Putting Tech Bros In Charge Was Never a Good Idea. Now it's a disaster.

Not known for extraordinary egalitarianism, empathy, or emotional intelligence, tech bros were already posing a threat. Now the threat is existential.

My late sister was among the first tech women, over sixty years ago. She worked on a project for NASA. Other family members are also in tech, and I have often said that if I were not a psychologist, I would have become an engineer. It is a world I love and understand fairly well. But it is not a world characterized by humanism or by wisdom.

The training for technology is not training in ethics or morality. It is training in effectiveness and efficiency, and you know when you did a good job because the thing you were creating actually works. Not because it helps someone or because it makes the world better. Not because it creates compassion, or cultural awareness or humility or even understanding, not because it creates jobs, or protects the environment or spreads love or peace. It’s much more simple than that. It’s because it works, for good or ill.

Here in the Bay Area, technology and tech bros are still in ascendance, as long as they can portray themselves as somehow in either cybersecurity or AI. They make massive salaries, and are highly respected. And confident. Sometimes the respect and confidence spills over into other people assuming they are wise. But there is no reason to think they are wise, or to think they are unwise. They have not been trained to think of human good or of human ill.

In the recent past, and still today, to some extent, doctors, nurses, and clergy were considered wise. Partly because they were more educated than most of us, and mostly because they had seen the most tragic and most miraculous events in real life, and had spent time with the happiest, the saddest, the youngest, the oldest, the living and the dying humans in their communities. Veterans and law enforcement professionals were considered wise because they had also seen the worst, lost loved ones, and sacrificed for a cause. Wisdom does not come easily.

Others were also considered wise based on their life experience. My grandmother was seen as a wise woman because she had successfully raised a family after being widowed at a very young age. Her brothers helped her buy a property in a mill town, and she ran a small bodega and boarded people in the property’s spare rooms in order to have enough resources to keep her children healthy. She made soap and candles and great food. She grew her own fruit and vegetables. She too was wise based on hard earned human experience. People came to her for advice on life because she had lived the good and the tragic.

Tech bros are, on average, no wiser than the average person. They are often respected based on the observation that they make a lot of money (by that I mean between one quarter and one half a million per year) within a few years out of college. They have spent their high school and college years with other STEM people. They may have witnessed tragedy or miracles, but they are no more likely to have done so than anyone else. Many have made a good number of their alliances online, so they have not even had the kind of social experience that makes people grow up with a bit of humility and camaraderie. .

They are not inherently bad. Their experience has rewarded them for being—not immoral, but amoral. Those tech employees that protest immorality often have their careers summarily ended, because those that rose through the ranks to become their bosses have, in essence, drunk the Kool-Aid of American individualism, capitalism, and corporate greed, and have been richly rewarded for doing so. They are not going to let a little morality stop them.

Billionaires run the Bay Area, and most of them have made their fortunes in some sort of tech work. They are sometimes revered, sometimes hated, but they are in most cases very powerful, and, as we saw at the recent inauguration of a racist, misogynist, fascist, felon, who depends on an smart, successful, and immoral tech bro, they are complicit.

With a billionaire tech bro at the helm along with a racist, misogynist felon, we are seeing the results of amorality. What is the mission of DOGE? Effectiveness and efficiency, not— care, compassion, concern, ethics, or morality. It’s a disaster.

The most important phrase in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto would help here: “remember your humanity and forget the rest.” DOGE values the exact opposite: Forget your humanity and go for efficiency. Evil can hide behind efficiency. (Remember Eichmann?)

We can still work to change the direction of the country and we had better do so. In order to do so we have to admit the obvious: Tech bros may be richer, but they are not any wiser than the rest of us. They should not be put in charge of society.