>I wanted to talk to one of the mourners to understand their technological grief. I wanted to know if theirs was a familiar case of bruised ego or disappointment—akin to, say, a boy who spends an hour building a tower out of blocks and watches his big brother smash the thing to smithereens—or something stranger and more profound.

I'll be honest. The response to mathematicians, even this one, makes me concerned about the lack of empathy and honestly just theory of mind of many people in tech. It's not a mystery why people are upset that their field, for many the singular passion to which they've devoted their entire lives, is being annihilated so that a massive company can boost its IPO valuation. It's not "bruised ego" ffs.

‘Tech’ culture has been getting nastier, more vicious, and more zero-sum for years now. It wasn’t even all that long ago that I remember feeling hurt when a friend of mine sneered about “tech bros.”

But I get it now. I see a certain type of guy in an AWS fleece and instantly judge him, round him off to some kind of bully. Harsh, unsmiling, tweaking on stims, telling you to cry harder. Or maybe he’ll open up tell you his theory of how we need eugenic breeding facilities on the moon, or which countries we need to “glass.” It’s gotten so ugly.

I know this seems mean, too. Coming out of nowhere. Strawmanning or whatever you call it. Literally inventing a guy to get mad at. I’m aware of the irony. I don’t know. I guess it’s another kind of mourning, and I don’t know how to express it. I thought tech people were supposed to be like Woz.