The cultural power of the anti-woke tech bro

If, in the year 2010, someone asked you to conjure an image of the average libertarian, there’s a good chance you’d envision former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who was, for decades, the ideology’s most famous representative. 

You might also think of someone entirely fictional: Ron Swanson. 

Grumpy, mustachioed, and obsessively fearful of government overreach, Swanson was Parks & Recreation’s resident macho man, the lone-wolf amateur woodworker who believed society’s problems could be fixed by bootstraps, hard work, and rugged individualism. 

Sure, these guys romanticize the idea of working with their hands, but it’s far more likely they spend their days typing on a laptop (or better yet, speaking into a podcast mic)

Sometime between 2010 and now, however, the libertarian of the American imagination changed. Our new avatar for laissez-faire economics and “leave me alone-ism” is more likely an aspiring entrepreneur who rails against wokeness in forums and group chats. 

Whether or not this type of guy is actually even a libertarian at all is debatable. Some may espouse libertarian-ish economics, but most are far more fixated on culture; still others have a hard-to-classify medley of views. They are, however, united by their self-mythologizing as “free thinkers” and a sense of alienation from mainstream liberal discourse. This brand of tech bro is proud of his heterodoxy, despite the fact that the worldview he articulates seems to have been passed top-down from a cadre of influential Silicon Valley executives. 

Sure, these guys romanticize the idea of working with their hands, but it’s far more likely they spend their days typing on a laptop (or better yet, speaking into a podcast mic). Rather than a remote log cabin, they imagine escaping to their very own civilization on a corporate-owned self-governing city-state — er, “networked state.” They’re not driving lifted trucks; they’re buying bulletproof hunks of metal that look like they came out of Cyberpunk 2077. Like Ron Swanson, they still love animal protein, but now they may be eating it literally raw. 

Less into Milton Friedman (the economist) than Lex Fridman (the computer scientist-turned-podcaster), they regurgitate the gospel of tech overlords like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and the creators who interview them — Joe Rogan and his many imitators. They love tough-guy sports like MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu but are worried about vaccines, seed oils, and the mainstreaming of trans rights. Their worldview is often a paradox, full of irony and sometimes hypocrisy. 

In recent years, there have been a few attempts at christening this cohort with a name. Germs of it are influenced by the manosphere, or the parts of the internet where men complain about their lack of access to women and sex and blame society’s present ills on feminism. Though you don’t hear these guys talk about the alt-right or being “redpilled” much anymore (perhaps too closely associated with incels), they tend to frame their position as “anti-woke,” or a counterpoint to what they see as a world over-indexed on equality and diversity. 

This sphere, broadly conceived, includes everyone from “canceled” figures associated with the “intellectual dark web,” to controversy-hungry influencers like Sneako and the Paul brothers, to mega podcasters Dave Rubin and Tim Pool (most recently in the news for unwittingly becoming paid Russian propaganda stooges). 

Since the Obama administration, two things happened that changed the way these men (and they are overwhelmingly men) think, look, and behave online: the overhaul of acceptable political discourse caused by the election of Donald Trump and, of course, the pandemic.

A worldview centered around cultural grievances

Some of this philosophy and aesthetic can be credited to the influence of billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Thiel, whose libertarian views have curdled into the anti-democratic, has for years funded a right-wing culture movement (if it can even be considered that) that includes film festivals, conferences, and media companies that tout anti-feminism and climate change denialism.

A recent Thiel biography traces almost everything the billionaire has done to amass power back to the grudge he held as a nerdy schoolboy who loved Dungeons & Dragons and The Lord of the Rings (several of Thiel’s companies are named for Tolkien people and places) against the liberals and elites who rejected him.

The Trump years gave extreme views like Thiel’s and others in Silicon Valley legitimacy and publicity. One major moment, says Derek Robertson, who writes Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter, was the publication of ex-Google employee James Damore’s letter to the company’s leadership in 2017. 

In it, Damore railed against the company’s diversity measures by stating that women simply weren’t biologically suited to work in tech, causing a major backlash from women in the industry. After Damore was fired, he hit the burgeoning alt-right media circuit, where he gave interviews to the leading commentators of the day: Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, as well as white nationalist podcaster Stefan Molyneux. 

The letter was also a litmus test for what was acceptable to say publicly in a world where Donald Trump was president. The sudden open hostility to diversity grew to include a stew of related grievances. Anyone who prevented entrepreneurs and other “big thinkers” from doing exactly as they pleased became the enemy: unions, the media, academia, government institutions, anyone with a liberal arts degree, as well as women and people of color in positions of power (although this part usually goes unsaid). 

If contemporary culture is the problem, with its wokeness and DEI, it’s no wonder they valorize “the classics” 

Robertson tells me he’s watched libertarianism, at least in its tech bro manifestation, go from this “really wonky” philosophy centered around less government interference in all aspects of life to a movement that’s almost entirely centralized around cultural grievances. “It’s just a reactionary movement against the increasing presence of women in culture, the increasing domination of women in academia and corporate fields,” he says. 

These grievances have shaped the aesthetic of the online right: If contemporary culture is the problem, with its wokeness and DEI, it’s no wonder they valorize “the classics.” 

Many of them, exemplified by the infamous internet personality Bronze Age Pervert, revere the type of art Westerners are exposed to in elementary school: ancient sculpture and their Renaissance counterparts, Romantic painting, and classical music and architecture. Echoes of this worldview are everywhere on social media, romanticizing “trad” lifestyles with regressive gender roles juxtaposed next to images of rural landscapes and marble nudes, often posted by people hoping for a “RETVRN” (styled as such to emulate the Roman empire) to an imagined past society. 

Ironically, no object better synthesizes the hyper-online, libertarian-leaning dude than the Cybertruck, the bizarre Tesla offering that the Times described as “a culture war on wheels.” 

Inspired by dystopian science fiction, the hulking hunk of unpainted metal barely squeezes into a lane of traffic and encases its driver in a (sort of) bulletproof tank that’s easily mistaken for a weapon of war. It is one of the few cars in the world that no one would ever compare to a woman’s body — there are no curves, after all. The Cybertruck appeals to someone who imagines danger is all around them. If they can’t protect themselves against a culture that is moving on without them, perhaps they can do it with stainless steel. 

How Covid supercharged male wellness culture

The pandemic was a convergence of several grievances harbored by the free-thinker set: government overreach, America’s troubled health care system, and left-wing virtue signaling. 

The CDC’s response to Covid-19, says Hussein Kesvani, a journalist and podcaster who covers internet culture and politics, clashed with the tech bros’ sensibilities: Public health required individuals to alter their behavior for the sake of the collective good and sacrifice certain personal freedoms. 

It’s not surprising, then, how this set began to view mask-wearing as a symbol identifying oneself with the political establishment and vaccines as dangerous. While promoting vaccine skepticism and decrying lockdown measures, personalities like Rogan have entertained a bevy of other junk ideas about health, often peddling their own questionable products. Energy drinks and longevity supplements in particular are a cash cow; listen to any podcast of this ilk and you’re likely to hear the guest plugging their own brand (Logan Paul has Prime Hydration; both Alex Jones and The Daily Wire have vitamin companies). 

“So much of this conspiratorial stuff is rooted in this idea that these institutions — hospitals, governments — are keeping the secrets of the universe away from you,” says Kesvani. 

That’s created an enormous industry for heterodoxy entrepreneurs on every level of scamminess to hawk ideas about “seed oils” supposedly turning everyone ugly and sick, why masturbation is making men weak, and how raw beef liver is the one true alpha diet: If the pandemic convinced you that everything you’ve been told about health is a lie, it’s far easier to sell you some random influencer’s vitamin. 

“They’re sold in this ‘macho lifestyle’ way, where if you drink Prime you can crush your enemies beneath your chariot wheels, rather than what you’re actually doing, which is probably staying up all night to play PlayStation,” says Helen Lewis, an Atlantic staff writer who covers politics and digital culture. “You have anti-woke moisturizers, anti-woke plunge baths, all this self-care which feels very feminine, so you have to put a macho spin on it to make men feel okay about it.”

Hence the interest in sports like MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which combine individual competition with combat. Mark Zuckerberg, Rogan, and Fridman, for instance, all have either blue or black belts in martial arts. Where wellness culture meets tech guy politics is full of its own paradoxes. 

“It’s about the optimization of you as a person, the people you surround yourself with, the places you go, the people you’re seen with,” says Ed Zitron, a Substacker and tech critic. “It actually, if you really take a step back, is something that 20 years ago, guys like them would have described as deeply feminine.”

Perhaps it’s all about the loneliness epidemic?

It’s possible you’ve seen videos or advertisements on social media promoting all-male retreats that romanticize escaping from society, either for hunting or networking or self-improvement (they’ve become so prevalent that there are now parodies going viral). 

While in itself not a bad thing, Zitron points out that most of these retreats are “men reaching out for community, but the community they find is one built on selfishness and exclusion.” 

“I think it’s really important to know how much of this comes down to the breakdown of male friendships,” he adds. “Women seem to have some degree of sisterhood, a gender-based solidarity. Guys don’t seem to have this unless it’s just being sexist.”

That desire for community sometimes leads heterodox thinkers into creating narratives borrowed from fantasy or reductive retellings of history. It’s no accident that billionaires like Thiel, Musk, and Jeff Bezos frequently reference The Lord of the Rings, a classic high fantasy about the fight between good and evil (you can guess which side they believe they’re on). 

Another current favorite meme places them within the stages of the Roman empire, (“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times”), positioning themselves as the few strong men who will rise from the ashes to save humanity — itself ironic, considering Musk is among the class of tech billionaires who forged the digital world as we know it. 

Yet to the fans who buy into this worldview, it all sounds both true and, crucially, cool: Not only will the free-thinkers rescue humanity, but they’re doing it because it’s punk. “The very macho styling feels countercultural to them. I think it feels punkish: ‘There is a polite society that is dominated by feminine codes of behavior, and we are the insurgent uprising to that.’ To outsiders maybe that doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but if you’re a 14-year-old boy, I think it does make a lot of sense,” says Lewis. 

After all, what else is a Cybertruck but an admission of fear?

There are ways in which their self-mythologizing is absolutely true: They are an alternative to mainstream news media, and they do say things that might land you in a meeting with HR or a suddenly very empty room at a party. By building their followings online, they’re tapping into an audience thirsty for someone to tell them that their grievances — against women, against culture, against the media — are valid.

In reality, the techno-libertarians, the heterodoxy, or whatever we’re calling them (Robertson poses “masculine futurism” while Zitron suggests “New nihilism”) seem to be driven by the deepest fears of these particular men. After all, what else is a Cybertruck but an admission of fear? Fear of other cars, of other people, of being broke and the failure to amass social status. “Because what do they actually care about other than ‘I want money bigger; woman sex me now’?” Robertson asks. 

What, indeed?