The Atlantic takes on tech broligarchs

I had another piece in the works for this week, but the media cycle delivered a gift with the Atlantic’s well-researched article about the antidemocratic politics of tech broligarchs.

Initially I was thrilled to see the bro of it all front and center in this portmanteau (an absolute chef kiss of a word). I felt validated with a well regarded mainstream outlet using similar language to what I’ve been soapboxing on for years. Then I put my ego aside and dug into the meat of the story. And what I read wasn’t about politics really. It was about power. It was about how those who already massively benefit from the power-granting systems will shift their actions and values to not just protect their power but to allow them to continually and aggressively increase it. This is the status bro in action.

The article’s author, Brooke Harrington, is a sociologist and professor whose researches addresses political and economic inequality. I was zero percent surprised in my immediate Googling that her work intersects with anthropology, social psychology and behavioral finance. Because the status bro depends on the interconnectivity of these systems to do the very precise thing she’s highlighting here. It’s not about what’s best for the world (of which we humans are but a small part), as much as they hope their philanthropic activities convince us. It’s about upholding structures of power that directly and almost exclusively serve them at the direct and indirect expense of others. Quite a loveless way of doing business, in my opinion.

It’s the same mentality that operationalizes growth at all costs. It’s the same extreme binary thinking that positions venture capital’s power law as an inmutable truth that justifies letting many portfolio companies fall to zero in service of the chosen potential 10x. It’s the hustle culture that hires for "hungry” overacheivers at under market pay only to put them into burnout cycles long before that liquidity event — if they make it long enough to vest, that is.

Pursuit of power at all costs manifests itself in any and every industry because that’s how these systems work. Capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy have been intentionally braided together in ways that uphold power for the few and force marginalization that requires us to stitch together societal safety nets for the rest of us. A critical component of disrupting the status bro, then, is building new systems rooted in community and care — as well as upholding and fortifying ones that already exist, many of which have managed to survive direct attempts at eradication precisely because of the threat they pose to the dominant power systems.

I am nothing if not pathologically optimistic overall. We have ideas. We have connectivity. We have community (it always finds it’s way back to community with me, what can I say). As we see the fallout of current harmful systems in our economy, politics and environment, I have hope. This passage from adrienne maree brown’s foundational Emergent Strategy sums up what I see as perhaps one of the biggest missed opportunities in human history: the choice to use our considerable individual and collective intellect, time, talent and resources to collaborate and not compete?

Here’s to reasoning our way to more sustainable processes, my friends, and the critical questions and challenging conversations that will get us there.