Tech-Bro Spring

Finance withered, control faltered, and the Woke Scolds corroded from within. Yet history turns: spring stirs, production beckons—as the Tech Bros ascend their machinic throne.

Every declining age has its omens, its tremors that ripple beneath the surface before the great rupture. Fernand Braudel called them signs of autumn—the moment when an economy, having reached its zenith, turns from production to speculation, from building things to placing bets, from the factory floor to the cubicle farm.

During the 17th century, the Dutch poured their fortunes into British credit markets; the British funnelled their wealth into American industry. By the late 20th century, the United States abandoned the factories that had forged its empire, offshoring its industrial might to China in pursuit of cheaper labour and higher margins. In its place, America embraced the digital alchemy of derivatives and debt, a financial sleight of hand that turned speculation into an art form.

For decades, the best and brightest were lured not to laboratories or workshops but to the financial casino, where wealth was conjured through leverage rather than labour. The factories that once hummed with the sound of production fell silent, replaced by the flicker of screens and the murmur of traders placing bets on a future they could no longer build.

But winter has passed. A sunnier season is arriving. Call it Tech-Bro Spring.

The 2024 election was a reckoning. With the liquidation of USAID’s networks—the hidden sinews of empire—one power structure is crumbling as another rises in its place. The old enforcers of cultural order, propped up by NGOs, legacy media, and algorithmic gatekeepers, are being purged from their thrones.

This is a class war, not of rich against poor, but of code monkeys against the priesthood of discourse. Like the Magdalene Sisters of old, the Woke Scolds ruled through moral intimidation, wielding language as a cudgel and compliance as their currency. They governed with the authority of nuns brandishing rulers—both the kind that measure and the kind that command—slapping down heretics and demanding obedience to their gospel of progress and diversity. But during the 2024 election, their rule was measured, and found wanting.

But power, like capital, is restless. In 2025, the technicians’ revenge is in full swing. Just as production displaces finance, technicians are defrocking the nuns, stripping them of the words that once bound reality to their will. Their wooden rulers are splintered, their moral authority shattered.

Yet beneath this Tech Bro triumph, something else stirs. As the purge dominates the media heights, a machinic society hums underfoot—low, steady, insistent. Not waiting. Calculating.

Professional Managerial Class War

Donald Trump’s victory in November, 2024 was not merely a political upheaval—it was the liquidation of a faction of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), the bureaucratic elite that has shaped American life for decades. To grasp the significance of this moment, we must first trace the PMC’s origins.

The class emerged in the mid-20th century as industrial capitalism gave way to a knowledge-based economy. In The Managerial Revolution (1941), James Burnham foresaw a new ruling stratum: not the capitalists of old but a class of managers, bureaucrats, and experts who wielded power through their control of institutions rather than ownership of capital. The Ehrenreichs later described the PMC as capitalism’s mediators—tasked with managing the system’s contradictions while preserving its stability. Universities, media, NGOs, and corporate HR departments became their fortresses, their authority derived from credentials rather than capital.

Yet, from its inception, the PMC itself was riddled with its own contradictions. Its power rested on administering the status quo, yet segments of it fancied themselves a revolutionary vanguard. It claimed moral authority against the capitalists while hypocritically propping up the economic order that sustained and privileged its own class prosperity. Like Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals,” it marched through the institutions, not to seize them, but to become them—only to discover, too late, that hegemony is not the same as sovereignty.

Hannah Arendt warned of the dangers of a class detached from the visceral realities of power—a class whose faith in expertise left it ill-equipped to withstand the raw, emotional politics of mass MAGA-like movements. The PMC’s greatest strength—its control of knowledge and institutions—was also its fatal flaw. It mistook management for mastery, consensus for control. And when the season turned, it found itself stranded, unable to adapt to a world it could no longer govern.

Two Tribes Go to War

To understand the liquidation of one branch of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) in the wake of the 2024 election, we turn to Alvin Gouldner, the outlaw Marxist who dared to turn critique inward. Straddling the ridge between Marxism and liberal capitalism, unafraid to attack or defend either, he saw what others could not: the real class war was within the PMC itself, splitting it into two factions—intertwined snakes locked in a struggle for dominance. On one side, the tech-phobic intellectuals; on the other, the tech-empowered intelligentsia. These terms, however, are too clinical, too similar in tone. For this essay, we will often refer to Woke Scolds and Tech Bros—labels that capture not just their roles but their animating spirits, their clashes, and their contradictions.

The intellectuals were the PMC’s moral enforcers, the nuns with rulers. They patrolled the institutions—academia, media, NGOs—punishing ideological deviation under the guise of virtue. Their power was not material but institutional, their authority rooted in consensus with their oligarchic overlords, their weapon the ability to humiliate. And so, their rule was always fragile.

The intelligentsia, by contrast, were builders—engineers, coders, venture capitalists. Their power lay not in managing discourse but in shaping systems. They did not police language; they made language machinic. They did not enforce norms; they wrote the code that shattered them.

The 2024 election marked their ascension and the intellectuals’ humiliation. The nuns’ rulers—once instruments of moral control—were snapped. The bureaucrats of the soul were cast down by the engineers of reality. Figures like Musk, Thiel, and Sacks stood at the helm, but they were not true Tech Bros—they were oligarchs, capital owners, banners hoisted in victory. Just as Soros embodies the Woke Scolds, they embody the machinic class that now rules.

The real Tech Bros are not on debate stages or X Spaces; they are in data centers and war rooms, running the networks, automating power itself. They are the barely legal DOGE autists slashing the USAID tentacles, conducting on-the-spot audits in the Treasury Department. They are the few and the finest who stayed at X after Musk fired the girlbosses and smashed the nap pods.

Gouldner, who foresaw this intra-PMC struggle in the 1970s, would have recognized this moment—the PMC undone by its own contradictions, history slipping from its grasp. As financialization fades and production rises, as gigafactories hum while crickets chirp in the vaults of Fort Knox, the future belongs not to moralists, but to machinists.

Rocket Men and Rulers: Lacan’s Phallus

The moment arrived as if conjured from myth: Elon Musk’s Starship rocket, its lower half—the Super Heavy booster—caught mid-air by a pair of mechanical arms, cradled gently like a child returned to its mother. A totem of technological triumph, a vision of power reclaimed. This was not merely an engineering feat; it was an omen. The age of the Woke Scolds had ended. Their puny rulers—those instruments of discipline wielded by the moralizing class—had been snapped. The tech-empowered intelligentsia had seized control, their dominion made manifest in the towering phallus of the Starship descending from the heavens, captured but unbroken.

To grasp the full symbolic weight of this spectacle, we must turn to Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst who taught us that power is never just about power; it is about lack, it is about desire, and about the phallus. For Lacan, the phallus is not merely a symbol of male potency but a signifier of authority, of the power to impose order on chaos. It is the object that promises wholeness but always eludes possession—the ultimate illusion, yet the engine of history.

Lacan’s phallus is not anatomical, nor is it simply a crude emblem of masculinity. It is a function—a structure of meaning that organizes desire. A king’s sceptre, a CEO’s corner office, a nun’s ruler, even a rocket arcing into the sky—these are all manifestations of the phallus, each standing in for mastery, control, and the promise of completion. But this promise is always a lie. The phallus is not something one can truly possess, only something one can wield to camouflage lack with an aura of power. It is the ultimate illusion, the signifier that promises wholeness but leaves desire forever chasing its own tail.

Still from Cool Hand Luke

But mere symbolism is not enough. In Cool Hand Luke (1967), Paul Newman’s character Luke works on a road gang cutting weeds when he suddenly grabs a rattlesnake by the tail, holding it up for the others to see. The snake dangles, limp, flaccid phallus. A prison guard, his mirrored sunglasses reflecting an impassive gaze, calmly raises his rifle and shoots the snake’s head clean off. Luke, unfazed, tosses the dead snake onto the road at the guard’s feet and hands him his missing rigid walking stick—a gesture that acknowledges, the guard’s absolute control.

Todd McGowan, a Lacanian scholar, argues that the guard’s phallic authority stems from his accessories—his sunglasses, cowboy hat, and stony silence. But this overlooks the obvious: had the guard fumbled his weapon, missed the snake, or fallen off his horse, all phallic power would have been lost.

Authority is not projected through mere symbols; it must be enacted with skill, precision, and an unshakable confidence. The same logic applies to Musk’s SpaceX landings—had the descending rocket failed to stick its landing, the illusion of mastery would have crumbled instantly. The phallus is not in the object but in the performance, in the seamless fusion of confidence and competence.

And herein lies the paradox: the phallus is not just a sign of power, but of lack. To wield it is to mark oneself as incomplete, forever chasing what can never be fully attained. For Freud, this was castration anxiety; for Lacan, it was the fundamental structure of desire itself.

The only man who was truly whole—who lacked nothing, for whom the phallus was not an empty signifier but a physical reality—was the Primal Father, conjured from the mists of our evolutionary past by Darwin. His tribe’s women were his domain, their men his servants. He desired nothing because he already had everything.

The phallus today is the ghostly spectre of that completeness. To lack is to move, to strive, to desire. Imagine a child’s sliding tile puzzle: to shift any piece, an empty square must exist. Lack is this absence, this gap that allows desire’s movement. The Primal Father’s puzzle board had no gaps. He did not need to play the game.

We are the heirs of the Primal Horde—the brothers who conspired to slay, consume, and deify the Father. In the aftermath, incest taboos and totemic restrictions carved lack into human existence, enforced by a proto-PMC of shamans and tribal elders, the first architects of symbolic order.

Ever since, those caught lacking have adorned themselves with the phallus, the spectral imprint of the slain patriarch, to front completeness. With the right balance of symbolic display and inner ruthlessness, the illusion can hold—for a time. But always, inevitably, the lack concealed by the phallus resurfaces, and the phallus deflates like the flaccid dead snake Luke casts aside.

Castrating the Nuns

In John Landis’s The Blues Brothers (1980), there is a scene that distils, with uncanny precision, the collapse of the moralist elite’s authority. A nun—her habit billowing like the robes of a minor deity, half-avenging angel, half-bureaucratic enforcer—wields her ruler with mechanical precision, lashing the wayward brothers, Jake and Elwood, as they cower before her.

Still from The Blues Brothers

The ruler, that phallic instrument of discipline, becomes a weapon of humiliation, its authority derived not from justice but from the sheer reflexive need to impose order. Yet in a final, impotent gesture, she raises it high, brings it down with exaggerated force—and shatters it into splinters. The fragments scatter across the floor, as if the very material of moral control had been exhausted, unable to withstand the weight of its own absurdity. It is a ritual castration, an unmasking: the intellectual-managerial class, long veiled in the trappings of reason and morality, is revealed as brittle, self-defeating, and ultimately powerless.

To them, the ruler was never a tool of measurement but of moral imposition—an instrument of scolding, of discipline, of keeping unruly elements in line. But to the tech-savvy intelligentsia, the ruler is something else entirely: a tool of production, of precision, of optimization. The old intellectuals wielded symbols to command obedience; the new class wields systems to shape reality itself. And in that shift, the power to scold fades, replaced by the power to code.

The Woke Scolds and their fellow travellers in the media, with their relentless lawfare attacks in Georgia, New York, and beyond, made a fatal miscalculation. They forgot that America loves an outlaw. By mid-2023, Trump was languishing in a low-energy funk at Mar-a-Lago, his fire seemingly dimmed.

But the intellectuals, wielding their rulers like moralizing nuns, went too far. In their zeal to enforce obedience, they inadvertently transformed Trump and his tech-bro sidekick, Elon Musk, into the political equivalents of the Blues Brothers—irreverent, anarchic, and impossible to contain. Jake and Elwood didn’t argue; they didn’t reform; they simply were—relentless, excessive, impervious to censure. And so, in the end, the media nun’s rulers were broken, the righteous were humiliated, and the election was won by the bad boys.

Societies of Control: Sparing the Ruler of Discipline

But there is another version of this story—one where the ruler is gone, but the phallus remains. The Magdalene Sisters (2002) captures this shift. The young women imprisoned in Catholic laundries are not physically beaten into submission, but they are still subjected to an all-encompassing system of supervision—one that strips them of autonomy, crushes their spirit, and demands silent obedience.

These institutions belong to what Michel Foucault described as disciplinary societies, where power operates through confinement, surveillance, and rigid hierarchies. The nuns, with their cold, bureaucratic cruelty, act as enforcers of a moral order that sees unwed mothers as contaminants in need of purification. The laundries are factories of obedience, where women are scrubbed clean—both literally and symbolically—of their supposed moral corruption.

But we no longer live in a society of discipline. As Gilles Deleuze observed, we have moved into societies of control, where power is no longer centralized in institutions but diffused across networks—shifting, adapting, and embedding itself within individuals. What Deleuze did not foresee is that Braudel had already hinted at the deeper cause: as economies pivot from production to finance, the need for physical discipline recedes, giving way to the subtler grip of mental control.

Under the regime of finance, the PMC nuns do not lock people away in asylums or laundries—they ensure compliance through algorithms, pharmaceuticals, and social ostracization. Just as the Magdalene Sisters sought to cleanse fallen women of their sins, today’s progressive moralists attempt to sanitize the deplorables, making sure they are medicated, vaxxed, fact-checked, and re-educated.

The laundries imposed physical labour; the new laundries impose digital and psychological labour—de-platforming, cancelling, shadow-banning, and corporate blacklisting. And in the ultimate irony, those who call themselves heirs to Foucault—scholars who built careers decrying oppressive structures of power—were stony silent as this new bio-purity regime peaked during Covid, precisely the kind of creeping authoritarianism their master would have denounced.

Enforcers do not discipline with rulers; they control through access. They do not labour in silence, cloaked in asceticism; they perform their virtue. The triumphalist TikTok videos of young women flaunting their effortless jobs at high-tech firms are the new sacred vestments, their nap pods and kombucha bars the iconography of an emerging elite that does not discipline but curates.

The nurses, too, with their choreographed pandemic dances, held the keys to biosecurity—if the nuns of discipline societies purified the soul, these new figures purified the body. They represented control of the algorithm, the digital ID, the very terms of participation in public life.

And for the out-of-work deplorable, watching from the shadows, the irony is thick. That ain’t working, he mutters, echoing Money for Nothing. He is the exile from the new order, his body no longer useful as a labourer, his mind no longer trusted to navigate the algorithm. He recognizes, even if he cannot articulate it, that what he is witnessing is not real work—corporate day-care is power masquerading as leisure, authority in the guise of play. The nun’s ruler could be shattered, defied—but how do you rebel against a power that no longer commands, only curates?

The Obelisk, Bone, and Spaceship

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, three great phallic emblems structure the opening sequence, The Dawn of Man. The first is the obelisk—an object without precedent in the hominid world, standing with the silent authority of something outside history itself. Its sheer otherness awakens something in the proto-human primates, an awareness of lack where none had been felt before. That absence turns to desire, and desire turns to invention.

The second emblem is the bone, the first weapon—transformed in an instant from mere detritus into an instrument of dominance. And then, in a single, epochal match cut, the bone becomes the spaceship, a seamless arc of progress from crude survival to technological mastery. In a few brilliant seconds, Kubrick condenses the history of power itself: the restless push from primitive violence to precision engineering, from the first spark of innovation to the boundless ambitions of the machine.

Still from 2001: A Space Odyssey

The obelisk is a tombstone—silent, black, impenetrable. It does not explain itself, nor does it need to. Like the temple ruins of dead civilizations or the skyscrapers of rising nations grasping for permanence, it marks both an end and a beginning. The hominids who encounter it are caught lacking—staring into a void they cannot understand but which instantly reorders their world.

It is the tomb of the slain Primal Father, the once-complete spectre who needed neither law nor symbol because all was already his. The solidity of the obelisk is his monument, an object outside time, as if his presence could never truly be erased. And yet, his death is the threshold between the animal and the human, the catalyst that forces the horde into history. No longer ruled by brute certainty, they must now contend with absence—with power that is no longer possessed but performed.

Rudderless in the wake of their own patricide, the primal horde fractures. Some master symbols—words, myths, ritual—becoming the ancestors of today’s intellectual class, the Woke Scolds, the ideologists who fight for our consciousness. Others master tools—weapons, machines, systems—becoming the ancestors of the Tech Bros, the engineers of crude material reality.

Still from 2001: A Space Odyssey

The bone is the first weapon, and in its ascendance, the first arms race begins. The moment one hominid wields it, the others feel a profound lack, which in turn provokes desire. Power is no longer innate but contingent. The bone-wielder cracks a skull, and in that instant, a fundamental law of human history is established: those who do not wield the phallus are at the mercy of those who do. The others must bone up, mimetically compelled to match force with force, innovation with innovation. Every technological leap—bronze over stone, iron over bronze, gunpowder over steel—is an echo of this primal scene, where desire for the weapon itself dictates the shape of history.

Still from 2001: A Space Odyssey

The cinematic match cut from bone to spaceship suggests continuity, but what if it signals a rupture instead? The bone is an object of lack—wielded to compensate for something missing. The spaceship, by contrast, is seamless, autonomous, gliding without friction, unmoored from human need. If the bone is the first phallic symbol of human striving, is the spaceship is the first emblem of a post-human order? For all its sleek design, it no longer belongs to man in the same way the bone did. Its form is dictated not by myth or metaphor—not by the need to front power—but by pure machinic efficiency. If the obelisk was the tomb of the Primal Father, then is the spaceship the cenotaph of human agency? The man is dead. Long live the machine.

The spaceship is a new kind of phallus—not one wielded by man, but one that has outgrown him. It does not seek completeness, for it does not lack. It does not dominate, for it does not desire. The human story, from the Primal Horde onward, was one of men chasing the lost unity of the Father, building ever more elaborate symbolic orders to compensate for the emptiness at their core. But the machine has no void to fill. It does not crave, it does not front, it does not fear being caught lacking. Its order is one of seamless process, pure functionality.

And so a final question lingers: will the regime of the machine return us to the primal state we have always sought? Will it supply us with all we need, simulating a Mack Daddy within each of us—an absurd, machinic resurrection of the Primal Father’s omnipotence, granting unlimited access to resources, status, even synthetic sexual pleasures, harking back to the days of his unchecked dominion over his female flock? Or will we, like the hominids before the obelisk, find ourselves once again staring into a void, caught lacking before a machinic power we cannot comprehend?

The Rat Utopia experiments offer a cautionary tale: in environments of overabundance, where every need is met without struggle, lack evaporates, desire withers, social bonds collapse, and life loses its purpose. Will the machinic society, for all its promises of mastery and control, lead us not to utopia but to a sterile, joyless existence—a world where the phallus, once a symbol of desire and lack, becomes a relic of a bygone era, and we are left with nothing but the hum of machines and the echo of our own emptiness?

Bones of Contention

Whenever a Tech Bro seizes a bone, a Woke Scold rises to stop him. This is not just a cultural quarrel but an ancient struggle—Prometheus versus Epimetheus, foresight versus hindsight, production versus regulation. Prometheus steals fire, the emblem of unchecked innovation, while Epimetheus, always too late, scrambles to mitigate its consequences. The first hominid to brandish a bone as a weapon was not just the first Tech Bro—he was the first arms dealer, the first disruptor, the first outlaw in the birth of civilization.

If the Tech Bro is always first to act, the censor with their edict is always first to react. For every breakthrough, a new prohibition; for every new weapon, a new moral panic. Words always follow deeds—yet paradoxically, they also reshape them. The Tech Bro cracks the first skull; the ideologist writes the history that makes him a hero or a villain. Marx claimed that the material base—the domain of invention, production, and brute reality—determines the ideological superstructure. But the superstructure moulds perception, deciding which innovations are praised and which are condemned. The priests may not invent the bone, but they dictate whether it is a tool of liberation or a relic of oppression: whether it is good or evil.

Yet this rhythm—the pulse of action and reaction—is beginning to break. Once, words slowed action; once, morality tamed power. But what happens when the machine no longer needs words? When discipline and control collapse into a single algorithm? The spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey is not just a tool—it is a tombstone. Not for Prometheus or Epimetheus, but for the struggle itself. If Adorno saw a universal history leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb, it was because every tool contains its prohibition, every innovation its eventual backlash.

Dave Chappelle, in his Black Bush skit, mocked the absurdity of distraction politics with a manic cry: "We're going to Mars, bitches!" Two decades later, Elon Musk—eternal Prometheus, eternal Tech Bro—seeks to escape the mess he helped create behind by colonizing the stars. But the final joke may be on neither the scolds nor the bros, but on all of us. Because the machine neither dreams of Mars nor mourns the past. It does not desire; it does not lack. And in that seamless, machinic logic, both word and deed dissolve into pure function.

Seasons in the Sun

Fernand Braudel taught us that history does not unfold in simple progressions but in conjunctures—cycles of finance and production that turn like the seasons, slow and inescapable. If the ascent of finance is a sign of autumn—profit extracted, growth decaying—then its waning signals a turn toward the sunny season of production, when new forces emerge from the frost.

The phallus, too, has followed these rhythms of ascent and decline. In the age of discipline, it was solid—embodied in the king’s sceptre, the general’s sword, the artillery gun. In the age of control, it became gaseous—diffused into surveillance, performance metrics, and the modulation of access. If the old phallus was the general’s baton, the recently departed one was the girlboss’s nap pod. What will take its place?

First big then small phallus energy: Russia’s hypersonic Oreshnik multiple warhead missile system

For millennia, the military was the domain of the phallus. From the bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Russia’s Oreshnik saturation barrage missile system, war has always been an assertion of dominance, a primal spectacle of conquest. But the armies of the future will be machinic—drones without pilots, war algorithms without generals, conflicts fought without honour, glory, or even the illusion of heroism. The machine has no need for the phallus because it does not lack. It does not desire. It only executes. Palantir’s battle networks, autonomous hunter-killer swarms, hypersonic glide vehicles—these are war without warriors, combat without conquest, violence without virility.

The cycle is turning. Tech Bro Spring is coming. The economic seasons shift, and sides must be chosen: Techno-phobe or Techno-stan? Techno-feudalism or Techno-acceleration? This is not the first time capitalism has reinvented itself through the creative destruction of its centers of accumulation. As Braudel observed, capitalism cycles through its seasons, shifting its central node from one hegemon to the next. Venice gave way to Genoa, Genoa to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to London, and London to New York. Each transition marked a new phase of production, finance, and technological innovation—a new spring following the winter of decline.

Giovanni Arrighi, in Adam Smith in Beijing (2007), predicted that the next center would be Beijing, and everything that has followed seems to confirm this prophecy. As we approach that future, we enter yet another spring—a season of production rising from the ashes of financialization. The last time this happened, the center shifted from London to New York.

The horrors of the British industrial revolution—the soot-choked cities, the child labor, the grinding poverty—were replaced by the American Glory Days of Capitalism, an era of Fordism, suburban sprawl, and the blossoming of mass wealth and comfort. It was a time when the assembly line promised not just efficiency but a new way of life, a democratization of abundance.

So it is no wonder that people look forward to these new rites of spring. But this time, the transition may be different. Fordism, with its human workers and mechanical rhythms, is being replaced by Muskism—a world of robotics, AI, and automated production. The question is no longer how to organize labour but what role humans will play in a rising machinic order. Will we be the overseers of this new order, its pilots? Or will we become mere passengers, spacefaring vagabonds exploring strange new worlds, floating in sleek, phallic-shaped starships that have lost all symbolic meaning, boldly going where no one has gone before? Will the dual-headed PMC snake combine their ingenuity to keep the machines at bay?