The word 'techbro' has seen a massive uptake in the past few years (source: trust me), driven in large part by the massive hype machine that is the AI industry. I don't think it's a useful word, I think it's used to imply connections that don't exist, and I think we'd be better off without it.
To illustrate my point, here are three people I've seen referred to as "techbros":
- Richard Stallman
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
- Sam Altman
In terms of their beliefs about technology, they're all fairly different. I don't know offhand what Stallman thinks about AI, but given all of his other stances I think it's a safe bet he's very against the OpenAI model of "run everything on the cloud server and trust the vendor". Yudkowsky and Altman both talk about the transformative power of AI, but the former views it as a massive threat and the latter phrases it as a massive advancement for humanity. Altman is incredibly rich, but Stallman and Yudkowsky aren't.
Wiktionary defines the word "techbro" as:
(slang, typically derogatory) A bro (someone who espouses bro culture) involved in the tech industry.
but I certainly wouldn't put Stallman or Yudkowsky in the realm of 'bro culture'! (I don't know what Altman's like.) The phenomenon described here is much more an artifact of the early 2010s, the era of Klout's infamous "bro down and crush code" recruiting partner or CouchDB's "perform like a pr0n star" talk. Note that in both of these cases, the behavior being critized is very directly linked to "bro culture"!
So, the three techbro figures, what do they have in common?
- They're strongly associated with computers. Note that it's not necessary for them to actually have any knowledge of tech themselves; Peter Thiel is often called a 'techbro' even though as far as I'm aware he doesn't really know how to program.
- They're men. 'Bro' is, of course, a highly gendered term. I have yet to see anyone call anyone "techsis" unironically; people generally either drop the phrasing entirely in favor of more specific descriptions, or result to painful circumlocutions like "techbro-coded behavior". There are going to be women involved in AI; I'm certainly not a booster, but I'm much more neutral on it than many of the people I know who use the word 'techbro', and I know several women who use generative AI in their personal artistic projects as well as women who work at generative AI companies. If your go-to insult here is 'techbro' then this puts you in an awkward spot.
- They're disliked by the sort of person that calls people 'techbros'.
As far as I can tell, that's really the content of the term: a techbro is a man associated with computers that the speaker dislikes.
I don't mean to sound like I think every insult must be the peak of intellectual rigor; there are many different ways for someone to be a "shithead". And there are many other terms in ordinary use, like "chair" and "game", that don't really have a very rigorous definitionion; instead, they're defined more by a family resemblance. But by the same token, it would be very difficult to use "chair", "game", or "shithead" as a term of analysis in a productive manner.
postscript
While looking things up for this article I found this Wired article from 2010 making basically the same argument I am here. Ah well.