We're All Tech Bros Now
"Tech bro" once described a specific guy in a specific vest. Now it covers billionaires, biologists, and your aunt with an iPad. A label that fits everyone describes no one.
Take this quick diagnostic. Do you own a smartphone? Have you ordered anything online this month? Do you have opinions about your Wi-Fi?
Congratulations. You're a tech bro.
A brief history of a shrinking insult
The term used to mean something. Circa 2012, it described a recognizable creature: mid-twenties, fleece vest, disrupting laundry, explaining your own job to you at a party. It was a critique of a culture, and the culture earned it.
Then the definition sprang a leak.
It stretched up to cover billionaires with rockets and social networks. It stretched down to cover anyone with a laptop job. It stretched sideways to cover crypto, AI, e-bikes, and anyone a little too excited about a new app.
Today the same two words describe the richest man on Earth and a 54-year-old marine biologist building kelp sensors in a Westside garage. One has a private jet. The other has a used Subaru and a grant deadline.
The perfect political villain
Here's why the term thrives: the tech bro has no constituency.
Nobody identifies as one. There's no Tech Bro PAC, no tech bro precinct. You can blame them for anything and lose zero votes.
It works from every direction. On the populist left, tech bros explain rents, displacement, and inequality. On the populist right, the same character appears as "Silicon Valley elites" and "Big Tech," explaining censorship and coastal arrogance. Different costumes, same scarecrow.
It's also a time-saver. Explaining forty years of housing policy takes an hour. Saying "tech bros" takes one second.
The Highway 17 test
Stand at the summit at 6:30 a.m. and count the tech bros.
Yes, there are engineers headed to Apple, Netflix, Adobe, and NVIDIA. But look at the next lane. Contractor trucks. Electricians. Plumbers. Painters. Tile layers. Ladder racks as far as the fog allows.
They live here. They coach Little League here. And every morning they drive over the hill, because that's where a big share of the work is. Their paychecks come from the same economy, often from the same homes and campuses. The money rides back over the summit every night and gets spent on Pacific Avenue.
So who's the tech bro? The engineer? The electrician wiring the engineer's office? The painter who bid the job by text, routed it by GPS, and got paid by app?
Santa Cruz County's livelihood has always had one foot on each side of the hill. Campaigning against "over the hill" is campaigning against your own neighbors' mortgages.
The kitchen-table multinationals
Then there are the people who never touch Highway 17.
The creative community working from home: designers, writers, editors, illustrators, musicians, filmmakers. One Santa Cruz resident logs on every morning to work for a company in Italy. She has never commuted to Milan. Her office is a spare bedroom and a fiber connection.
She and thousands like her use digital tools to span the globe, then spend that income locally. By the current definition, she's a tech bro too. She'd be surprised to hear it.
Meet the local suspects
Santa Cruz County has 600+ tech companies of its own. Let's round up those bros.
Engineers building quiet electric aircraft. Looker alumni who spun out data companies and, improbably, a duck-themed database. A fintech team automating invoices. Hardware founders soldering at Idea Fab Labs. The Frenchman who invented the camera phone to share a photo of his newborn daughter.
Many are women. Many are over fifty. Almost none own the vest.
What we lose
Here's the serious part. The original critique was fair. Arrogance, homogeneity, extraction, and outsized political power are real and deserve scrutiny.
But a word stretched over everyone protects the people it was built for. When the tile layer, the illustrator, and the billionaire share a label, the billionaire gets to hide in the crowd.
So try this: criticize behaviors, not categories. Name the policy. Name the practice. Name the person, if you must.
And if you catch yourself saying "tech bros" into a $1,000 phone, take a breath. You're among friends. We're all in the vest now.Related Articles
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