TechbroBabble

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A place to catalogue and discuss the odd, silly, nonsensical, and sometimes malicious neologisms of the internet.

Please include the techbro babble word or phrase in quotes in the title of your post. If known, please include the definition in the title or body of the post.

For babbles found in the wild, please include a link to where you encountered them, as this will help our team of volunteer babologists identify and classify it.

For discussions about what qualifies as techbrobabble and other meta discussions please use the [meta] tag in the title of your post.

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queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone

[meta] What is techbrobabble? (piefed.blahaj.zone)

submitted 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) by queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/techbrobabble@piefed.blahaj.zone

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I will offer my opinion here, but this is an open question to the community and the definition of techbrobabble will likely evolve with the comm. All thoughts on what is, what is not, and what should be considered "techbrobabble" are welcome in this thread.

First: some things it is not:

techbrobabble is not technobabble. Technobabble as employed by scifi writers is scientific or technical-sounding mumbo-jumbo, with widely varying degrees of correspondence to what I would call "correct technical jargon". Examples of technobabble that are not techbrobabble might be "reversing the polarity of the warp core", or "that's what things would be like if I'd invented the finglonger".
techbrobabble is not merely technical jargon. Technical jargon has an important role in technical discussion, and it can feel exclusionary to those not intimate with the jargon of the field being discussed. Something like "load balancers are useful for horizontally scaling web services" is technical jargon, but it isn't techbrobabble.

I think techbrobabble is best described alongside its intent, e.g. "Technical jargon used in bad faith" or "The use of technical-sounding language to deceive or manipulate the audience". maybe a succinct definition would be "malicious technobabble".

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[–] borth@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I don't think it has to be malicious either. Like that one Meta AI "Researcher" that let the bot delete her entire inbox. She literally said

Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb

And I just can't believe that that is the most humble thing she might experience 🤦

I think that could be considered techbrobabble because to me, it sounds like babbling bullshit, coming from a techbro (regardless of gender), and is devoid of actual tech jargon because most of them lack that knowledge.

[–] queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 9 hours ago

After sleeping on it, I don't think it has to be malicious to be techbrobabble. Maybe a working definition could be "IRL technobabble"?