"Between the slash-and-burn US government reboot led by a dank meme fan and the relentless pushing of AI by venture capital-backed blowhards, 2025 has felt like peak obnoxious tech bro. Fittingly, jargon-spouting, self-regarding digital visionaries also became Hollywood's go-to baddies this year in everything from blockbusters to slapstick spoofs. Spare a thought for the overworked props departments tasked with mocking up fake Forbes magazine covers heralding yet another smirking white guy as Master of the Metaverse or whatever."
"As Ethan Skate creator of the neurocaster technology that quashed an AI uprising then turned the general populace into listless virtual-reality addicts Tucci certainly looked the part: bald and imperious in retro Bond villain wardrobe. But even the great cocktail-maker couldn't squeeze much out of sour existential proclamations such as: Our world is a tyre fire floating on an ocean of piss."
"There was more baldness in Superman, where Nicholas Hoult's Lex Luthor embodied the worst kind of wannabe paradigm-changer: one desperate to appear on talkshows. Incensed that the world seemed to be ignoring his genius in favour of a flying alien do-gooder, the LuthorCorp founder spent a fortune to rig social media, deploying an army of vivisected monkey cyborgs to swamp platforms with anti-Superman hashtags and memes."
2025 featured a combustible mix of meme-fueled political rebooting and aggressive venture-capital-backed AI promotion that crystallized into a dominant tech-bro archetype. Hollywood leaned into that archetype, making jargon-spouting digital visionaries the standard villains across genres and requiring props teams to fabricate clichéd images of smiling male tech moguls. The cultural saturation risks collapsing distinct bad-faith figures into a single smarmy stereotype. Examples include Ethan Skate, creator of neurocaster technology who turned society into virtual-reality addicts, and Nicholas Hoult's Lex Luthor, who weaponized biotech and social media to attack a perceived rival.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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