No Stupid Questions

Crypto bros are a subset of the cryptocurrency community. Some of us managed to make enough money to retire, and now we spend our days contributing to open source projects

Crypto bros aren't the geeks, they're the popular kids who did well by cheating and copying off other people's work. None of them actually helped make anything even vaguely useful, they memorized enough technical jargon to sound convincing and got lucky betting on digital ponzi schemes.

That sounds not much different from the tech bros back then. The vast majority of them were always posers. Anyone with any talent has made their money by now and dropped out of the rat race, the rest of them are either in middle management or drunk themselves to death.

There's a difference between tech geeks and tech bros.

The tech bro is selling you NFT web 3.0 AR experiences, the tech geek might be learning Docker to self host a Lemmy instance, not because he needs to, but because it's fun.

Both have always existed: one was selling you some horrendous domain during the .com bubble, a plot of land on Second Life or even a perfect marriage based on a secret algorithm running on his Commodore 64, the other was busy playing muds and learning how to make free calls by ringing weird tones into a public telephone.

If all you're seeing are crypto bros, it says more about the media you consume. Serious technologists / engineers are out there, keeping the lights on.

Nothing happened to them. Those guys are still exactly the same.

The difference is that there's a ton of money in that sector now so a bunch of greedy assholes moved in and now look like they're the folks actually doing tech stuff.

Oh also, there's always been a fair amount of legitimately crazy among tech people (we're strange folk) and those voices get more amplification due to the idiots at the top.

It happens in every industry: the passionate people who got in it for the love of the field get replaced by the people who got in it for the lucrative business opportunity. Experts get replaced by salesmen.

It’s a tale as old as Capitalism. People who geek out about something do it because they enjoy it, then somebody finds a way to improve distribution of their work and suddenly there’s a skyrocket in demand. Vultures swoop in and suck out whatever life might be left in their passionate work to make it profitable, and then all the passion is gone.

“Tech bro” is the term used to describe those vultures. People who try to monetize the shit out of everything with an ounce of human soul in it. Passionate tech nerds are still out there, mostly in FOSS circles, some in hardware hobbyist circles building cool form factors for their own computers.

Honestly, odds are you’ll find passion only in someone who’s not looking to monetize.

When things shifted from being proud of server uptimes to being proud of constant push notifications and constant pointless updates, that's when the tide turned. Engineers lost, MBAs won, and now customers suffer. It's all subscriptions and lootbox mentality now.

I'm guessing somewhere around 2010, but it was a gradual relentless process.

Tech bros like Bill Gates used open source communities like an all-you-can-monetize buffet to build a closed operating system. The rest is history.

Tech geeks have actual autism.

Tech bros microdose so they can pretend they have autism.

What I think a lot of people fail to put together, is that this is the end-game of the early ideologies of the internet. The ideologies of the tech nerds now are directly descended from earlier, more decentralized ideologies.

Think about internet piracy and the change from Napster to Bittorrent.

In the tech world, even since the early days, tech was seen as a way to route around bad laws. In the early days, copyright laws were viewed as overly draconian (they are, but that's not the point), so piracy flourished by routing around the legal framework.

What has happened is the power and wealth of some people with those ideologies have grown so big, they now view all laws that prevent them from doing whatever the hell they want as "bad laws to route around." That's why you have Musk buying Twitter and forcing his opinion's down everyone's throat (routing around traditional media). That's why you have Jack Dorsey dumping his money into Nostr, because he thinks the worst sin on the internet is censorship (routing around attempts to rein in disinformation/misinformation).

It can be seen at OpenAI where they knowingly used books3 to initially train their AIs, which was well known to have been sourced from piracy. OpenAI doesn't care about the provenance of the data as long as they can legally route around the copyright issue and make a fuckton of money in the process.

Anyway, it's a deeply libertarian ideology that was accidentally spurred from earlier, more anarchist ideologies, within the tech community. I would peg tech nerds from the 90s as more anarchist, and tech nerds of the modern era as having bought into the technolibertarianism that began to grow out of it.

Like Steve Wozniak is your standard real tech nerd from the 70's who was the actual engineer behind Apple products, while Steve Jobs was literally the marketing guy yet only the marketing guy got remembered.

Pick your favorite tech company, pick a small team with a "nerdy" engineering mandate, and I'm confident you'll find the academic, geeky science and engineering types you're talking about.

They probably aren't very vocal though, because 1) there's a huge PR/marketing budget which is responsible for being the face of the company, and 2) well...these are nerdy STEM folks who probably like their job because they get very well compensated to be nerdy STEM types, and not because they're fanboys/girls.

I'm a technerd from the late 90s and early 00s. We're all still here living our best lives, making money off the newest hypes, and then going home to chat on IRC and fiddle around with our old, soulful protocols.

apple started with stuff done by woz. googles algorithims came from their founders. gates bought but put a lot into it. hardware companies where engineering firms. google is the only one where its product was not bought and owned by the user (mostly) but they basically set the stage for flipping the whole thing on its head with the user being the product. this further set the stage for the idea is that if you get the people into your ecosystem then it will be to hard to compete as people are lazy and don't want to change. this lead to emphasis not being on the tech but instead on building the monopoly.

We still exist, but you gotta look. Tech has gotten a lot more mainstream since the 90s.