How Tech Bros are Hacking our Reality
3.12.25
If you are one of the 75 million Americans who voted for Harris, or one of the 90 million American who did not vote in 2024, you may have heard the genuine terror in the voices of your friends, neighbors, and countrymen as they compare our current political landscape to Germany in the late 1930’s.
Indeed, there are many overlaps– an authoritarian leader prone to calling immigrants “vermin” and using them as a scapegoat for economic turmoil (as if the American economy wouldn’t completely collapse without immigrant labor). And who could forget Gerber-Baby-In-Chief Elon Musk proudly heiling at the Inauguration, grinning like a naughty little minx?
While the MAGA-Nazi narrative isn’t without merit, we live in a far more complex society than we did in the 1930s and 40s. The OG Nazis, for all their hard work in branding and marketing, were half a century before the internet became mainstream. They were almost a full century before AI. They rose to prominence in a time when Americans still trusted the newspaper and the occupation of “journalist” was an earned privilege, not an all-encompassing term for anyone with a TikTok and a hard opinion regardless of their credibility.
That is why what is happening in Washington right now, in the year of Lord 2024, is so deeply stomach-churning: it’s unprecedented.
When I was a kid in the late 1990s, there was nothing more exciting than living on the bleeding edge of technology. For misfits and outliers like myself, internet message boards, computer games (shout of the Civilization IV), ripping CDs from Napster downloads, and general tech-brat Matrix culture was a wonderful new land where nerds ruled. The future is now, we thought.
Decades later, that tech culture has evolved into something indisputably vile. It’s not just the culture’s disdain for anyone not white and male, but the tech bro obsession with proving superiority over any and all it deems less-than. What was once a culture of inclusion, where the best idea won the game, has become a pool of piranhas. The tech bro de jour doesn’t just hate women (although some identify as incels), they seem to take joy out of humiliating one another in the swamps of Discord. All of this is gross, of course, and until recently I was one to shrug and move on– not my business. But then the ridiculous Big Boy contest rather insidiously came to Washington. And now, it is my business.
My fear before the 2024 election was, in hindsight, sort of precious in its innocence. If Trump wins, I thought, we’re at a serious risk of entertaining Christian Nationalism as a reality and domestic terrorism would become even more prevalent. After all, for the members of the New Apolistic Reformation church, Trump is second only to their bizarre interpretation of Jesus. This worry now feels as simple and folksy as a rocking chair at a Cracker Barrel. What I never could have anticipated was that Elon Musk, he who ran my favorite social platform into the ground with unrelenting speed, would bring his arrogant, anti-semetic, transphobic, misogynistic, trolling self into the government and, with the help of a motley crew of angry and entitled teens, dismantle reality.
It’s not just that he masks this takeover as “efficiency”; indeed, demanding to know via email what someone did last week and then wildly firing millions of those workers with little warning is far from efficient. And it’s not just that with the dissolution of the USAID, we are greatly at risk for another global pandemic (take mid-century Polio and make it modern; Malaria de Mar-a-lago) and terrorist attacks. To his credit, Musk’s strategizing was brilliant– take an easily foilable egomaniac like Trump and praise him, the megalomaniac is flattered and gives you power, you take the power and overthrow the government (it’d be a great computer strategy game if it wasn’t actually happening). While these things are scary, they are only a manifestation of something far more frightening.
There is a small team of unqualified, uneducated, brazen internet trolls dictating the actions of the US government. They don’t have the maturity (or the respect) needed to handle sensitive information– you don’t bring your own server to the OPM if you understand the value of government data. They don’t have the experience to know what to do with the unrestricted, unregulated power they have usurped. Why not replace humans with AI, they ask. They trust robots over people because it's people who have rejected them and robots who they have programmed to love them. They fire government employees because it feels good to pwn, to prove the inherent superiority of the hacker. What is happening in Washington right now feels like a bad 80s movie where War Games meets Tron meets Revenge of the Nerds; a great misreading of dystopian fiction. If, as America’s Sweetheart Elon Musk does, one reads science fiction as aspirational instead of a warning to readers of possible dangers to society, that is a powerful ignorance.
Hackers have taken over Washington. Who is going to stop them?