Like pre-ripped jeans, the tech bro fad has long outlived its usefulness, which never existed.
I wish the nice English majors and communication majors and former journalists in and around my industry would stop using their talents to glorify this particular culture.
To wit:
This last January I spoke with Caitlin Bigelow, the chief marketing officer at a company called Blazel, which was out to use AI to help company busy company founders do executive communications. I was talking to her to figure out how that could work. She was talking to me because she was looking for writers to serve as “seasoned content strategists” who would work with AI to support Blazel’s clients. I wrote a story at ProRhetoric.com, “AI Exec Comms Agency Starts Small, Dreams Big.” (In the piece, I noted that Bigelow’s parents had been journalists, her father a Pulitzer Prize-winner at the San Diego Tribune.)
That was in late January. By early summer, Blazel fired all the writers they’d hired. “It was the first time I cried at work,” Bigelow wrote on LinkedIn. “I had hired a team of the top 1% writers in the US.” But then Blazel leaders discovered the model didn’t work, partly because they found that editing AI posts to make them sound human took the writers more time than writing good content in the first place; when the company passed 100 clients, the writers got overwhelmed. (Source: AI Overview.)
And so, Bigelow wrote, “We made the gut wrenching decision to lay off the team that I loved working with and had hired only six months earlier. It was the darkest month of my professional career.”
But after shitcanning the top 1% writers in the US, Bigelow and Blazel bounced right back, relaunching with a fully automated platform that lets client companies generate their own automated LinkedIn content marketing without human writers involved. (Source again: AI Overview.)
None of which offended me, because to be offended, one must be at least mildly surprised. I doubt any of those top 1% writers in the US were surprised, either.
And as for Bigelow, I generally think performative tears are slightly better than no tears at all. I’m glad she knows she should be sad.
But then last week, Bigelow posted on LinkedIn:
For Tech Week our company threw an absurd hot sauce competition that came extremely close to hospitalizing our CEO.
Sanjeev Kumar, our CTO, leaned over off mic and said, “Zain, you need to tap out.”
But he didn’t tap out.
Then, seven rounds of mouth scorching pain, there were only three people left.
Dev Wadhwa who eats Carolina Reapers for “fun”.
Sanjeev Kumar, who hadn’t broken a sweat.
and Zain Jaffer who looked ready to die.I was torn between feeling like we were putting on this incredible show and being seriously concerned for his health.
But, I also felt strangely proud.
Zain’s sheer determination and will had single-handedly kept him in the game when every odd was stacked against him. He clearly had no business still being there, yet he was.
Isn’t that the trait of the best CEOs?
To mold reality to his/her vision without excuses and through the pain?
I expect most people to watch this video and think, ‘That’s dangerous and insane.’
But I watched it and thought, damn, he would do absolutely anything to succeed.
So, I’ll follow him into the fire.
I commented: “This feels very Silicon Valley, 1999. Especially the same year you fired all the writers you hired and scrapped your business model for another, I don’t care how macho your leaders are, I care how wise they are, and how caring. What a self-regarding stunt.”
That didn’t feel like enough. This post is more like it.
Those ripped jeans are finally out, have you noticed? Why are these dumb fucking bros still in? Partly, thanks to the misguided marketing efforts of people who have other career options, and should take them.
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