our tech broverlords: the false prophets of the unfolding cyberpunk dystopia

The PayPal Mafia's grand plan for Western civilization is a cyberpunk dystopia they don't even know how to build.

If there’s a word we need to bring back into the common vernacular to describe what we hear most today, it’s “technobabble.” Usually, it’s what writers with no background in science or technology — and no desire to learn anything about either — cram into a character’s dialog to make them sound clever or justify some absurd plot twist. Your dilithium and kyber crystals for warp drives and light sabers. Your naquadah to power the Stargate. And your Hyperloop to revolutionize transportation.

And with the ascent of the Trump 2.0 administration, angry and confused voters have been asking questions about why a random billionaire is allowed to decide how funds approved by Congress are to be distributed, despite the law very clearly saying this is not allowed, and if they do get a response, it’s usually in the form of a stream of weird claims, outright lies, quietly retracted puffery, and condescending technobabble.

For example, according to President Musk’s DOGE, Social Security — which the GOP he purchased at a deep discount this year has been desperate to dismantle since the day it was established — is paying out millions to 150 year olds. Of course, if you ask anyone familiar with the COBOL programming language, that’s just a default date for entries that are no longer active and nothing more.

Same goes for his angry claim that the government doesn’t use relational databases and SQL scripts to manage data in those databases, to the surprise of those who did government contracting or are employed by government agencies. (I personally wrote thousands of lines of SQL scripts to support just one aspect of ACA implementation for a state agency.) This was followed up by one of his foot soldiers claiming that he’s trying to analyze Social Security data using PostgreSQL, which is, yes, the exact kind of database Musk claimed the government doesn’t use.

He then went on to claim he fried his hard drive processing just 60,000 entries, which is beyond bizarre since anything under a few million entries is considered a very easily manageable table, and I’ve processed billions of rows before without frying any drives and computers. Granted, it took me all day and required fairly specialized code, but it really isn’t anything crazy for today’s comp sci professionals.

So, basically, Musk unleashed a bunch of woefully unqualified people to examine very important software, processes, and policies they know little to nothing about, and as they show their whole asses to the entire planet, they puff out their chests and try to tell us that we’re too dumb to understand just how insanely clever they are, and to try and prove it, they unleash a torrent of panicked verbal diarrhea mixed with comp sci jargon and call actual experts who call them out on it various slurs.

You see, Musk and his fellow tech bros, as well as their beloved guru Curtis Yavin are not geniuses with deep thoughts or amazing expertise, writing complex, thoroughly researched essays after decades of research. They can’t even make computer jokes that aren’t utterly befuddling nonsense. They’re professional verbal onanists making billions by dazzling people with cryptic bullshit, or in Yavin’s case, just write stuff that makes tech billionaires happy.

And this extends to the alleged ultimate grand plans of the tech broligarchy: to more or less dismantle the United States and turn it into a loose network of corporate city states ran by executives and their AI models, a plan supposedly conceived by the evil genius of the aforementioned Yavin.

Here’s the thing, however. Yavin’s plan, embraced by Musk and the rest of the Pay Pal Mafia, is not clever, or new, or original. The guy just read Snow Crash, watched Ghost In The Shell, and decided “yes, I want to be a bad guy in a cyberpunk dystopia!” and then wrote it down in a blog he passed off as some grand insight into the future. If all of this stopped on a hack’s derivative blog, it would almost be funny.

But the fact that it didn’t, and men with power to shape government policy think this is a great idea is absolutely terrifying if you know what cyberpunk actually is. In case you don’t, my friends Trace Dominguez and Julian Huguet over at the That’s Absurd, Please Elaborate Podcast podcast came up with a brilliant description of cyberpunk.

It’s having access to technology that allows you perfect recall of every important and cherished memory. But if you miss a monthly payment, then you lose access to said memories, and the only way you can get them back is to pay up.

Yeah, that is indeed dystopian. This is why so many cyberpunk stories focus on the outcasts, criminals, and forgotten who are trying to better their lot until they simply reach and breaking point to try and rebel against the oppressive and abusive system by hijacking some aspect of its technical prowess for themselves. They never really win, and in many cases, their endings are far from happy. But that’s not the point. It’s that to them, rebellion becomes what gives their lives meaning as they rage until the almost certain dying of the light.

It’s a genre of science fiction created by writers who loved the idea of the future and exploring the frontiers of technology, but were also worried about what it could do in the hands of greedy sociopaths, organized crime, or malicious governments. In every story, the takeaway is simple and straightforward: advanced technology and the vast amounts of money and power it brings has serious consequences, especially if it’s in the hands of those with no empathy or morality. Which, well, kinda fits our new Tech Broverlords perfectly, doesn’t it?

And it also shows exactly why categorizing them as “out of control nerds” misses the mark because they’re not nerds. They’re business tycoons cosplaying as nerds who understand the culture, the lingo, the tech, but in reality, they haven’t a fucking clue, doing the political equivalent of running around a Star Wars convention flashing the Vulcan salute, greeting actual, befuddled fans with “may the force be prosper!” and meeting their confused glares with angry rants about how any real fan totally knows how the Kaylons sieged the Death Star on the forest moon of Pandora.

So, that’s where we’ve ended up. Drowning under a tsunami of technobabble from a bunch of businessmen who once took a couple of coding classes when I was still but a wee radioactive toddler, cosplaying as tech geniuses while dragging us into what I can only describe as the Temu version one of the worst case scenarios in sci-fi they love but can’t wrap their sparse smattering of brain cells around, and so they think it totally rules to be the bad guys in a cold, cruel technological dystopia.

But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you watched Edgerunners and Pyscho Pass, read Altered Carbon, and thought “holy shit, serfdom with terabit wi-fi, total surveillance, and robot parts of questionable providence and efficacy crammed into and attached to me regardless of my consent sounds awesome!” Though, if that is your stance on the subject, I would ask that you consider that the people trying to do that to you are even remotely qualified for the job…