We need to talk about calling people “bros”
The suffix has had a sufficient run
If you look at Google’s Ngram Viewer, the word “bro” took off in 2010.
2010 now feels like about seven different eras of cultural evolution ago, but I’ve been watching this word metastasize into something like a discursive cancer, one that went from a perfectly reasonable slang for a certain kind of guy to a very lazy form of rhetorical dismissal deployed by the most vacuous members of the keyboard class and finally into something so pervasive that even I have a hard time not using it any time I talk about dudes.
“Bro” is an old, old piece of slang. It may even be several hundred years old, according to Oxford University Press.
It has certainly been around my whole life.
I had a friend in elementary school that we called Jamie at the time. Of course he would eventually become “James.” James was a bro in gestation, as we know it today. Even way back in the 80s, before the word had any particularly emotional valence, Jamie liked to call people “bro.”
We all know what a “bro” is, right? It’s short for “brother” but it tended, once, to be used in that more expansive sense of the “brotherhood” of men rather than naming someone as your literal brother.
And for the last couple decades, at least, “bros” have been synonymous with a certain kind of guy. We know that kind. They tend to be guys who enjoy physical activity, being outside, hanging out with other guys and they like “guy things.” Beer. Sports. Tools. Sports. Cars. Also: Sports.
In my head, fraternities are the natural bro habitat, but there are other kinds of bros. There’s bro culture on the beach or on the black asphalt basketball court or in the machine shop or on the fishing boat. Being a bro does not require going to college, but the frat bro was archetypal in my particular coming of age.
For a long time, it didn’t bother me at all when someone would name a group as “bros” or “bro’y.” I saw bros as men who enjoy simple pleasures, and the key to every pleasure has always been money, the more the better. That is why the apex bros have always been so eager to join Wall Street. When their days of catching passes and stealing bases came to an end, many bros turned their natural aggression to the most logical vocation: trading.
That was fine. It was easy for the rest of us to stay out of FiDi.
But then something remarkable happened in the broader culture. As the tech world boomed and geeks ascended, bros adapted.
Who knew bros could do that?!?
Tech-bros
A subset of bros changed course sometime around when Facebook went public in 2012.
So in 2014 Nick Parish named what had changed. He wrote the book, Cool Code, Bro: Brogrammers, Geek Anxiety and the New Tech Elite.
Bros, chasing money, were invading nerd turf. They were learning to code and engineer software systems and suddenly that chest bumping, beer-swilling culture of Wall Street was showing up in the pizza and Red Bull strewn temples of progress built by our priest class of tech visionaries.
It was weird. At least for the techies it was weird. What were the jocks doing in the clubhouse?
And at this point you can see a useful distinction and even useful critiques. And of course there’s nothing wrong with commenting on a particular kind of guy or particular ways of being. But in this era, types were still broken out, and Parish noticed that one type was encroaching quickly on another.
We thought of the DotCom boom as a Revenge of the Nerds story arc, but after a while the coders stopped being entirely nerds.
“Tech-bros” had become a thing, though being in tech did not make one a “tech-bro.” Not yet. This is what Parish’s book made legible. At first, “tech-bro” acknowledged the people in tech who were bros. It was new. It was surprising. It was something worth talking about.
That book — or at least the phenomena it describes — is the patient zero of “-bro” not as group, but as a suffix.
Before that time, “bro” was still mostly just a term of endearment between men. It was also, secondarily, a way of describing a category of men, without precisely “problematizing” them.
So in 2014, when the first season of HBO’s Silicon Valley came out, they included a couple brogrammers as minor characters in the early episodes of the show, so we could see them picking on Richard, the star and main character. These were frat guys who had traded Excel for Vim.
While Richard was the classic nerd we all pictured when we thought of the prototypical progenitors of the tech renaissance, his tormentors were cut from the same cloth of everyone who has forever tormented his kind, from the middle school locker rooms to the later life cubicles.
Alas, 2016
The type distinction of the Parish era wouldn’t last though.
As in everything else that turned mendacious and overwrought, the inflection can probably be traced back to the 2016 presidential election, when polite America was divided about who should bear the standard for the Democratic Party.
Many took the field. Only two proved to matter: Hillary Clinton, the most traveled Secretary of State in history and wife of some has-been, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont legislator whose grumpy-old-man version of hard leftism somehow captured the youth’s imagination.
The trouble was that Hillary was the presumptive nominee, and Bernie would not cooperatively step down. He had ignobly touched the hearts of young partisans by refusing to speak like a living focus group. This did not sit well with the thinkfluencers-that-be.
So they deployed a gendered critique against Bernie’s supporters. Enter: “Bernie-bro.”
The story was that Bernie had an unofficial Army of supporters and defenders on the internet, and these supporters — who, we were told, were all guys — would digitally brigade anyone who expressed a preference for Clinton over Sanders.
Were they all so aggro? Were his young supporters all men? No and no. But it didn’t matter.
Once named, they became easier to dismiss. No one actually needed to engage with the argument or even the behavior of a “Bernie bro.” Naming him as such was an exorcistic incantation... bernian broium begonus!
Since the naming of the Bernie-bro, the suffix “-bro” has metastasized from something that names a type to something that dismisses a trajectory.
From tech-bros to gym-bros to podcast-bros to influencer-bros to film-bros.
I asked myself: What’s a very not bro-coded interest? How about... theater? Theater has largely been the domain of women, sensitive guys and gay men.
But could there really be someone out there talking about “theater bros”?
Yes, there actually is.
Cancer of ‘bro’
This use of “bro” as a way to dismiss an idea really hit me in the pandemic.
For a long time, I was a superfan of John Darnielle, the leader of the band The Mountain Goats, an indie rock band that works like a lovechild of Bob Dylan and They Might Be Giants.
Since 2008, though, he’s also been an author. He put out his first book that year, the slim 33 1/3 novella, Master of Reality, a meditation on young men once institutionalized over wrongthink.
He wrote a couple more books over the next few years, but the book that matters for our story came out in 2022. That’s the year he released Devil House. I was there for a Devil House release event at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn to see him read from it a bit and talk about writing books with the author Grady Hendrix, and that’s when it hit me that the suffix had become poisonous.
At some point in the Q&A this author and musician who had written so much about outcast nonconformists used the phrase “free speech-bros” and I thought to myself: “What the actual fuck is going on?”
Musicians are -bro’ing free speech now?
It hasn’t stopped, either. For example, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal wrote an incomprehensible tweet, shortly after Trump’s ouster of Nicolas Maduro in Argentina, “I can’t exactly explain it, but ‘international law is fake’ bros are the cousins of people who like to observe that correlation isn’t causation.”
Spoken like a true conventional wisdom-bro, Joe.
And then in a recent Wall Street Journal headline, “Finance Bros to Tech Bros: Don’t Mess With My Bloomberg Terminal.” It’s hard to say what the word “Bros” is doing — twice! — in this headline, other than to signal the paper’s dim view of both sides.
The idea seems to be that if a thing, a space or an interest is dominated by males, then it can be dismissed out of hand. AI-bros, longevity bros, crypto-bros, hustle-bros. And on and on and on.
And if there’s any remaining doubt about its pejorative connotation, note the default way of describing the most widely disliked non-politician on the internet, Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro.”
Even the FTC uses that appellation at this point.
What it all means
[Insert Bernie meme here]: I’m once again asking what you think you mean by using “-bro”?
Because from where I sit, the suffix has stopped doing anything useful or clarifying.
It’s funny: As I was writing this, I typed into Google “who were the bro characters on Silicon Valley?” The answer it spit back: Erhlich, Gavin, Russ, Dinesh, Gilfoyle and Wajeed. Wrong, wrong, sure(?), way wrong, also wrong and mostly-wrong.
That list is made up of actual geeks, not the bros. Even Russ is debatable because he’s more the geek who got lucky and now acts like a bro out of his own insecurity. None of those were the characters I was looking for. I was thinking of Hooli’s Jason and Aly, the aforementioned bullies.
And it’s funny because this exemplifies how the use of -bro has been emptied out. In Cool Code, Bro, Parish had correctly named the rise of the “brogrammer,” the software engineer who didn’t at all fit within the pocket protecting code monkey mold we picture when we think of techies. The brogrammer was a new type of engineer, with different motivations.
Now here in 2026, a “tech-bro” has become anyone male who codes. Which is exactly my point.
“Bro” no longer denotes a kind of guy. It just denotes men, and it indicates the distaste that many people in the discourse (including tons who are male) have for anyone who had the temerity to be born that way.