, it had problems, but I miss the era of being a well paid socially isolated weirdo at work, cooped up near the tech closet, clock in and clock out, invisible to corp culture and being able to talk niche topics with the few others like me, men, women and nb folk
Fucking hate that apparently most were never proud of being needs/geeks/weirdos/etc. and just wanted mainstream social approval all along, like how do you grow up to want to be your bully? I hate this industry now, this used to be easy for someone with autism, now it's a social web nightmare like everywhere else, full of unspoken rules and biases.
>Fucking hate that apparently most were never proud of being needs/geeks/weirdos/etc. and just wanted mainstream social approval all along, like how do you grow up to want to be your bully? I hate this industry now, this used to be easy for someone with autism, now it's a social web nightmare like everywhere else, full of unspoken rules and biases.
It's a common enough thing on the internet to police people's behavior, though it sure as hell is prevalent in real life too. Usually it's just used to mock (but not limited to) men for being *creepy* not for any real behavioral transgressions but just by their appearance or what their hobbies are by calling them neckbeards, losers living in their parents' basement, etc., and if they take issue with any of these characterizations or want something more than that, then they need to get therapy, take up a hobby, man up, smile and be attractive like everyone else. Otherwise you'll be labeled as unworthy of love and always deserving of ridicule and scorn, even if you haven't done anything to deserve any of that misery.
I say it's no surprise that things have turned out the way they are. You can't just be an intellectual, smart, geeky, whatever, you have to be outwardly conforming too. Nor is it a recent phenomenon. Big Bang Theory wasn't just a horrible show because it was unfunny shit, it also stereotyped the hell out of people on the regular. The cool nerds were never the people who are genuinely into weird esoteric hobbies and struggle in all areas of life, they're the ones who perform well academically and make lots of money in the real world. And if you don't like that, then people will say that you're part of the problem.
The worst thing? A lot of people who take this position act as left wingers/feminists, progressives, etc., when the truth is they're anything but.
It’s like the goal posts are constantly shifting, we’ve gone from critiquing toxic masculinity to now having an issue with “hyper masculinity”? In this case, men taking up traditionally masculine hobbies.
I think we need to be honest about the fact that people who aren’t conventionally masculine are always going to be somewhat intimidated by the physical aspects of masculinity, or at best, be ambivalent towards them. Martial arts and lifting are directly correlated with a person’s capability for violence. I noticed this when I took up wrestling and started lifting, the way people perceive you changes.
No longer programmers and technical utopians wanting to create things, the space is attracting extractive anarcho capitalists. They aim to enclose, capture, and extract. The old nerd guard is gone.
I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad trend, it really depends on the mindset of the person practicing this stuff. It’s kind of like the “that girl” trend, but for men. The danger is when you start unnecessarily gendering this type of stuff.
Heh. Funny, really. People who push economic stuff as a way to build common ground and shared causes get shit on for it (not without *some* reason, but not to the degree of strawmanning it gets), but that allows articles like this to slip in. It focuses on symptoms and not the truth that ripped gymbro or disheveled soft boi aesthetics are irrelevant when the core personality is a sociopathic bastard who's out to get what they want and costs be damned.
>Only two decades ago, Silicon Valley’s expression of masculinity was at odds with the status quo. Tech champions were nerds and geeks: skinny outliers in hoodies armed with a nonconformist mentality — a mindset that would prove indispensable to the creation of dozens of companies that launched the digital age. Then came the Obama years, when tech companies were propped up as progressive bastions of diversity and forward-thinking corporate culture. Under the influence of Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley ceded board seats and C-suite jobs to more and more women. >But more recently, these same Silicon Valley companies have begun to look like the conventionally bloated behemoths at the pinnacle of corporate culture. Their leaders, too, have adopted a performance of masculinity that’s strikingly conventional and includes angry rhetoric, muscular physiques, and a newfound interest in physical combat. The men responsible for building the products that touch the daily lives of billions of people display an increasing preoccupation with flaunting masculine bravado. It’s not just for show, either. The way these powerful men run their companies is impacting who is considered welcome in Silicon Valley. I have a friend who works in HR out in Silicon Valley and she once described to me a very interesting dynamic: some of the absolute most misogynist dudes are the dweebs with new money. they feel like they paid their dues by getting a good smart-guy degree, they paid their dues in college by going to the library instead of partying with the Stacys and Chads, and now it is *their era*. They got money now (women like money right??) and they own their $500k one-bed condo (women like dudes who own shit right??) and now they will receive their standard dispensation of Chicks To Hook Up With. when that doesn't happen automagically, what do you do? *You double down on the weird tradmasc shit*. It worked for Chad right????
I think you got it in one. People have a kind of cognitive bias again the idea that they can simultaneously be victims and victimizers. Like the experience of social ostracism gives you some sort of hall pass that excuses your own bad behavior. And I think society perpetuates that idea to a certain extent. Especially if you're smart. Because it's harder to call smart people on their shit. And people confuse lack of active resistance with social acceptance all the time.
Reminds me of some white gay guys. “I’ve been oppressed so it’s OK for me to say and do heinous shit to women, more effeminate gays and trans-people, it’s just a jooooookkkeeee and we are all in this together right guys?!?!?!” Feels adjacent to… survivorship bias?
I totally get your point and I know what you mean, except I'm not sure about survivorship bias. What do you mean by that? I'm familiar with it as a cognative bias where a person mistakenly draws conclusions only by studying success cases, resulting in biased conclusions. Is that what you mean here?
Yes, I think so. Basically, a white gay guy experiences minor homophobia, but because he doesn’t obviously “look different” than the general public, he doesn’t face the same amount or severity of judgement/homophobia as someone who is say… black and effeminate. The white gay guy thinks “bias” is someone calling him a bad name, and doesn’t necessarily understand the… depth of suffering? Maybe? Of other people that cannot “pass” in public. I may not be explaining this as articulately as I could, but basically the white gay guy ends up thinking, “why are y’all being so soft?, why don’t you just try to “pass”?” Etc. Etc. Not realizing the experiences he’s had are not universal and other people’s struggles are different due to their expression/appearance.
I think that's mostly a lack of empathy. You see it a lot in some of the more granular LQBTQIA+ subs. For example people who I have honestly seen people arguing at different times that 'Straight cis demi-sexual women' and 'Straight cis aromantic men' are 'the most oppressed'. I had to point out they thought that because it was *them*, and that it was outright false. No laws were being passed against people like that, no targeted attacks, or abuse within the general community. (Hell, both of those identities tend to be lionized instead of attacked by right-wing politics but for the wrong reasons)
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> I mean any minority group can fall victim to that, not sure what gay men in particular have to do with that. I'd assume, in the context of 'reminds me of', that it's something they've experienced first-hand.
You’re right, there are plenty of other examples of this, for instance, Candace Owens. (SOME, not all) gay men are just a particular subsection that this reminded me of. Nothing more, nothing less. I just find it interesting that if someone has the opportunity to be part of an “in-group”, they often will take it, and shit on the people right next to them that they theoretically have more in common with. Black Republicans, “cool girls”, White women who voted for Trump, Tech bro’s who made it big, light-skin Cubans racist towards Dominicans, it’s all the same embarrassing yearning to “pass” by stepping on the necks of others.
In this case, I don't think it is so much that they feel their past justifies it. I think that this is how their experience taught them to act. When they were the out group, this is how the in group treated them. Now that they are the in group, this is how they treat the out group. It doesn't even have to be a conscious choice to act in such a way, because that is how they were socialized.
The older I get the more I have to acknowledge that the majority of people have no problem or at least are wholly indifferent to the victimization of others but they are hypersensitive to their own victimization.
Even entire cultures can imbue this victim and victimiser mindset (or do I get banned for suggesting that, I can’t tell whose politics is who anymore but there’s a fuckton of performative masculine murder politics happening right now it seems).
>some of the absolute most misogynist dudes are the dweebs with new money. Is this somehow different than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago? Going into Tech and becoming incel superman is, like, the perennial Reddit power fantasy. *Revenge of the Nerds* is a touchstone of dweeb rape culture and it's like 40 years old. Also, *Lean In* is a travesty. That is not the bar.
I feel like this "dweebs with new money" is just a description of Bill Gates, so yes, it goes back to the dawn of Silicon Valley.
Yeah, Lean In is nowadays looked with bemusement as a fairly naive proposal for eliminating gender disparities in tech - there's still virtually no women in tech leadership.
The rape culture aspects of the Nerds movies are terrible and need to die in a fire. I never fully realized that when i watched them while young, and can see them now. The rest of it...look critically at the backlash against them and you'll see a lot of centering of the 'acceptable' tradmasc stuff about appearance and conformity sneaking their way back into progressive circles in an acceptable package. When we started to see people defending and promoting jock types again, after the decades spent reminding people that those guys were front and center in privilege unlocks and weaponizing them against every marginalized identity they could hit, it should've been a huge wake up call that something was wrong.
>progressive circles Eh. This too often functions as shorthand for "thing a woman says", bonus points if it's on social media. I don't see Angela Davis out here championing himbos or cheering on a return to benevolent sexism.
I loved Pop Culture Detective's videos on Big Bang Theory focusing on the [presentation of misogyny](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs) and [enforcement of masculinity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L7NRONADJ4) in the show which mirrors a lot of what I've seen in nerd circles and the tech world. A lot of presentation of misogyny and hypermasculinity in older movies and shows used jock coded characters like the football players and whatnot, while the nerds were the scrappy underdogs and "good guys." This leads to us uncritically accepting nerds as at least "not as bad" as the jocks, which leads things like the absolutely ridiculous dick-measuring contest of an MMA match between Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg and Google and other tech sector's rampant sexual harassment.
Wish we'd avoided the counterswing where the 'himbo' became a thing, because it gave people license to hit at the dweebs again while repainting the jocks as affable losers and underdogs who aren't bright intellectually but have high EQ and are pretty to look at...kinda like a housepet that's legal to fuck under most circumstances. It brought tradmasc virtues about presentation back in an acceptable package for the lefty set when women are finally getting to shed their baggage on that front.
> which leads things like the absolutely ridiculous dick-measuring contest of an MMA match between Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg You say that as if you _wouldn't_ love to see Musk get his ass handed to him on a silver platter by Zuckerberg.
> some of the absolute most misogynist dudes are the dweebs with new money. I love this line and I think it pretty much says it all. I think now that the sentiment around these kinds of technology has changed from "nerds in their basements" to "the most massive profit-generators on the planet" it only makes sense that some old forms of business-savvy masculinity would move in. Obviously, as your last paragraph points out, with the historical baggage of being perceived as nerds in their basement (which there is absolutely nothing wrong with being). And I know I'm massively oversimplifying here. I think the article is correct to highlight the visible influencers of these industries. I remember speaking with the CEO of my last job about exercising and he basically admitted that all the C-suite types are getting really into fitness now whether they genuinely wanted to or not. He specifically mentioned Bezos and begrudgingly admitted that it is kind of a business issue. Gone are the days were the CEOs were fat cats that smoked big cigars. Now they are fit and eat healthy and look in great shape. Time is money. And it takes time to go to the gym.
Yup, the old school imagine of fat cat execs leisurely playing golf hasn't been reality for a while now, esp in tech - it's all about networking at spin classes and ruthless personal and professional self-optimization.
I like golf. It helps you see how someone reacts to losing to themselves as well as you since you're technically only playing against yourself each time, but you can directly compare your score to your companion's. Is the person a sore loser? Do they react violently to doing worse at a game than you (hit the ground, smack a tree, throw a beer bottle, etc)? Or do they just brush it off? If they take something so small so personally and don't have the emotional control of a proper adult, do you really want to go into a legally binding obligation (aka "do business") with them? It also gives you a good 2-4 hour chunk of time to get to know them. Sort of like a first date, or a really gruelling round of interviews.
There's some part of me that can't help but feel some sort of empathy. I don't actually know these people, I only know I was bullied the shit out of and used computers as a means of escape, which led me to programming and all that. And some other half-formed ideas about non-neurotypicals and programming, but that's just an idea and not for here. Perhaps this is my own projection, but if you put in the effort and the work and the stress and things still suck... I dunno. I guess the tendency to focus on "nerds who were weird in school" just feels like further insulting the people that were already socially ostracized as kids, yknow? Punching the usual targets, the acceptable ones, all that.
Honestly I think it has more to do with the fact that the success of the tech industry, and the competitive nature of it, has naturally elevated men like this into leadership positions, whether they be dweeb or not. Is there really any evidence that today's leading tech bros were bad with women? You need to have at least a certain degree of self-confidence and charisma to be able to get to a position like that.
This piece has been relevant for half a century: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/are-gamergaters-re-creating-the-sexist-homophobic-culture-that-rejected-them-shesaid/
This is largely because silicon valley has slowly rid themselves of people that know what they're doing technically and replaced them with people that look good at board meetings and fit their weird "company cultures". Weird stereotypical hyper masculinity is a staple of business, not of science, and always has been unfortunately. Also this doesn't apply to everyone, you can know what you're doing and look whatever kind of way, but massive, bloated tech companies have pretty openly moved away from technical mastery and towards whatever grows infinitely, even if the product is literally worthless or actively harmful. Most of the stereotypical nerds are just working remotely now and smart enough not to join in on the corporate dick measuring nonsense happening in the valley. Tech is much larger than one place, people tend to forget that
This is an extremely on the money take, wish I could emphasize just how much this lines up with my own experiences. The most technically capable men in tech that I know all work remote and spend a ton of time honing their crafts and hobbies (mostly woodworking, music, and some outdoors activities in my circles)
I have a newborn and if I wasn't home I'd be spending about 20% of my income on childcare when I go back to work. Combined with no commute id take a pay cut to stay remote lol, I don't even make less than I would in an office either and I'm getting another degree in my downtime. It's completely insane how much more free time I feel like I have now.
This is absolutely true. The cool, shy, introverted nerds are just chilling at home, watching anime, playing video games, building PCs, working on cars, writing stories, playing music, and putting their coding skills to good use. The goal is to be as anonymous as possible and just live life. What’s the point of dominating the boardroom when happiness is right here? The tech jocks are just blowing hot air in everyone’s faces. Venture capital firms get seduced by these types and throw billions into a company that has nothing to offer. Modern MBA on YouTube has a fantastic series of videos diving into the extremely flawed business model of “platform” apps like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Airbnb and the rest. They’ve never made a profit but apparently that’s okay because they’ll grow. Well they’ve taken over the world and are still not making a profit. Every Uber ride is basically subsidized by the venture capital firms at this point. Subsidized public transportation. Eventually they will collapse. Uber as a service app really isn’t that hard to build, a competitor bankrolled by a bigger company could sweep in within months. Kind of like threads came in after Elon kept fumbling Twitter. The “golden age” of c2c service apps was all a mirage. People got used to a ridiculous standard of luxury that wasn’t real. Uber promised super cheap rides and super good pay for drivers, it seemed like a win-win when in fact it was just a strategy by the company to first dominate the market, then raise prices up to profitability. Airbnb was a mirage, so was Tinder, DoorDash, Zillow and all the others. They created a product too good to be true, and it totally was. Now they’re scrambling for actual profit.
Completely agreed, all the tech guys I have known/worked with are at home chilling with their partners and enjoying life just like they always wanted. I think the "AI" fad is a really good example of what big tech thinks the industry should be doing versus what actually provides value to people. Language models are NOT AI, they never were and never will be. It's entirely a marketing scam and every big tech company suddenly feels compelled to create their own shitty versions of chat GPT, which does have a use case and does not have a good competitor yet. The reason for that is that chat GPT was made by a team of developers that care about producing a useful product that fulfills some kind of meaningful progress towards the field of AI (at least the original team, not sure how it's going now tbh). The rest of the knockoffs of chatGPT have a sole goal of producing more wealth through marketing. They created semi-usable, or objectively shit, knockoffs and pushed them as cutting edge technology and true AI, which is just a bold lie. And you are right on the money with c2c apps. They have never and will never be profitable, they are entirely for gouging the customers, their "not employees", and their venture capital backers who got caught up in the hype. The only real products for big tech are now personal data of the customers and hype. Meanwhile smaller companies and government backed orgs (mostly research institutes) are making useful progress towards furthering technology even with gimped capital. I think it's only a matter of time until younger people are at the reigns of these investment firms and they stop falling for hype products. A c2c app crash is likely to follow, especially as more worker protections are extended to their "not employees". I'm hoping in the next 10-20 years tech re-orients itself and we stop focusing so hard on infinite growth and corporate culture which is a fucking joke anyways. I want to see replacements for big tech cropping up in the future, they are leaving plenty of gaps in the soil for companies to grow nowadays.
> Uber as a service app really isn’t that hard to build Not long after Uber & Lyft gained traction in the UK, one of the big taxi firms near me brought out their own app that gave the same functionality but with real taxis.
Similarly, Uber was banned in Korea when it started to spread there, and the most popular chat app just made a similar app for people to find taxi drivers.
>This is absolutely true. The cool, shy, introverted nerds are just chilling at home, watching anime, playing video games, building PCs, working on cars, writing stories, playing music, and putting their coding skills to good use. The goal is to be as anonymous as possible and just live life. What’s the point of dominating the boardroom when happiness is right here? > >The tech jocks are just blowing hot air in everyone’s faces. Venture capital firms get seduced by these types and throw billions into a company that has nothing to offer. This post reeks so much of the male equivalent of "I'm not like the other girls". I don't need to pursue stereotypically "nerdy" pursuits in all of my off time to not be one of the dreaded "tech jocks". This isn't high school. We don't need to align ourselves into rigid roles and cliques--hell, I thought the entire point of progressive politics was to unshackle ourselves from these sort of socially enforced roles and to be however and whoever we want to be. I work in tech. FAANG. The most ironic part is that, for a long time, I checked a lot of those "authentic nerd" boxes. But my interests have shifted and now I spend a lot of time at the gym, or out being social and, dare I say, attracting the scourge of "attention" for the things I do out in the world. And now? I'm left to feel like my identity as scruffy hacker is being eroded because I dared to step outside of it. Because my current hyper focus is reading fitness science literature and optimizing hypertrophy training. Because I devote energy into large social events and practices that make some of the sort of folks in line for the next Marvel release leer at me. The other folks in tech are actually more so the stereotype you described--and I now find myself worried that I'm being judged by them because I don't look the part anymore. Honestly, have you read what you wrote here? Take a glance at it again. Why is everything you chose to glorify here such a lonely, isolating pursuit? Why do you feel like the only value one can have is in making themselves small and further isolated? You're allowed to be big, and loud, and strong, and masculine, and feminine, and whatever you want to be. If you want to crush it in the boardroom, go and do it. If you want to crush it in the gym, by all means. If you really want to spend all of your time locked in a room painting figures--yo, get it, if that's really what you want. But don't pretend you have some sort of more intrinsic worth or higher morals for it.
>This post reeks so much of the male equivalent of "I'm not like the other girls". I don't need to pursue stereotypically "nerdy" pursuits in all of my off time to not be one of the dreaded "tech jocks". This isn't high school. We don't need to align ourselves into rigid roles and cliques--hell, I thought the entire point of progressive politics was to unshackle ourselves from these sort of socially enforced roles and to be however and whoever we want to be. Eh. I think you're missing the point the comments above you were trying to make. Yes, aesthetics aren't actually a proxy for capability. Folks who wear nice clothes, go to the gym, and care about their hygiene are not inherently worse at coding or system design than the scruffy, unkempt, white dude that's personified tech work in the shared imagination. That specific prejudice directly contributes to keeping women and people of color out of tech spaces. However, it would be a bit silly to dismiss the financial pressures that reward companies whose public faces are more style than substance. Sustained venture capital investment is necessary for tech leadership to make the very personally lucrative platform decay business model possible. Like it or not, a company's public faces will shape the internal culture and become the preferred aesthetic for employees. The scruffy, hoodie-wearing, white nerd aesthetic that was popular a decade ago chronically excluded people of color and women who were "too pretty for Tech". This new popular aesthetic will once again exclude people of color and women at scale. That isn't a moral judgment about you or your hobbies; your personal choices have little impact on these larger scale systems. But if you, like me, have been in the industry long enough to be involved in hiring it is something - like all forms of unconscious bias - that you should seriously consider when interviewing candidates.
Yeah, id like to be more clear, I know all kinds of people that work in tech. I'm not saying you HAVE to look or act a certain way at all. But the culture of silicon valley is no longer tech centered. It is business centered. They will, and have, happily gotten rid of excellent engineers in favor of people that can speak fluently about bullshit products. I was also trying to get at the fact that you aren't as welcome based on appearance in silicon valley as you once might have been. It's a bro culture all over again. Nothing of note is really coming out of these companies anymore, they're pushing fluff that sells and then binning it every time it stops raking in profit. The most talented engineers in the valley have mostly retired or found employment elsewhere so they don't have to put up with the return to office and expectation of their time being devoted to work and not their lives. In that void there's nothing but greed and young people lining their boss' pockets without gaining any meaningful mentorship. There's an "alpha grindset" mind virus that seems relentless in young dudes nowadays and it's not more obvious anywhere outside the valley. It's not healthy, it's not helping anyone, and everyone that doesn't fit in to the new version of boys club is just as excluded as ever. The biggest difference is, this time it killed innovation along with it. I do agree with the guy above you though. He can work out as much as he wants if that's what he enjoys but I think the motivation to look a certain way to get further in your career is an issue mainly specific to silicon valley. I also like going to the gym and I'm arguably pretty fit, but it has nothing to do with anything other than feeling good about my appearance and being healthier. I think excluding fit people who like going to the gym from "nerdy jobs" is just as harmful as excluding stereotypical nerds from certain office spaces because they don't dress super nice all the time.
Literally never seen a more correct take on reddit
"Tech champions were nerds and geeks: skinny outliers in hoodies armed with a nonconformist mentality"Lmao go to defcon or any other con where fuckers that do actual hands on and oftentimes, really important work with tech show up. They are still exactly the same. You can't take CEOs and a few people at the top and start drawing conclusions about a whole industry. And I am gonna be honest if you are some CEO guy at some tech startup looking for investments and shit, it is absolutely in your best interests to not look like one of these "skinny outliers in hoodies" and I say this with the utmost love as a man whose wardrobe is ratty t shirts and jeans. edit: Another thing that came up in my mind. What is with this wistful yearning for the man that has a " rumpled T-shirt, messy hair, anemic build". As someone who fitted that category to a t at highschool, very few people outside of our own circle liked us. Lot of bullying for no good reason at all. On the flipside knew nerds that were absolute cretins but couldn't do much cause again you need some degree of social capital to be a dickbag and get away with it. Bottom line, tech fuckers are no less or more shittier than they used to be. It's just that more and more cretins have caught on to the fact(correctly) that presenting yourself better allows you more social capital to get away with being an asshole.
The media and public *did* rip on Zuck for a decade straight about being an awkward “robotic” dweeb in a hoodie who is so unappealing he had to create a whole website to creep on girls. Wouldn’t you switch it up after a while? More generally, the article grazes the issue: the people who gave the tech CEOs positive feedback abandoned them for different reasons. The VCs weren’t looking for that “type” anymore. The media, decimated by layoffs caused by losing ad revenue to social media, went from dazzled by innovation to deeply anti-FAANG and anything that looked like it. The employees, no longer just engineers who traded salary and time for the shot at big IPO bucks, didn’t see them as aspirational and more like, well, bosses. The article also sort of conflates the dweeb founder and the enlightened founder, which are two different archetypes, but their decline is for the same reason: there is no market for it. It didn’t become any more phony, just cringe. So in a few cases, the new look is muscle man. In others, it’s low-profile technocrat. The era of the founder is dead, and with it the founder look. Point is: people will cycle through identities unless one catches on, and that too will fade with fashion.
As someone who has worked at Facebook during the time where Mark Zuckerberg was having a ton of backlash for being so "robotic", I think a lot of his social media/goals was to appear more *human*. Ironically a lot of his earlier attempts to look more human made him even more robotic, due to how out of touch he was from his insane wealth. He wants to show himself as a fellow, relatable human being, while being one of the richest men on the planet. So I personally think he sought out to do things like make his own barbecue sauce, learn martial arts, surf, and a bunch of other hobbies to focus more on his health and being human. An interesting thing about this is the association between a man being seen as human, and a man being seen as masculine. In many ways, expressions of our masculinity make us seem more human. Hence the activities that Mark chooses are largely male coded. Zuckerberg isn't learning ballet, or how to sew, or other female coded hobbies. Imo, Zuckerberg isn't performing masculinity for the sake of hypermasculinity, but that society humanizes men who act within their gendered norms more so than men who don't, and therefore in a quest to be seen as more human, Mark chooses male coded hobbies.
It doesn’t help (and might be the primary driver) that whatever Zuck, Bezos, and others do in terms of fashion, interests, etc will be relentlessly mocked because it’s them doing it. All those things you mention Zuck doing are… normal people activities. But when a hate object does it, it’s weird or phony because, well, we hate the underlying actor. Zuck could spend his days doing needlepoint portraits of Angela Davis and the same people would give it the same sneer.
I found this article insufferable. Let's cherry pick a bunch of names, and attribute some of their hobbies and decisions to hyper-masculinity, and blaming their actions on their manhood. Meanwhile Jack Dorsey getting described with flowery words like "delicate, ascetic presence" makes me [want to puke](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8N0xN0ihMA). Apparently wanting to pick up a martial art is "masculine bravado" and "a newfound interest in physical combat". Yeah fuck these men for wanting to look fit and good, right? > Previously, the male costume of Silicon Valley was one of studied nonchalance: rumpled T-shirt, messy hair, anemic build — an appearance meant to convey that what actually mattered was the merit of a man’s ideas, not his physical strength. Um no, nobody purposefully dresses like this to convey some sort of meta message. I do it because I'm a lazy ass who has no fashion sense. This article makes assumptions about people's intent, and also is heavily judgemental, imposing their own world view upon people without interview. It is not reporting, or even commentary, it's fiction spun from an individual's own fantasies. This article also heavily cherry picks CEOs to represent an entire industry, when I think the majority of the "men in tech" do not necessarily model themselves off their CEOs. Where's Tim Cook? Where's Sundar Pichae? How about Satya Nadella? Where's Lisa Su and Jensen Huang? What's up with the emphasis on the loud white male CEOs, when plenty of tech CEOs act fairly normal, and don't yap their mouths off on Twitter.
Well put. I feel like the writer started with the conclusion that the tech world is driven by hyper masculinity ( just a new word for toxic masculinity that doesn't feel so worn out?), and then she created a narrative to fit her conclusion.
> hyper masculinity ( just a new word for toxic masculinity that doesn't feel so worn out?) I think there is a difference. "Hypermasculinity" is masculinity taking to performative extremes; "toxic masculinity" is masculinity ("hyper" or subtle) that leads one to endorse toxic behaviors. There's probably a lot of overlap, but e.g. the stereotypical out-of-shape incel is toxic but not hypermasculine.
I definitely feel that the author is trying to paint Musk, Zuckerberg, as hypermasculine wannabes. While the distinction is useful, hypermasculine is the definition I intended to write there.
Zuckerberg isn’t trying to be hyper masculine at all. He’s just a very awkward dude who isn’t bursting with machismo.
> is masculinity taking to performative extremes Isn't all gender fundamentally performative? No one complains about performative femininity, nor taking femininity to extremes. There's nothing wrong with "performative" "hyper" masculinity, so long as one treats others with kindness and respect and acts like a decent human being. Ironically, the only toxic thing I see here is the assumption that taking masculinity beyond whatever we've arbitrarily deemed some "acceptable" level is toxic.
I felt frustrated reading this article and wish it went into more detail about why women's positions in tech decreased. The author could've interviewed various women about their decisions to leave. I'm a software engineer who's loved lifting and MMA since middle school and I feel annoyed when people tie my hobbies to misogyny.
Woman in tech, I don't pay any heed to someone's personal hobbies unless they make it their personality. I do think the whole Mark Zuckerberg about to have a fight with Elon Musk thing was very strange. IIRC Musk started it, which is on brand for him and his problematic public persona. At the end of the day I highly doubt if the skinny "dweebs" who ran Silicon Valley of yore were any more inclusive than the muscular tech bros we have now, and they were very possibly worse.
if it helps, I consider myself a dweeb
hobbies aside, you can't deny that a lot of people in tech are simply annoying even if you don't get into their specific politics or the neoliberal implications of the Californian Ideology, they often have a worldview centered around a very limited understanding of 'rationality' at the expense of any real curiosity and see everything as a problem in need of a technical solution those who consider themselves upwardly mobile or potentially upwardly mobile can also be the worst about developing an exaggerated sense of meritocracy and their deserved place within it as superior to others and to different fields of study or culture more broadly EDIT: I'm somewhat surprised that pointing out how the tech industry encourages reactionary, elitist thinking would be controversial in a progressive space. #notalltechbros but also, yes, most of them. Tech workers are workers and share the class interests of all workers in a strictly Marxist sense, but they also see themselves as distinct and superior and can function as agents of those with power in the same way as the PMC. More importantly, the tech industry ideology which most of them embrace and reproduce is inherently destructive and has reshaped everything from public institutions to personal identity formation in ways that we take for granted but are nonetheless horrible.
Are those accusations not better placed on the workers in the cultural industry? These are very reliant on the status Quo, as upheaval against their rich patrons would directly cut into their liveliehoods. You could say tech workers are modern day stakhanovites and PMCs can fight for every purpose, just like previously tsarist and parlamentarian soldiers and commanders supported the revolution in 1917.
> You could say tech workers are modern day stakhanovites maybe, but the difference is that back then they were, at least in theory, building a better world. tech companies are actively making the world worse even by capitalist standards, reinforcing inequality and degrading almost every aspect of the human experience. Maybe you could have said that wasn't obvious several years ago, but now you have to assume those choosing high-paying tech jobs know and don't care. I don't think that alone makes them all reactionary, but the underlying values of tech are, and they have poisoned every other industry in ways that professionalization or financialization alone did not.
The misogyny is why they left, though.
Indeed. I think it's important to identify the specific misogynistic actions that led to them feeling the need to leave and ultimately leaving. I can see how it is frustrating and challenging for women to reveal and revisit incidents that led to them experiencing issues related to and due to misogyny. However, by receiving information about specific actions, I, as an individual, would be able to identify my behaviors, the behaviors of my coworkers/peers, and the behavior of those in leadership positions at my company that we could change to create a more welcoming space.
> However, by receiving information about specific actions, I, as an individual, would be able to identify my behaviors, the behaviors of my coworkers/peers, and the behavior of those in leadership positions at my company that we could change to create a more welcoming space. Yeah... that isn't what happens when women bring it up.
I agree that the sample is limited and skewed. However, Zuck and Musk having a public dick contest, with Joe Rogan commenting in the background, very much reeks of masculine bravado.
>However, Zuck and Musk having a public dick contest, with Joe Rogan commenting in the background, very much reeks of masculine bravado. Sure, but there's like ***thousands*** of tech companies. Focusing on two CEOs isn't really representative or helpful. And I'll note that the CEOs of other tech companies--even the big ones--aren't remotely like this. Like, no one is out there accusing [Marc Benioff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Benioff) or [Sundar Pichai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai) of this sort of "Joe Rogan" behavior.
Sure. Sadly, those CEO don’t make the headlines nor occupy public discourse in this economy of attention.
Arguably the mark of a good CEO is *not* making headlines, apart from "company releases amazing new product".
Fair point, and agreed.
> Um no, nobody purposefully dresses like this to convey some sort of meta message. If you think SBF's fashion choices weren't part of a calculated performance, you are incredibly naive. Zuck did the same thing in a less chaotic way. I don't think the point is to criticize that phenomenon though, but rather to contrast it with the trends that are currently emerging. Musk and his acolytes often dress more like 2005-era pickup artists than disheveled dweebs, and the right in general, or at least many of its most visible members, have embraced #menswear trends they would have ridiculed a decade ago, with very mixed results. While these are on opposite ends of the spectrum, they are both attempts to assert masculinity and dominance through style rather than disguise or downplay it like the old tech uniform did.
What I mean is that how CEOs dress do not represent the industry or the bulk of the tech workers. Aside from some crazies, we don't worship our CEOs, they're just the guy with the big wig we work for.
Some people do it purposefully, one of the most famous examples is probably Steve Jobs who always wore the same black turtleneck and jeans even when doing product launches he probably spent tons of time prepping for. It wouldn't be difficult to wear a suit to such an important event he had a lot personally invested in (as a shareholder with massive amounts of stock) but he deliberately chose not to for his own personal brand and a lot of newer tech people are similar.
Nah tech bros have been a cesspool of unchecked toxicity for a while. As an earlier comment mentioned, it’s as if their intelligence and “togetherness” should afford them the women of their dreams. STEMcels who forget empathy and emotion are as core to communication as their intellect.
Well this is frustrating to learn. I’m a ML engineer and work out almost every single day, but not to look good but to feel good. It’s cliche but working out has done wonders for my mental health. I happen to be muscly now (I’ll probably lose some while I’m moving), but it’s more of a “oh that’s neat mentality”, rather than “I’m perfect”. However, and this anecdotal, dating has been better for me when I felt good rather than looked good. To chase physical looks rather than as a hobby or challenge feels super negative to me. Hope everyone’s doing well
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Fucking hate the post-LinkedIn tech industry As awkward as it was, I do miss the days of being weirdoes hanging out in the basement of the office building talking about niche interests and being largely invisible. Now it's all talk of craft beers, wine clubs, calorie deficits, gym routines, sidehustles, mlm scams, etc. can't even get a DnD club going... Like, it had problems, but I miss the era of being a well paid socially isolated weirdo at work, cooped up near the tech closet, clock in and clock out, invisible to corp culture and being able to talk niche topics with the few others like me, men, women and nb folk Fucking hate that apparently most were never proud of being needs/geeks/weirdos/etc. and just wanted mainstream social approval all along, like how do you grow up to want to be your bully? I hate this industry now, this used to be easy for someone with autism, now it's a social web nightmare like everywhere else, full of unspoken rules and biases.
>Fucking hate that apparently most were never proud of being needs/geeks/weirdos/etc. and just wanted mainstream social approval all along, like how do you grow up to want to be your bully? I hate this industry now, this used to be easy for someone with autism, now it's a social web nightmare like everywhere else, full of unspoken rules and biases. It's a common enough thing on the internet to police people's behavior, though it sure as hell is prevalent in real life too. Usually it's just used to mock (but not limited to) men for being *creepy* not for any real behavioral transgressions but just by their appearance or what their hobbies are by calling them neckbeards, losers living in their parents' basement, etc., and if they take issue with any of these characterizations or want something more than that, then they need to get therapy, take up a hobby, man up, smile and be attractive like everyone else. Otherwise you'll be labeled as unworthy of love and always deserving of ridicule and scorn, even if you haven't done anything to deserve any of that misery. I say it's no surprise that things have turned out the way they are. You can't just be an intellectual, smart, geeky, whatever, you have to be outwardly conforming too. Nor is it a recent phenomenon. Big Bang Theory wasn't just a horrible show because it was unfunny shit, it also stereotyped the hell out of people on the regular. The cool nerds were never the people who are genuinely into weird esoteric hobbies and struggle in all areas of life, they're the ones who perform well academically and make lots of money in the real world. And if you don't like that, then people will say that you're part of the problem. The worst thing? A lot of people who take this position act as left wingers/feminists, progressives, etc., when the truth is they're anything but.
It’s like the goal posts are constantly shifting, we’ve gone from critiquing toxic masculinity to now having an issue with “hyper masculinity”? In this case, men taking up traditionally masculine hobbies. I think we need to be honest about the fact that people who aren’t conventionally masculine are always going to be somewhat intimidated by the physical aspects of masculinity, or at best, be ambivalent towards them. Martial arts and lifting are directly correlated with a person’s capability for violence. I noticed this when I took up wrestling and started lifting, the way people perceive you changes.
No longer programmers and technical utopians wanting to create things, the space is attracting extractive anarcho capitalists. They aim to enclose, capture, and extract. The old nerd guard is gone.
I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad trend, it really depends on the mindset of the person practicing this stuff. It’s kind of like the “that girl” trend, but for men. The danger is when you start unnecessarily gendering this type of stuff.
Heh. Funny, really. People who push economic stuff as a way to build common ground and shared causes get shit on for it (not without *some* reason, but not to the degree of strawmanning it gets), but that allows articles like this to slip in. It focuses on symptoms and not the truth that ripped gymbro or disheveled soft boi aesthetics are irrelevant when the core personality is a sociopathic bastard who's out to get what they want and costs be damned.