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Kill the tech bro, save the world: how CEOs became Hollywood's new supervillains
- vkou 8y agoThey already were, in the anti-globalization anti-corporate backlash at the end of the cold war. Orcs and comic book supervillians and bankers had two decades in the sun, but the wheel has once again turned.
- cfadvan 8y agoEven then, a lot of comic book super villains were essentially caricatures of CEOs, or actual CEOs. Green Goblin from Spider Man being a fine example of the crossover.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoLex Luthor, anybody? or Valentine from Kingsmen 1 edit: woops, didn't look at the article before that. Lex is the core of the article
- bitwize 8y agoLex Luthor went from mad scientist to ruthless CEO sometime in the 80s or 90s.
- mLuby 8y agoI bet (mad) scientists/inventors like Frankenstein, Jekyll, Herbert West, Tom Swift, and Tony Stark became less plausible as intense specialization became more and more common.
- bitwize 8y agoWe live in a world that has Elon Musk in it. Tony Stark stretches credibility much less than contemporary characters in his genre.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y agoRecently they appear to be going back to his roots as a mad scientist more than businessman. ... When he isn't busy being a straight up hero (barf)
- mLuby 8y agoMight be reflective of a world where we fear oppressive systems (created by maybe evil maybe naive tech guys) more than strongmen (who now act as mere agents of said system).
- richsinn 8y agoThis comment reminds me of "the banality of evil" concept. src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_banality_of_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana...
- monksy 8y agoWhy would we take this article seriously? It's a bit of sexist toss to point out that "tech bros" are the issue. (They use the term to imply that it's men and that they're the dominate population within tech.. which isn't even close to being true) The issue here is people who are over-promoted in the media and lack ethics. Also in the article: It goes from the use of stereotyping to the whole liberal "companies are bad" argument.
- johnbender 8y ago> They use the term to imply that it's men and that they're the dominate population within tech.. which isn't even close to being true This seems to contradict most of the information I've seen in the diversity reports from companies. Maybe there is some information covering the broader industry that supports this point?
- macintux 8y agoThat's a vastly more charitable reply than I would have made. Kudos.
- evanpw 8y agoI took GP to mean that "tech bros" (with all of the negative stereotypes that implies) are not dominant, not that men aren't.
- monksy 8y agoYep. That's what I meant.
- jon_richards 8y ago>[tech bros are] men >[tech bros are] the dominant population within tech I think those two statements weren't meant to be linked.
- monksy 8y agoClarifying: I meant to say that they're blaming "tech bros" and linking that attribute to men and linking tech bros to being dominate in the tech industry. The second part of that was pointing out bad journalism.
- Apocryphon 8y agoThe article isn't very deep, only pointing out a phenomenon by way of examples and without too much analysis. I'd argue that villains need power to have teeth and believability. Our definition of power changes over time- that's why we don't see too many communist rebel Che Guevara knock-offs, for example, as movie villains anymore unlike in Predator or Escape from LA. But if it wasn't tech CEOs then tinpot dictators and rogue generals always work, because they're always in power somewhere in the world. There's also the archetype of the sinister senior intelligence apparatchik or bureaucrat as highlighted in Mission: Impossible, 24, the Bourne movies, and a ton of others even before the Snowden revelations or the Iraq War, because that's another example of American conception of power. I'd argue that tech CEOs also make for an easy target because their public personas are often defined by their idiosyncrasies (Jobs' turtleneck, Bezos' shaved head) and perceived social awkwardness. Sometimes, in the case of Upgraded, it just feels cruel to stereotypically awkward or neuroatypical nerds. But there's at least one major counter-example: Ex Machina was a great Hollywood exploration of A.I. and the Turing Test, and its genius CEO villain was played by Oscar Issac as a charismatic, or at least chummy, non-stereotypical nerd.
- lalos 8y agoAbout the tech bro (and less of the successful CEO) problem, I think it is getting out of hand. Service workers (waiters, drivers, etc) in SF complain constantly of their behavior. What's funny its that it's usually the new blood, junior devs that behave like this. Why do they think they are kings of the world if they are on the lowest chain in the tech world? I want to sympathize with them but just can't understand their thought process. Also I've had issues with them, I saw a group of tech bros touching all the keyboards of the Computer History Museum, they don't even respect their own history or are grateful of why they are here to begin with. Maybe it's just that enough people are in tech now that we have a percentage of bad apples by pure stats. It worries me, since we are getting stereotyped by what I hope is a loud minority.
- oceanghost 8y ago> Why do they think they are kings of the world if they are on the lowest chain in the tech world? Becuase they're the top of the food chain where they came from. I came from a small, poor town. I was never a "tech bro." My parents stressed humility, and in particular, my dad said, "All work is honorable" which isn't true exactly, but the point was not to look down on people. I'd also had jobs at Walmart, Subway, etc. before college... At about 26 my income went from NOTHING to low six figures in the early 2000's. I made more money in a day then I made in a month. I was living in a nice house, driving a nice car. For the first time in my life, I walked into a dealership and bought the car I wanted, not something I could afford. I took a loan for a modest sports car because I'd never had a loan before. But I could have paid cash. Having come from a small, poor town-- that was a big deal to me. Most of the people I grew up with were just trying to make rent each month. It is so easy to let that go to your head. I am sure I did a few times.
- lalos 8y agoI have to agree with your dad as long as your work is not illegal or causing severe damage to part of the community. The honorable part is usually discarded if you are cleaning toilets for a living but I've talked with people at work that have that job and there is honor to it. They usually have big dreams for their kids and talk about sacrificing themselves for them to have just a little bit of a better life. Also they ask for advice on how to get them interested in tech and things that they don't have the time to sit down and get a grasp of. That is the definition of honorable. Thank you for sharing your introspection! You seem like a great person.
- Wohlf 8y agoAh yes, Hollywood, our moral arbiters that can't stop projecting their own issues on to everyone else.
- paul7986 8y agoWell they also are similar to dirty hedge fund operators.. no morale compass .. win and become filthy rich at whatever cost.
- Bartweiss 8y ago> tech bro... CEOs Even in this headline, there's some pretty interesting equivocation happening between techies and CEOs overall. The article makes a decent case for why there's collective anxiety about tech companies, but neglects the question of "why only tech?" The ~1990s had a whole string of movies with bankers and investors as villains: American Psycho, Rogue Trader, Glengarry Glen Ross, Wall Street, Boiler Room, and so on. Lately, we had had Wolf of Wallstreet and The Big Short, but in a post-2008 world where banking already has trashed the economy we're surprisingly short on bankers-as-villains films. We got a couple of global warming films in the 2000s, and a couple more in the 2010s, but I can't think of one which makes a serious attempt to cast oil CEOs as villains - certainly not in the sense that e.g. tobacco companies have been. Avatar is probably the closest thing to "CEOs trashing the environment" that's been a hit. Pharma companies lend themselves to human-interest tragedies, and we did get Dallas Buyer's Club. But there's no whole genre here like there used to be with "the bank takes the farm". So there's the missing question: why tech companies specifically? The most obvious answer is just "more impressive visuals". I'm not sure we're talking about a particular anxiety of the moment, or if it's just that banks and oil companies work better on the page than on the screen.
- eesmith 8y ago> Avatar is probably the closest thing to "CEOs trashing the environment" that's been a hit. What about "Erin Brockovich"? PG&E is a power company, though the hexavalent chromium was used to fight corrosion. I did not see the movie, but the Wikipedia summary says the decision was traced to upper management.
- Bartweiss 8y agoErin Brockovich and A Civil Action (about groundwater pollution) are both good examples, yes. I guess it depends when the article starts its timeline. I was trying to think of movies from the 2010s or so, because I can think of a lot of tech CEO villains in that span but not many non-tech CEO villains. My best guess at why is that action films with corporate villains look better with tech companies. (For instance, Robocop is way older than the article's timeframe, but fits the same villain narrative.)
- nojvek 8y ago> After all, what’s scarier? The rise of the machines, or the rise of the morally ambiguous men who pioneer them. This article summarized things so well. I love it!
- joshuaheard 8y agoSomething I've noticed about Hollywood bias. When there is a Republican President, the villains tend to be corporations ("Rollerball") or government ("No Way Out"). In other words, Republicans are the enemy. When there is a Democrat President, the villains tend to be aliens ("Independence Day) or natural disasters ("Twister"). In other words, Democrats are the heroes. Just anecdotal, I've never seen a study on it.
- AckSyn 8y agoI eagerly await your analysis with a well researched paper.
- DanAndersen 8y agoI wonder which other groups of people the Guardian would feel comfortable writing headlines about promoting killing for the good of the world.