Policy Pirated: The Tech-Bro Vision for America

Why Our Future Is Being Written by Men Who Think They’re Tony Stark

In this installment of the Manual for the New Age, we pause from our pondering on the Post-Truth zeitgeist to explore an issue of world view with great impact.

Consider one example:
This week President Donald Trump’s social-media-and-crypto company, Trump Media & Technology Group, announced a surprise merger with TAE Technologies — a bet on nuclear fusion, one of the most unproven and capital-intensive investments you can make.

(This is merely the newest iteration of the president leaping into the Artificial Intelligence boom. One might wonder whether this has anything to do with Trump-family investments in data-center ventures. It’s enough to marvel that there’s no outcry against a US president so obviously self dealing. But that’s old news. Maybe the real story for this post is the Tech Bros and their particular exploitation of Trump’s corruption.)

This is only one example of tech taking over.
No one should fail to notice how neatly the whole gamut of national “policy pirating” aligns with the interests of the tech-related inner circle — Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Tim Cook (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Elon Musk (Tesla), Shou Zi Chew (TikTok), etc.

So, as we inventory conditions in our society, it is worth diving deeply for a minute and asking: What kind of world do these tech titans imagine?

Their vision is complex and not “pure” but we might focus some through the lens of science-fiction archetypes:

• Tony Stark — the tech-messiah above morality: “I break things because I’m the only one smart enough to fix them.”

• Batman — private solutions to public problems, accountability optional.

• Green Lantern — technology as an amplifier of will, bending reality to the desires of the exceptional.

This is the mythology of the techno-optimist.

And we might dive even deeper: we should briefly consider what tech titans are reacting against. Our culture has been marked by:

• paralyzing ineffectiveness,

• a widespread identify (vs. achievement) validation,

• obstruction from those who don’t know how to build but know how to block,

• crippling regulation that is often precious rather than prudent,

• and a vision of society that is “protective” but not productive.

Indeed, this is not the virile, can-do spirit that built railroads or invented microprocessors. Indeed, it should be noted, many men come of age in environments where assertiveness, ambition, and high-spirited risk-taking were discouraged — sometimes by teachers or family members who themselves harbored contempt for masculine dynamism and testosterone-fueled versions of honor. That cultural friction has now become political.

And, tech-bro frustration also has another source, possibly unrelated to gender politics: They may be reacting to a national grifter economy.

In the real world of building — hardware, energy, manufacturing, logistics — results are measurable. Things either work or they don’t. But the FIRE sectors (finance, insurance, real estate) plus much of marketing, DEI bureaucracy, brand consulting, “thought leadership,” and performative management are filled with people rewarded for work that does not generate wealth, add value, or attempt the difficult.

These are the grifters: those paid handsomely for ingratiation rather than contribution.

In fairness to the tech titans — whatever their faults — most of them actually build things. And whether considering outright grift, or just the busy-body sphere — where journalists, politicians, and the priestly class, for example, have no idea of what it takes — the overarching frustration is rocket fueled by the clueless arrogance of the cultural elites.

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One (of many) solutions

In the spirit of offering solutions in this Manual for a New Order, we must acknowledge that this moment demands a counter-vision, and it must be more compelling than e.g., the wimpy, withering, fecklessness of Democratic dudes and dudettes. We need models of seriousness, rigor, competence, intellectual honesty and actual change — not performance, pedantry, and postmodernism.

One solution begins where civilization begins: in the university. Remedy means:

• reintroducing objectivity and reality,

• reinstating penalties for falsehood, even minor carelessness,

• restoring rigor and standards, it means math.

• returning assignments to their proper role: you either read it or you didn’t.

• grading on the curve.

• submission to reason.

• teaching concepts like externalities, wealth generation, and -conversely- that much compensation in our unreal economy is actually grift, that is, ways of gaining position and wealth by trading in goods and services (and their distribution) generated by others.

• requiring students to defend scholarship against sharp, scholarship-based critique,

• and, next step, extending this “reality ethos” beyond the ivory tower and into commerce and civic life.

Indeed, consumers should be encouraged to confront their Chamber of Commerce about the real external costs of the goods and services local merchants profit from while the public pays the bill.

It is how adults prepare adults to take responsibility in an unforgiving reality.

And it’s actually one counterbalance to an overly destructive, ultimately exploitative, reactive (though rational) agenda of those who want our willing capitulation to their Ayn-Randian fantasy. We need real masculinity —marked by responsibility, reason, and reach-beyond-one’s-grasp, do-or-die-trying, accountability-demanding riskiness — to counter the glamorous but pathological masculinity marked by sneaky self-supremacy.