[rektide]

What a fragging amazing treasure. Rushkoff has just gotten better and better over time, more and more on point. Humble fun opening:

> I thought i was supposed to go out there to do this talk on the digital future & do this talk on the digital future - you know what I usually do -& just try to make people angry, you know- wealthy people upset by telling them people what this technology is for, and all that, and business plans are stupid, and killing the world....

Real talk middle, about the brutal indifferent stasism of AI:

> The dataset on which we are feeding our ai's is us. Is what we are actually doing. We have created a situation where we have a generation of very powerful children learning how to be, based on how we are.

> The only way to raise appropriately AIs is to begin behaving appropriately ourselves.

[wpietri]

"I don't necessarily like tech bros but I like talking with tech bros and at tech bros because they're easy to upset. The main way you upset them is by asserting either their humanity or everyone else's humanity."

Ok, this is now on my watchlist. Such a good summation.

[freetime2]

I don't think that making denigrating remarks about any group of people (even "tech bros") is a good way to start a talk. It signals to me that the speaker is more interested in identity politics, pitting "us" against "them" because that's what seems to hold peoples' attention these days, rather than serious solutions.

[logicprog]

I don't think that's true at all. You are taking classical liberal ideas to an absurd extreme — and far too literally — and it's handicapping your conceptual capabilities.

It isn't necessarily identity politics to talk about groups of people, nor does it necessarily preclude discussing real solutions either — it depends on the relevancy of the group being mentioned. If the group being mentioned is a subculture or philosophical tendency or whatever the defining characteristics of which are relevant to the subject at hand, then it's perfectly fine to refer to such a group. It's only if you are bringing in groups that aren't actually relevant to a discussion, whose defining characteristics aren't provably related to the characteristic you are trying to apply to them, does talking about groups become a problematic thing. Barring that, being able to talk about groups of people that have different approaches or attitudes or beliefs or behaviors regarding a subject, even if it's to speak derogatorily about them, is basically necessary to have a functional discussion about certain topics whatsoever.

In this case, we are having a discussion about attitudes towards technological solutions and technological progress, and one of the major cultures that influence discussions around that stuff and the direction things actually take are 'tech bros.' If we band the ability to speak about such a group that would just give them free reign to do anything they wanted without being criticized.

To define the group, it is a specific subset of the people who work in tech whose attitude towards tech is characterized by a sort of brash, prideful belief that you can solve everything with technological solutions and that the human (qualitative) factor of things just isn't relevant — or is even harmful because it's "unquantifiable" and it needs to be specifically perfected out of our considerations.

This is a real type of person and attitude in tech that we can discuss.

[freetime2]

I really think you're going to bat too hard for the term "tech bros". The very term itself is derived from a stereotype, as per this definition from merriam webster:

> bro - a young male who is part of a group of similar male friends stereotypically characterized as hearty, athletic, self-confident, party-loving, etc.

Are there no women who have the same attitude towards tech that you ascribe to tech bros? Or older, unathletic, unconfident, or introverted men?

I also don't think your definition is universal. As evidence you need look no further than a sibling comment to your own which implies that I am a tech bro even though I don't hold the beliefs/attitude in your definition (I believe that technological solutions do exist - but don't think they are the solution to every problem. I also think that qualitative human factors, like happiness, are very important indeed).

I also disagree that this joke is as conducive to constructive conversation as you seem to think it is:

> I don't necessarily like tech bros but I like talking with tech bros and at tech bros because they're easy to upset. The main way you upset them is by asserting either their humanity or everyone else's humanity.

Is it constructive to take pleasure in "upsetting" people? If he were really out to change peoples' minds rather than simply preach to the choir, I think it would be more effective to adopt a more respectful tone towards people who disagree with him.

> This is a real type of person and attitude in tech that we can discuss.

Is it though? Can you give me an example of anyone who self-identifies as a tech bro according to your definition, let alone a enough people to call it a "major culture"? Or is it just a harmful stereotype that gets applied to people to discount their opinions instead of engaging with what they actually believe? Because my experience is that most people tend to hold more nuanced beliefs than what you are describing.

[wpietri]

So if even you don't believe that anybody self-identifies as a tech bro, why are you calling this "identity politics"?

I'll also note that is a red herring, as it's not necessary for anybody to identify as an X for X to exist and be a problem. Indeed, some of the most prominent problems today involve people in that space. Exhibit A would be Elon Musk. But most bigots know that openly identifying as a bigot doesn't work out well for them. You might also read Mills or Manne or Bancroft for a look at how and why not identifying as X is part of the game.

[freetime2]

> it's not necessary for anybody to identify as an X for X to exist and be a problem.

I actually tend to disagree with this. Solving problems generally requires consensus. If a term like "tech bro" is too reductive, divisive, and imprecise for people to agree on, we should throw it out and come up with a better way to describe the problem.

For example, a major attribute that people tend to associate with tech bros is being overly optimistic. Most people in tech (even Elon Musk) would readily admit to being overly optimistic at times, and willing to discuss the risks, mitigation, etc. To me this is much more constructive than just labeling someone a "tech bro".

[wpietri]

Ok? I guess don't start your talks that way then.

But I think that's a very shallow understanding of "identity politics". Typically that's used to mean a deep or immutable characteristic. It's not like techbros come from Techbronistan or County Techbro, with deep cultural roots. Tech bros are dudes who chose to go into tech and choose a hypermasculine performance. And that performance, like the "frat bro" stereotype isn't just about their personal choices. It's about its impact on others, and their indifference to that impact.

Which is also, not coincidentally, a major critique of the tech industry as a whole. If you really care about "serious solutions", maybe you could grapple with that, rather than performing offense right off the bat.

[freetime2]

“Tech” refers to someone’s career, their livelihood. I would say that qualifies as a relatively deep and hard-to-change (though not immutable) characteristic. “Tech” also implies a certain socioeconomic status, since jobs in tech are often well compensated.

For “bro”, I’ll use the definition from merriam webster that I used elsewhere: “a young male who is part of a group of similar male friends stereotypically characterized as hearty, athletic, self-confident, party-loving, etc.”

So they are “male”, and “young” - that’s two immutable characteristics.

If this is about behavior, then why mix in aspects of gender, age, and profession? And the problem of course is that it’s very easy to see a person with the above three traits and assume they think or behave a certain way - i.e stereotyping.

And since we’re talking about gender, age, and socioeconomic status - I think the term identity politics is applicable.

[Qwertious]

You've written an argument about what the word "techbro" should mean, but it actually means whatever concept people think of when you say it to them. That's how words work - they're tools, shared levers that you pull to trigger a specific concept in the head of the person you're talking with.

Words spread when lots of people start using it and lots of other people successfully infer the same meaning from context as what it was intended to mean - what people intuitively interpret is incredibly culturally-specific and subjective, and thus is utterly impossible to nail down in some sort of rigorous formal logic.

I bring this up because assuming "techbro" means "tech" plus "bro" (instead of referring to a specific attitude common among FAANG employees - and if you ask why people say "Xes" instead of "people who think X", the answer is brevity) is a very naive and inaccurate approach to language.

>If this is about behavior, then why mix in aspects of gender, age, and profession? And the problem of course is that it’s very easy to see a person with the above three traits and assume they think or behave a certain way - i.e stereotyping.

What you're saying is that "techbro" is a politically incorrect term, and that anyone who uses the term is therefore stereotyping. The problem here is that people can use the term (because it's useful) without necessarily supporting the choice of words the term is made up of - as I mentioned above, when people use a word they do so because they believe other people will reliably connect it with the right concept.

[freetime2]

I understand that there is additional meaning beyond just “tech” and “bro”. But the parent asked why I brought up identity politics, and I don’t think I am incorrect to say that “techbro” is inextricably linked to being young, male, affluent, and working in tech. Would you disagree?

I agree that stereotypes have their uses in popular culture. And often there is some basis for stereotypes in reality. But people should at least be aware when they are using stereotypes, of their inherent imprecision, and why people find them offensive/hurtful. Do you agree that “techbro” is a stereotype?

And I think we should be careful not to build our world views on top of stereotypes. I.e. a world view that the tech industry is run by a bunch of techbros who don’t understand or care about humanity is a gross oversimplification.

[wpietri]

> If this is about behavior, then why mix in aspects of gender, age, and profession

This is such a good example of why technical degrees need stronger humanities requirements. Why indeed?

[freetime2]

I don't follow. Can you elaborate?

[CaptainFever]

What even is a techbro anymore? At best, it seems to mean “person I dislike in tech”. At worst, it seems like anti-autism (e.g. “overly logical”).

[logicprog]

It's not ableist to take issue with people who exclude qualitative considerations, especially considerations of human subjective experience and existence, from their reasoning. That's a very big and often dangerous flaw in reasoning that can cause a lot of problems, and that doesn't change even if autistic people have more of a tendency to fall into that sort of mistake. That just means it's a cognitive bias that's common for us just, like other cognitive biases (like e.g. the bandwagon fallacy) are more common for non-autistic people.

Here's my definition btw:

> it is a specific subset of the people who work in tech whose attitude towards tech is characterized by a sort of brash, prideful belief that you can solve everything with technological solutions and that the human (qualitative) factor of things just isn't relevant — or is even harmful because it's "unquantifiable" and it needs to be specifically perfected out of our considerations.

[wpietri]

As an old-school nerd and non-neurotypical person, I think that's both wrong and insulting. I have never felt targeted by the term "tech bro".

You could probably get at what people mean by it by starting with "person I dislike in tech" and asking exactly who they dislike and why. It's not because they write code.

But if you want a cheat, TV Tropes has a pretty good explanation of how the tech bro stereotype differs from the average nerd: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TechBro

[CaptainFever]

That’s a good reference web page, thank you. It makes it much easier for me to understand what others mean by it in mainstream usage.

I’ve unfortunately had some different life experiences of people using the term in other ways, dissimilar to the stereotype on TVTropes… or at least I perceived it as so.

[anigbrowl]

You're only looking at the Tech part. The Bro part is the unquestioning allegiance to optimization and capital maximization.

[Qwertious]

>At worst, it seems like anti-autism (e.g. “overly logical”).

I think fundamentally it's a combination of 1) arrogance in thinking they understand how the world works socially (and are very capable of solving problems that are fundamentally social), and 2) a complete lack of understanding of how the world works socially.

People hate them because at best they're idiots who achieve nothing and at worst their hardworking idiocy makes the world materially worse.

In particular, techbros tend to have a belief that social problems can be solved with technological solutions (e.g. the solution to the housing crisis is to design a construction technique with lower material/labor costs). The problem in this instance is that if they asked themselves "what is the root cause of the problem", instead of jumping straight into the technology (they commonly "disrupt" old technology by ignoring some particular prevailing wisdom, and frame ignoring said wisdom as "not being closed-minded" instead of as "being stupid and ignoring the lessons of the past" - which, to be fair, is occasionally true).

There's also a more explicitly political component, but saying "they have X politics which is stupid" is a great way to start a political flame-war so I think I'll skip that.

So tl;dr: technosolutionism, plus overconfidence on trying to solve social problems that they don't even understand, let alone have the ability to solve.

[partomniscient]

Rushkoff often portrays himself as the counter-culture heroically wise anti-hero.

[camillomiller]

Yeah, that’s what a techbro would say

[tinideiznaimnou]

And this, folks, is how you get techbros.

[corinroyal]

LMFAO!

[ggm]

> The only way to raise appropriately AIs is to begin behaving appropriately ourselves.

I dunno, wasn't Saint Augustine "lord make me good, but not yet" pretty much admitting that our heroes have feet of clay, and yet they function as educators and leaders.

If you modulate the training set through externally derived axioms of good and bad, can't you train an AI on objectively naughty data to recognise the anti-set of good behaviour?

[NovaDudely]

The issue of what is good or bad is all a matter of perspective though.

On the extreme end of this is - What one side considered a terrorist, the other considers them a liberating warrior.

That is easy at that scale but the finer grain you go on morals the more fuzzy it gets and the more push back you will get from all directions. This is how you get things like the 1946 Obscenity threshold of "I know it when I see it".

Many saw the 2008 crash as a major issue that destroyed the lives of millions of people, some hard line environmentalists saw it as the single great decrease in consumption we have ever had.

[kuchenbecker]

Do we WANT the AI judging us as good / bad?

[rektide]

A major thread through the talk is that there are powers that be that think they have the answers & want to shape & mold us. Not super clearly stated, but implicitly said, it rarely works & the hubris almost always causes huge problems, is a projection rather than what the world wants or needs.

If AI is judging us, it's either based on data encoding our existing behaviors. Or it's crudely manipulated data by biased hubris filled megalomaniacs. The rest of humanity doesn't really have/isn't permitted much of a say in the matter.

[kuchenbecker]

> it's either based on data encoding our existing behaviors. Or it's crudely manipulated data by biased hubris

My argument would be this is both likely and inevitable where there AI is used as a judge. OpenAI, for example, has material explaining how they prune and curate their datasets to alter it's biases.