Why Silicon Valley Guys Are The Worst

From an infantilizing culture to tech products that hurt women to partying and excessive drug use, here are several reasons why Silicon Valley guys are the worst.

They’re Infantilized

In Maelle Gavet’s book Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech’s Empathy Problem and How to Fix It, Gavet illustrates how an infantilized culture rules the tech scene. The men in tech “live in hyper-privileged bubbles where their every whim is catered to and every need anticipated,” she writes. 

At Google, employees are given nap pods, free massages, and a luxury hotel-style concierge service to run errands for them. Facebook offers free meals all day long,  bankers and barbers, free dry cleaning and laundry, and regular ice cream socials. Airbnb has regularly scheduled perks including Mustache Mondays (employees wear fake ones), Yoga Tuesdays, and Thursday Recess (company-wide kickball). The founder’s office has a two-story indoor treehouse (okay, that is kind of cool).

These perks sound more like summer camp than workplaces. This spoiled treatment insulates Silicon Valley guys from ever needing to inconvenience themselves, be self-sufficient, or do anything too difficult. Considering boys need hardship to turn them into men, this is a huge problem. The treatment by their companies pampers them in a way that makes them eternal man-children. The tech companies serve as a mommy and a wife to their employees, enabling a Neverlandish state of mind.

They’re Polyamorous

One of the biggest reasons Silicon Valley guys are the worst is because they’re bent towards polyamory and open relationships. When your corporate mommy is doing your laundry and cooking for you, you can see how having a monogamous girlfriend or wife seems unnecessary.

Guys in tech tend to be hyper-rational, without a strong attunement to emotions. Everything is a problem to be engineered away or to be decentralized. Polyamory and open relationships are particularly appealing to tech guys because they look at their love lives like an engineering challenge, something to be optimized and gamified so they can get the highest return. Is it any surprise they’ve made an app for keeping track of their many sexual and romantic partners? It’s called The Poly Life.

They look at their love lives like something to be optimized so they can get the highest return.

In order to be polyamorous, everyone is required to cut off the very human emotion of jealousy and navigate a complicated set of arrangements and negotiations. Women end up particularly hurt in this scenario, as women are the more emotional sex and are built for monogamy in order to ensure they’re supported by the father in the event of a pregnancy. 

Not that the guys in Silicon Valley are considering being a father any time soon. As committed Peter Pans, they’re more interested in casual sex than lineage. 

They’re Excessive Partiers and Drug Users

Burning Man culture permeates Silicon Valley. Burning Man is a pseudo-pagan art-and-tech festival that happened yearly in the Nevada desert, before COVID-19 pushed it underground. It’s deeply woven into Silicon Valley’s culture.

Often dubbed a “playground for adults,” Burning Man is a place where grown men dress up in onesies and tutus, get high, dance to EDM, and have casual sex. The week culminates in a mock human sacrifice, in which the “burners” set fire to a giant wooden sculpture of a man.

Burning Man is a place where grown men dress up in onesies and tutus, get high, dance, and have casual sex.

A big part of Burning Man culture is heavy drug use. Tech guys who go to Burning Man have an affinity for ketamine, LSD, coke, DMT, marijuana, whip-its, and ecstasy. The idea is that using a lot of drugs will “open their minds” to creativity and help them gain big spiritual insights, or that the aliens they see in DMT will give them their next million-dollar start-up idea.

In reality, they just become increasingly more dependent on using drugs to be creative. The constant use makes them pie-in-the-sky, flakey, forgetful, hedonistic, idealistic, and extremely self-involved.

They’re Making Technology That’s Bad for Us

The technology being built by the guys in Silicon Valley is creating radical consequences for society. Chief among this disruptive tech is OnlyFans, an app inspired by Silicon Valley-based Uber, in which men pay women a monthly fee for personally-tailored sexually explicit images and videos.

It’s hard to overstate how bad technology like OnlyFans is for men and women. This technology has made being a cam girl or making porn more acceptable. Porn is now a freelance endeavor a woman can do right from her phone. This is extremely sad and disturbing given the fact that doing cam work or pornography damages women psychologically, physically, and spiritually. There’s also no shortage of evidence that watching sexually explicit content damages and changes the viewer’s brain.

Along with tech like OnlyFans, many tech companies based in Silicon Valley are also eroding our First Amendment rights. The radical ideology the men in Silicon Valley possess leads them to make decisions like censoring the people who use their platforms under the guise of creating a “healthy conversation” or “fighting incitements of violence” online. The most disturbing example of this happened in early January 2021 when Twitter permanently banned the elected President of the United States.

Tech companies shouldn't be allowed to stifle the speech of American citizens who think differently.

Shortly after banning the president from Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon followed suit and conspired to remove the social media app Parler from being downloaded. It was quite frightening to witness the sheer power of Big Tech over our free speech and free association rights, and the actions set an extremely dangerous precedent. Silicon Valley tech guys have so much power over our communication, politicians, and elections that they essentially act as a de facto government — except none of us elected them. 

Jack Dorsey made the call to ban Donald Trump from Twitter while on vacation on a private island in French Polynesia.

The creepiest part is that the guys in Silicon Valley don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. Tech companies should not be allowed to stifle the speech of American citizens who think differently than they do or conspire to shut down a private business like Parler, but they do it anyway, thinking it’s for some “greater good.”

Closing Thoughts

The guys in Silicon Valley are embedded in a culture that makes them Peter Pan-like at best and censorious tyrants at worst. Silicon Valley is not known for men who are upright, noble, orderly, chivalrous, and good at having healthy boundaries, and it has everything to do with the mentalities and behaviors that are considered socially acceptable in the tech scene. If the guys in Silicon Valley want to lead us to a better world, they’re going to have to do some very intense self-reflection before their reputation changes.