The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro
Heidi Siegmund Cuda investigates how we eradicate tech-troll domination
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”—Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962
They were treated as special — tech wunderkinds who possessed magical powers.
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel etc…
Awe-inducing cover stories in polished tech periodicals, which existed to exalt them on high. The faces of these special boys appearing in chiaroscuro to ensure their canonisation.
But what was Mark Zuckerberg, really? A troll who created a website twenty years ago that judged if someone was hot or not. FaceMash, as it was known, evolved into Facebook, and its ‘move fast and break things’ ethos nearly broke democracy when the social media platform allowed Cambridge Analytica to hoover up all our data and target minds.
“It started with the dream of a connected world,” said digital rights activist Professor David Carroll in the film The Great Hack. “These digital traces of ourselves are being mined into a trillion dollar a year industry… we are now the commodity.”
No one read the terms and conditions, or checked the box for the part where the world becomes a deeply divided wreckage site, he said.
