Slate "Treating Tech Bros Like Mark Zuckerberg as Children Excuses Their Very Adult Mistakes"
https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/04/mark-zuckerberg-is-not-a-child.html
Now that Facebook CEOs Mark Zuckerbergs two days of testimony before Congress are over, the postmortem floodgates have opened. From the Evening Standard: Mark Zuckerbergs coming of age: As the data scandal rages, Facebooks billionaire boy-king is dragged into the spotlight. The BBCs Dave Lee writes on Zuckerbergs dreaded homework assignments. Over at the Washington Post, we see how Boy billionaire Mark Zuckerberg struggles to play the grown-up. On Zuckerbergs much-analyzed outfit, the Cut asks, Whos This Little Sweetie in a Big-Boy Suit? And according to CNN, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw millions of Facebook users personal information sold to a political firm later hired by Trumps campaign, constitutes a growing-up moment for the 33-year-old billionaire CEO and father of two.
See a trend here? According to the punditry, Zuckerbergs protracted adolescence has finally come to an end, and we can all rejoice in a new, mature Zuckera where he wears suits and looks sorry. Too bad it came after a massive breach of millions of peoples private databut hey, what can you do with kids these days?
Zuckerberg is indeed quite young for a billionaire CEO: Hes the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company by at least five years. But were at least a decade past when the word boy or any attendant immature metaphors should be used in relation to him. Hes not playing at being grown-up; hes been one for the past 14 years. His continued infantilization not only lets him escape the consequences of his very-adult actions, but also highlights a larger social inequality, in that such extended immaturity is afforded solely to white tech bro men.
Peter Pan mythology is rampant in the male-dominated world of Silicon Valley, where adult men get free laundry, food, and access to toys bearing the ability to change the very fabric of our democracy. These ostensibly eternal children are encouraged to move fast and break things, never looking back at the things that they broke. Even the term tech bro evokes youthful collegial stupidity, the anti-frat star armed with hoodies and flash drives rather than Solo cups and Vineyard Vines. And a fair amount of the older journalists covering these boy kings play right into this mythos, covering Silicon Valley with a kind of bemused avuncular air, attributing missteps to guilelessness and the apparently inherent childishness of social media and tech toys.
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