Maybe I hate technology: The line between the utilitarian and "tech bro" culture

Recently, I shared a confession in this space about my screen addiction. The response was vast, but one account in particular touched an open wound: a reader, a software developer, summarized her relationship with the field with brutal honesty: "What saves me is that I sort of hate technology."

As someone who breathes technology daily, this sentence has haunted me for months. How is it possible to work with something you essentially detest? The answer, as we delved deeper into the conversation, revealed itself not as a paradox, but as a necessary distinction.

The hatred has a target: "Tech bro" culture

While talking to R., the developer in question, it became clear that her "hatred" is not for electricity, processors, or code. It is a sentiment directed at the ideology that has hijacked technology: "tech bro" culture.

This mindset, inherited from the logic of Silicon Valley, is what turns communication tools into vectors of addiction and algorithms into tools of surveillance. We can list the pillars of this culture that wear us down so much:

• Startup Messianism: That tiring promise that any delivery app or cloud solution will "save the world."
• Technological Determinism: The belief that every innovation (like generative AI forced upon us) is a necessary advancement, ignoring the social and ethical damages.
• Financialization of Life: When the user stops being a customer to become "data" or "product," and every second of our existence is quantified to maximize shareholder profit.
• The Arrogance of the Valley: The idea that "moving fast and breaking things" is a virtue, ignoring that the things being broken are usually our privacy and our mental health.

The editorial shift: Less bitterness, more autonomy

Since the end of 2022, this space has undergone a transformation. After years of following the infinite cycle of Big Tech scandals, the sense of powerlessness became unbearable. The financialization of online life stopped being a journalistic topic and became a personal anguish.

That is when I decided to change. It makes no sense to simply record the decline of the internet; one must offer alternatives. Today, this User Manual is moving into a new phase. Instead of being just a "one-person newspaper" focused on the negativity of tech giants, the focus has shifted to:

1. Valuing Free Software: Tools that respect user autonomy instead of colonizing their attention.
2. "Low-Intensity" Technologies: Devices and practices that help us have a functional relationship with the digital, without the need to be connected 24/7.
3. Subjective Experiences: Accounts that humanize technology, showing that, behind the bits, there are still people trying to live coherently.

Why do I still write about technology?

If I admit that I share the contempt for the culture that dominates the sector, why continue writing about it? Precisely to show that technology is not synonymous with Big Tech.

Technology is, in its essence, an extension of our capacity to create and solve problems. The mistake lies in confusing the tool with the ideology that surrounds it. It is perfectly possible to be a computer enthusiast and, at the same time, a fierce critic of mass surveillance, the addictive design of social media, and corporate arrogance.

My goal here is not technological nihilism, but resistance. There is a path where the computer and the network are servants of our lives, not masters of our time. And as long as that possibility exists — however small it may be — I will remain here, dissecting what works, discarding what is harmful, and, above all, keeping my intellectual integrity far from the clutches of that "tech bro" culture that exhausts us so much.

Do I perhaps hate technology? Perhaps. But, maybe, I just hate the way it has been hijacked. And that, fortunately, is something we can start to change today.