Or, Jesus Christ these people have never stepped foot outside their STEM supremacist echo chamber and it shows

What do Brendan Eich (creator of javascript and Brave), regular people, and techbros all have in common? Well, other than being humans.

Correct, they all kinda hate Firefox and Mozilla! But why is this the case? I promise it’ll be relevant to why techbros are.

Opsec? I hardly know ’er; why do I know this?

Before I go through my little rant, I think it would be relevant to ground it with what my background is. At the time of writing, I’m almost at the end of completing undergrad in IT/compsci/whatever you wanna call it and sociology. It is from the experiences I’ve had through my years in tertiary education and being maybe a little terminally online that I write on this topic. So yeah, I’m not necessarily talking out of my ass.

Okay but why do they hate Moz tho?

In case you’re not a techy person, Mozilla is made up of multiple parts – the corporation that actually develops things, and the foundation that does more social cause type things. You might already realise where I’m going with this, and yes, dear reader, you’re correct. Mozilla Foundation is pretty progressive and has initiatives for more inclusive environments in the FOSS space. In my experience, many techbros have this belief that Mozilla should just direct all their money towards developers and not do anything PoLiTiCaL. “Political” obviously being code for “anything vaguely left”, and not actual political things like the Free Software movement, of which Firefox is a part. Obviously there are legitimate criticisms of Mozilla and Firefox, but you don’t often hear them, the anti-progressive leanings of the average techbro override the actual technical issues with the Firefox browser. And if you try and bring up that there might be better reasons to dislike Firefox than the activism of Mozilla, people will deny deny deny and/or call you stupid for thinking something social could possibly be complicated because they don’t see it as complicated with their big STEM brain, just give money to the devs, it’s easy bro!

This is just one example of this attitude that you will probably come across in STEM if you’re not a cishet guy.

Is it fair to say every single person in tech/STEM/etc is obnoxious and embodies that attitude? Well, as a queer person in tech, I spitefully do kinda want to say yes. But being more charitable, this is more of a structural problem rather than every single individual in this field problem.

Reality is often disappointing

Innuendo Studios recently did a short video on this idea¹, that people want to believe in simplicity because it “makes more sense” even if reality isn’t as straightforward as they would want. If you come at social sciences with the natural or “hard” science attitude, you miss out on a lot of the nuance and oversimplify a lot of things. And honestly, even in hard science you miss out on a lot if you purely go for cold hard raw facts that you can see. Empirical observation is one of many lens you can apply to society because you can’t just use one lens and assume you’ve understood everything. At every step of university sociology, the teachers reinforced the fact that no one theory will be perfect in every single case – grand theories, much like the “great man” theory of history² have largely been discarded because they often end up getting some things wrong. The reality is, the world is really fucking complicated! You can’t reduce a system with billions of moving parts down to a single book, a single algorithm, or a one-liner that feels right.

Who needs humanities?

In the humanities, yes there are TERFs but mostly people get me and don’t really act weird about me being trans – heck, teachers have implied that sharing your pronouns would be nice but not required on multiple occasions. We discuss social things from multiple angles, getting different people’s perspectives because objectivity is relatively uncommon when it comes to describing society. To paraphrase Butler³, searching for the pre-cultural truth is simply not possible because we always exist after and within culture, we can’t extract ourselves from that context. Essentially, we will always be biased but that’s okay, because we can work with that and be open about limitations when trying to understand the social world.

Contrastively, in STEM fields (especially the T part), there’s the idea that we can always be objective if we just slap the data into an algorithm⁴. Then it’ll be pure, sweet, objective Data! If you’ve clicked to the footnote and actually looked it up, you’ll know that’s not how it works. Algorithms are made by humans and without any adjustments will likely replicate the biases of the society they’re created in. The common one is found in policing – cops are biased towards poor and/or ethnic neighbourhoods, so more crime will be reported in the policing data from those neighbourhoods, thus resulting in an algorithm that will tell the cops to continue going to those very same neighbourhoods they already over-police.

Actually, Science is a social construct

As an aside, I think it’d be relevant to drop this in here. Yes, science is a social construct. The philosophy of empiricism and the scientific method is pretty alright, it seems to align with reality a lot of the time, but it’s not the only extant epistemology⁵ in the world. You can scare a person in STEM by stating this to them. It’s not actually that controversial if your foray into social science brushes up against feminism or indigenous cultures, but it sounds like a steaming hot take to everyone else, which I find really funny. Anyway, back to the main show.

The need for humanities, continued

When a society devalues the softer things, be it art or humanities, people start to look down on those who pursue those fields and even the fields themselves. Techbros continue their march towards automating away everything that can’t truly be automated without losing its soul, or without retaining its safety, ethics be damned. I don’t have the greatest love for the average philosophy major (I’ve had the misfortune of taking intro to phil) but without the people who think about whether something should be the way it is and whether people are getting hurt by what you’re doing, you end up just reinforcing the way it is because you never thought to ask if anyone different to you might be harmed by the way things are.

In Barbie (2023), there’s the scene towards the end of Ken’s redpilling in the “real world” where a random business dude tells Ken that men aren’t doing the best job with patriarchy, given that some men aren’t as privileged as others. This is a reference to the fact that Greta Gerwig understands actual feminism and isn’t just another pop feminist. But also, it’s a fun little callout of the fact that yes, men don’t have it easy, men don’t all have privilege over everyone else in the neat, simple way many people who need Jesus the humanities want to paint feminism as describing. Recognising that feminism actually does talk about marginalisation of men and the plural ways to perform masculinity⁶ would be anaethma to a culture of people who think they’re always an expert because they know how a computer works. Also I fucking hate the analogy of the human brain as a computer, that’s such an oversimplification to the point of absurdity. But I digress. These techbros need the humanities because even with all their big brained tech infrastructure, they still don’t understand the reason their bosses make multiple orders of magnitude more money than they do, they still don’t understand why women and gender diverse people might not feel safe around them, and why the jokes they make can actually hurt people even if they didn’t mean it in that way.

Das Ende

I don’t blame individual dudes I encounter in tech spaces for being the way they are, heck, I know dudes who are actually pretty nice and respectful that I’ve met in tech spaces, so it’s clearly not an individual problem. The structural issue is that many in tech are ignorant of the humanities to the point where they wrap around and start thinking everything can be solved with facts and logic. Bro, dude, homie, leave the logic in booleans and bring out the empathy instead. If nothing else, having more empathy and learning a bit about the social world through the humanities will help you make better, more usable products and expand the potential userbase for your stuff.