How Silicon Valley Spoiled Man-Children came to rule politics

Carolina A. Miranda, Opinion, “Washington Post”, 3/15/25

Opinion, Carolina A. Miranda, “Washington Post”, 3/15/25

If you happened to tune in to the live stream of the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual right-wing confab held in Maryland last month, you would be forgiven for thinking you had accidentally logged on to a video game reveal at Comic-Con. There was Elon Musk — decked out in sunglasses, black MAGA hat, chunky gold chain and a T-shirt reading, “I’m Not Procrastinating, I’m Doing Side Quests” — bounding around the stage with a chain saw while squawking, “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy! Chain saw!” Later, as Musk departed the stage (after an incoherent discussion with Newsmax host Rob Schmitt), an audience member gave him a painting that shows the Tesla CEO rising above a futuristic city as brain waves emanate from his head.

It was as though politics was being filtered through the fever dream of a pimply adolescent boy. And that’s because the pimply adolescent boys are now running the country. This is in some ways literal. See the case of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the 19-year-old currently helping Musk butcher the federal bureaucracy as part of the U.S. DOGE Service, a.k.a. the Department of Government Efficiency. It’s also figurative, because even the adults in the room seem permanently stuck in snickering boy mode.

Elon Musk

Let’s start with the antics of the country’s adolescent in chief: Musk. The man who helped devise Tesla car horns that sound like farts named DOGE after a nonsensical viral meme of a skeptical-looking Shiba Inu. After his job was announced, he posted an AI-generated image of himself on X that shows him sitting behind a “DOGE” deskplate, sporting large sunglasses and an unnaturally strong jawline. There is also his trash talk and trolling, which seem perpetually set to “stun.” Over the past six weeks, Musk has performed a Nazi salute at a rally (white nationalists have interpreted it as a Nazi salute, so I’m going with Nazi salute); responded to his critics on X by tagging a pejoratively-titled troll account called “@IfindRetards”; suggested that federal workers need to prove that they have “a pulse and two neurons”; and has taken glee in firing people from jobs they do, not for money, but because they deeply care about the work. Such as the custodian at Yosemite National Park who told the San Francisco Chronicle after losing his job: “The past 24 hours, I’ve cried more than I have in my entire life.”

Boorish behavior is in no way limited to Musk. President Donald Trump has turned simple handshakes into what look like lunchroom battles for dominance, and his recent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took on the cast of a hazing. Last month, the White House’s Instagram account posted a Valentine’s Day image with the message “Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Come Here Illegally and We’ll Deport You” — turning immigration enforcement into a joke. Two weeks later, the X account for the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee uploaded what it claimed was a link to files related to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, but was in fact a rickroll, sending people to a YouTube video of Rick Astley’s 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Because the sexual abuse of young girls is so ha ha hilarious? The committee later took down the post, but such gestures of mild contrition are more the exception than the rule.

I knew that facing the end of constitutional checks and balances during Trump 2.0 would be bad; I didn’t realize it would be so relentlessly puerile. To some degree, we have Silicon Valley — and the broader tech business — to thank for this.

Silicon Valley culture

For years, the industry has fetishized the idea of perpetual adolescence. In the Bay Area, wannabe founders inhabit shared living spaces that critic Adrian Daub has described as “a mix of the fanciest hippie commune you’ve ever seen with the fanciest dormitory you can imagine.” One of these served as a primary setting for Mike Judge’s satirical HBO series “Silicon Valley.” A ranch-style home intended for an upwardly mobile family was inhabited by an oblivious crew of programmers, as well as a tiki head, pirate flag and foosball table; the dining room was reserved for working out code. Real-life “hacker” houses vary in size, design and amenities, but they are united by the same feeling of subadult transience.

Tech office design has likewise occupied a childlike Neverland. Interior aesthetics at startups have leaned toward bold primary colors (the palette of so many day cares), with trappings like ping-pong tables, hammocks, egg chairs, cereal dispensers and, in the case of Google, boxes of Legos. The work uniform typically consists of hoodies and jeans — unless you graduate to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg levels of wealth, in which case you can tap a fashion designer to create custom oversize tees with sayings in Latin. (Mark Zuckerberg’s Roman Empire, it appears, is Mark Zuckerberg.)

The most frustrating part of the tech sector’s extended adolescence, however, is the relentless mean-boy aggression. Facebook has roots in “FaceMash,” a social media network devised by Zuckerberg while he was still a student at Harvard University, which invited users to rate the relative hotness of fellow students. When Facebook became an actual company in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg used to conclude staff meetings by raising a fist and exclaiming, “Domination!” — as if embarking on a battle sequence in “Age of Empires.” Recently, he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and declared that “the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered” and that business needs more “masculine energy.” (Never mind that men vastly outnumber women in corporate suites and on boards.)

Zuckerberg is not the only Silicon Valley mogul who appears stuck in puberty. In 2017, when former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was caught on a dash camera behaving petulantly with an Uber driver, he issued an apology in which he stated: “I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up.” Except Kalanick was already plenty grown up when the incident happened. In his enlightening 2020 book “What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley,” Daub describes the reaction to Kalanick’s apology: “Even in a place as chockablock with balding skateboarders and middle-aged trick-or-treaters as San Francisco, a forty-year-old CEO of a seventy-billion-dollar company casting himself as an overenthusiastic kid who just needs to get his s--- together was seen as a bit much.”

This childish belligerence has roots in the 1960s. In an eye-opening article published in the science and technology journal Osiris in 2015, sociologist and historian Nathan Ensmenger notes that women once had a significant presence in computer programming. But as the field grew in status and pay during the late 20th century, it drew more men, who brought to the mundane act of sitting at a keyboard the combativeness of the gladiatorial arena. Programming became competition — with all-night coding sessions powered by coffee and junk food (not to mention drugs), in which everyone battled to see who could best handle the sleep deprivation. “The physical risks of computer programming might have been artificial and contrived,” writes Ensmenger, “but they were nevertheless a form of masculine competition and display.”

This bravado has become a trope in an industry that has largely sidelined women. Cut to Google founder Sergey Brin issuing a memo late last month stating that working 60 hours a week is “the sweet spot of productivity,” and to Musk frequently bragging about sleeping in his workspaces, including DOGE offices in D.C. And don’t forgot the flashy, look-at-me hobbies: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (who owns The Post) has rocketed himself into space, Zuckerberg raises cattle that dine on macadamia nuts, and Musk takes to social media to boast about his gaming skills (though serious gamers have accused him of cheating).[NOTE: Who does this remind you of? Oh, yeah. The orange sadist and golf.]

Silicon Valley’s self-involved “toxic toddlers,” as described by tech journalist Kara Swisher, like to MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS with little regard for what or who might get hurt. Social media promised connectivity but also has fueled phenomena such as revenge porn and cyberbullying. Ride apps such as Uber and Lyft put taxi drivers out of work. Facebook amplified violence against the Rohingya people in Myanmar in 2017. When Musk suddenly pulled the plug on the U.S. Agency for International Development last month, workers stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo were left to their own devices as they tried to flee violence in Kinshasa.

Early last month, workers in Washington removed the USAID sign from the building’s headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue NW and obscured the agency’s name with black tape on nearby street signage — like some act of late Cold War iconoclasm. In one video of the removal, it was possible to see the ghostly traces of the USAID name on the building’s facade, which made me think of another tech industry phenomenon: link rot. This is when websites link to pages that no longer exist. A quarter of all webpages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, according to a study published last year by the Pew Research Center. Since Trump (and Musk) took office, they’ve worsened the rot. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has removed or edited references to transgender people from its official pages; the Agriculture Department has removed data related to climate change. There are plenty more examples.

The promise of the internet was that it would be a widely accessible archive of collective knowledge. But it is ephemeral, and intensely susceptible to manipulation by a chosen few. Our government is beginning to feel similarly flimsy as the spoiled man-children of the tech industry chain-saw their way through the vast federal workforce, leaving in their wake a pile of broken links.