Tech Bros and the Myth of Innovation
I used to think men like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were innovators. For a long time, I bought into the idea that they were shaping the world for the better and were meant to be admired. It was easy to believe their success stories were everywhere, wrapped up in the language of progress and possibility.
But over time, I started to realise I’d been sold a lie. The more power and money these tech bros gained, the harder it became to ignore what I suspected had always been there: a lack of accountability, ethics that crumbled on closer inspection, and choices that caused real harm.
Before Facebook, Zuckerberg (one of the first tech bros I ever admired) built Facemash, a site where Harvard students compared women’s photos and ranked them for attractiveness. It wasn’t a noble mission about “connection.” It was an objectifying game. Facebook came later, but this is part of the origin story that gets airbrushed out when he’s described as a visionary.
Musk was often hailed as a genius who would “save humanity,” but his companies have faced repeated criticism for working conditions. His public statements feel to me less like innovation and more like picking sides in culture wars, particularly given his most recent forays into European politics.
Steve Jobs is still revered as the genius of Apple, but his daughter Lisa has written in her memoir Small Fry about the emotional cruelty she experienced from him. Apple has also faced criticism for labour conditions in its supply chains. These are the parts of the story people prefer not to mention when celebrating his genius.
It seems to me that if a man creates something or is successful and popular, how he treats people is overlooked as something not important, typically because the people on the receiving end of mistreatment are just women and marginalised communities who apparently don't matter in the eyes of the world.
And if you look further back, even Edward Jenner, remembered as the “father of vaccination”, wasn’t the sole pioneer. Inoculation practices were carried out by women and communities across the world years before the creation of the smallpox vaccine. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu introduced it to England after learning about the practice of inoculation in Turkey 75 years before Jenner's vaccine. Jenner formalised it in writing, but the knowledge wasn’t his alone and was built on the backs of women's minds.
Once you start noticing the pattern, you realise it’s everywhere, the same story playing out again and again with different tech bros. Innovation has too often meant: a powerful white man taking credit, while women and marginalised people are erased. And behaviours that would normally be condemned, arrogance, exploitation, even cruelty, are excused as the quirks of genius.
This makes me angry. Really angry. Because women have been challenging this for centuries, and still we see the same archetype recycled over and over again: the untouchable man, glorified as a visionary, while everyone else’s contributions are sidelined.
But here’s the thing: naming it matters. Saying, “this isn’t innovation, it’s exploitation dressed up as brilliance”, matters for all the people trampled upon in the name of patriarchal progress.
Because to me, real innovation doesn’t look like billionaires manipulating our attention spans, harming our wellbeing through social media addiction or shaping culture in their image. Real innovation looks like women quietly, stubbornly finding ways to live differently. Breaking cycles in our personal lives. Refusing to stay small or silent and unlearning everything the patriarchy grooms us with.
It might look like leaving a marriage that’s crushing you and building something new. It might look like resting without guilt. It might look like saying the words you’ve been holding back. It might look like refusing to repeat the same relationship patterns, even when it’s uncomfortable, simply because you finally start believing that you deserve better.
This kind of innovation is quieter than Silicon Valley and the noise of tech bros. It doesn’t get celebrated in headlines or turned into billion-dollar companies. But it changes lives.
And I think that’s what both exhausts me and keeps me going: knowing how long women have been doing this work, and knowing we’re still here, still refusing to be erased. And for the women of the future, we have to keep going.
💭 Maybe you feel it too, that combination of rage and weariness, alongside the flicker of determination that whispers: we don’t have to let them keep defining the story.
Because they were never the only innovators. They just convinced us they were.
