But techies aren’t just stand-ins for the 1 percenters of California. Unlike finance industry types, techies of the 2010s have a distinct culture that is redolent of the classic 1980s yuppies. They are overwhelmingly young and urban, and they have pretensions to hipster refinement. Yuppies ate quiche and brie and watched foreign films. Techies collect bespoke furniture, eat locally-grown food, and support indie music on Kickstarter. Maybe techie is to indie as yuppie was to hippie. I don’t want to overthink this, but my point is that techies represent both a class position and a fashionable youth culture associated with conspicuous consumption of fancy items.
Perhaps most importantly, the hated techie is as much a figment of our wrathful 2010s imagination as the yuppie was of the 1980s. Sure, there are real-life people who fit the stereotype of techies, like Mark Zuckerberg. But I think people are more familiar with the fictionalized, monstrous version of Zuckerberg from The Social Network — just as people probably remember Wall Street‘s coke-snorting psycho Gordon Gekko better than the real-life yuppie villains like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky.
As people lose jobs in the middle of the country, and the income disparity between city dwellers grows beyond anything we’ve known in this generation, it’s handy to have a caricature to blame. Because who really wants to do all the mental math to figure out that it’s not just a few shitty techies, but in fact an economic system that over-rewards some people while under-rewarding almost everybody else? It’s easier to hate over-simplified symbols than it is to challenge our whole troubled economy.
Still, the rise of the techie makes it obvious that tech industry magnates are on the cusp of replacing bankers as the robber barons of our imaginations. Maybe the next urban class war really will be fought on the campuses of Facebook and Google. Or maybe techie is just an ephemeral term, like yuppie, that will dissipate when the tech bubble bursts — only to return, like the problem it represents, under a new name.
Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9, where this story first ran, and the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction.
