Techbros.

Techbros are, for obvious reasons, not just all about iSheeps vs Samsung fanboys anymore. For example, a “cryptocurrency techbro” aka. “cryptobro” is enlightened with the advances of one or specific cryptocurrencies to the point that they forgot that the word “crypto” actually stands for “cryptography”.

It’s a whole community of people enlightened with a specific technology that they mostly don’t own, as if they “owned” the technology, who also tries to enforce everyone else to use the same technology.

Let’s start with, someone known to actually make large cash selling Notion templates made a poll whether people prefer to use Google Workspace over a bunch of niche tools that he personally use. We can partly see his intentions to offer alternatives to the “boring” Google set of productivity apps.

The answer is somehow obvious: 65% of voters actually choose A over B. Considering the number of votes, this is embarrasing for the Arc–Superhuman–Notion community out there.

The moral of the story? Has any self-proclaimed “techbro” done useful things to the outside community in the long term?

1. Techbros don’t innovate at all.

Yes, they’re rapidly sharing tech innovations, but they’re still don’t innovate at all.

Taking the case of AI, 99.99% (pun intended) of them don’t actually learn how to make one, the foundations of automata, maths, data collections, some legal policies, and so on. But 99.99% (also pun intended) of them are pledging to use them for a lifetime.

The same also goes with the ones who praised Apple’s M1 chips. Yes, M1 is another innovation, but the only innovation these can actually give is to type these, 🤯🤯🤯 emojis over Twitter and now other platforms, too.

/* Hey, at least 🤯 is now innovating against 🤣, 😭, and 💩, right? */

A dedicated Notion influencer like the above case proved to rake in as large as $239,000 selling Notion templates over Gumroad.

But what happens if Notion ended their product? Sure, we have some alternatives including AppFlowy, but it’s important that many of these will less likely to incorporate all the things that made Notion, Notion. That’s why Google Sheets didn’t have the exact same set of supported functions compared to Microsoft Excel. Or Zoom having the same collaboration capabilities with Google Meet.

But will Easlo continue to succeed in a post-Notion world? A quick LinkedIn search around the founder and the company clearly shows this guy’s first and only listed professional work experience is building Notion templates since the start of his career.

So, at a glance, it might be the person who truly innovates in building templates and “second brains” for people. But is it? Isn’t that the original creators of the templates feature in Notion who actually innovate in productivity?

2. Many techbros today don’t bring any real, usable values to the community. They’re just selfish to make people do or buy what they want.

“Hey, I recently convinced an entire village in South Africa to open up payments in #Bitcoin. One small step to open the global economy freedom to the country!”

Yeah, that sounds good, especially if you’re the one introducing it to them before moving to Portugal then Japan and Australia as a digital nomad. But have you ever consider what would happen to them if they forgot their recovery phrase, or even worse, forgot what does these 32 English words you told them to write on paper and save it securely actually mean to them!

Oh, no! There’s no such things as “forgot private key” in Web3 just like “forgot password” in Web 2.0! They will lose their access to the global economy as you envisioned!

Have… anyone consider certain people who did these things as selfish? Because most techbros have the same ultimate goal: making more and more people to adopt the same and specific technology as they loved, endorsed, and enforced.

3. Techbros believe they are part of marketing. Actually, they’re the target market.

This sounds like a win-win solution, though. They dedicate their lives for and only for consuming all the innovations the tech world is producing, and for companies who made, this is profitable.

And this makes techbros no different than social clubs that commonly endorse certain luxury bags, clothes, or cars. Nothing’s different here, even the goal behind these clubs are also the same: Endorsing people to use certain brands, right?

But at the same time, these cool social clubs also become the coolest preys of luxury brands. Whenever Louis Vuitton or Ferrari release a new product, it’s significantly easier for them to trick and target social clubs to buy more. So are techbros in the eye of OpenAI and many other tech companies today.