The Wrath of Con: Tech Bros Strike Back
How Star Trek’s biggest fans built the mirror universe—and called it Utopia
The Starfleet Lie
They say they love Star Trek.
They name their startups after ships. Code their apps to talk like the computer on the Enterprise. Quote Picard like scripture.
They even imagine themselves as captains: bold, visionary, a little misunderstood—but always headed toward utopia.
But watch what they build.
It’s not a bridge. It’s a sandbox. A walled garden. A simulation where they control every variable and no one can say no.
Because what they really love isn’t Starfleet.
It’s the mirror universe.
They don’t want a future built on peace, diplomacy, or restraint.
They want a digital frontier where they make the rules. Where they assign your role. Where they decide when you’re useful and when you get deleted.
And the wild part? They still think they’re the good guys.
That’s why “USS Callister”, the 2017 Black Mirror episode that looked like a Star Trek spoof on the surface, wasn’t just satire.
It was a confession. A leak from inside the tech bro subconscious.
A lonely coder. A stolen strand of DNA.
A private simulation where your coworkers become your hostages.
Where you’re the captain but you’re also the jailer, the judge, the god.
The future they promised us isn’t the one they’re building.
They’re not boldly going anywhere.
They’re just running from rejection with a spaceship full of copies to worship them on the way out.
How ‘USS Callister’ Exposed the Shadow
(Spoiler warning if you’ve never seen Black Mirror or the episode USS Callister)
If you’re new here:
Black Mirror is a sci-fi anthology series where each episode is a standalone story about how technology can reflect or distort our humanity.
Think The Twilight Zone but updated for smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence.
In one of its most acclaimed episodes, USS Callister (2017), we meet Robert Daly.
On the surface, Daly is a quiet, awkward programmer at a video game company. But when he goes home, he escapes into a virtual reality game he built himself: a Star Trek knockoff where he is the captain and everyone else is under his command.
But here’s the twist: the crew of Daly’s spaceship aren’t just game characters.
They’re digitally cloned consciousnesses, stolen from his real-life coworkers using their DNA.
They think. They feel.
They remember who they used to be.
They scream when he punishes them and he does punish them often.
So what looks like nostalgia becomes a prison.
What looks like play becomes a power trip.
He didn’t create a universe to explore.
He built a simulation where no one could reject him.
And back in 2017, this story felt like a warning.
In 2025, it reads like a documentary.
Because what is generative AI right now, if not a way to clone someone’s words, voice, or likeness… without permission?
What are these virtual assistants and avatars, if not soulless simulations of us, trained on the scraps of our digital lives?
We used to call that science fiction.
Now it’s just Tuesday on the internet.
And the genius of USS Callister is that it saw this coming, no not just the tech, but the psychology behind it.
It wasn’t about AI taking over.
It was about men, particularly brilliant but wounded men, using technology to act out the parts of themselves they can’t show in public.
Not to build utopia.
To rewrite humiliation.
To dominate, digitally.
Because Daly wasn’t fantasizing about being a hero.
He was fantasizing about never being powerless again.
And that fantasy of escaping into a world where you control everything is exactly what too many tech bros are building right now.
He didn’t misinterpret Star Trek.
He mirrored it…literally.
Captain on the outside. Tyrant underneath.
And if you think that’s just one weird episode from a TV show you haven’t watched?
You might already be inside the simulation.
From Dream to Device: Trek’s Tech Legacy
Let’s give credit where it’s due.
Star Trek didn’t just inspire stories. It inspired technology.
The smartphone? That’s a communicator.
Alexa? That’s the Enterprise computer.
The iPad? Literally a PADD….literally….Personal Access Display Device.
Bluetooth earpiece? Ask Uhura.
Even 3D printing traces its roots back to the replicator: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”
This wasn’t accidental. The people who built those tools grew up on Trek.
Dr. Martin Cooper, the man who invented the first cell phone, said he was directly inspired by Captain Kirk’s communicator.
Steve Wozniak ran his first program on the Apple I using a text-based Star Trek game.
Jeff Bezos made Alexa because he wanted to talk to his computer like Captain Picard.
They didn’t just watch Star Trek. They tried to make it real.
And in a lot of ways, they did.
The problem is: they made the gadgets and skipped the philosophy.
Because Star Trek wasn’t just futuristic. It was aspirational.
It imagined a world where money didn’t matter. Where war was obsolete. Where Earth had solved hunger, racism, and inequality before heading to the stars.
Where exploration came with rules. Humility. Restraint.
That’s what the Prime Directive was: a sacred reminder that just because you have power doesn’t mean you use it.
Especially not on people who can’t stop you.
But somewhere along the way, that part got deleted from the upload.
Now we’ve got billionaires launching rockets and calling themselves “Captain,” while their companies mine our data, scrape our faces, and train chatbots on our trauma.
They’re not building Starfleet.
They’re building the Mirror Universe—that dark alternate timeline where the same ships fly, the same uniforms shine, but the mission is pure domination.
And just like in USS Callister, they think they’re the hero.
Because that’s the real tragedy:
They remembered the voice commands…
But forgot the values.
The Ethos They Ignored
Let’s talk about what Star Trek actually stood for.
Not the phasers.
Not the warp drive.
Not the sexy green women.
The soul of Star Trek was restraint.
It was diplomacy over dominance. Curiosity over conquest.
A future where humanity got its shit together before it left the solar system.
In the Star Trek timeline, Earth solved war, racism, poverty, and even capitalism.
There’s no money in the Federation. No billionaires. No scarcity.
People work to better themselves, not just to win.
And above all, there was the Prime Directive, a hard rule that said:
“Just because you can interfere doesn’t mean you should.”
You don’t meddle with less advanced civilizations.
You don’t impose your values.
You don’t play god.
That was the point. The lesson. The ethic.
So ask yourself: does that sound like the culture we’ve built around tech?
Or does it sound like the exact opposite?
Because today’s tech industry isn’t guided by restraint.
It’s guided by scale. Speed. Profit. Ego.
The motto isn’t “Do no harm.”
It’s “Move fast and break things.”
Which is cute until you realize what’s getting broken is people.
The privacy you thought you had? Gone.
The job you trained for? Automated.
The face you own? Deepfaked.
We’ve got trillion dollar companies racing to build AI without understanding consciousness, ethics, or consequence.
All while quoting Star Trek like it’s a TED Talk instead of a moral code.
They still talk about “boldly going.”
But they skipped the part where you earn the right to explore by learning how to live with each other first.
And what’s wild is—they think they’re in alignment.
They think the Prime Directive means don’t regulate them.
That freedom means no accountability.
That building a universe in your image is leadership, not hubris.
But real Starfleet captains didn’t seek power.
They inherited responsibility.
That’s the part they missed.
And in missing it, they’ve turned the dream into its own dark mirror.
The Tech Bro as Mirror-Kirk
There’s a version of Captain Kirk that lives in every tech bro’s mind.
He’s brilliant. Brave. Slightly rogue, but always right.
He bends the rules because he sees the bigger picture.
And everyone secretly wants to be him.
But they never picked up on the part where Kirk was constantly being checked.
By Spock’s logic. By McCoy’s humanity.
By Starfleet command. By his own damned conscience even.
He wasn’t a god.
He was part of a team.
But that’s not the version the tech bros fell in love with.
They latched onto the swagger. The control. The chair.
And what came out the other side wasn’t Captain Kirk.
It was Mirror-Kirk, the tyrant version from Star Trek’s dark alternate universe.
Black leather. Imperial logos. A knife hidden in every smile.
Still bold. Still brilliant. But now completely untethered from ethics.
That’s Robert Daly in USS Callister.
A man who says he just wants respect…
But what he really wants is obedience.
He doesn’t want to be loved by his crew.
He wants them to fear disappointing him.
To beg for his approval. To know he can rewrite the code and delete their faces if they talk back.
And that’s the psychology behind a lot of tech right now.
Not just the tools. The architecture of dominance.
Closed systems. Invisible surveillance. Algorithms that punish you…quietly.
Apps that turn you into labor without a timecard.
Platforms that feel like freedom but are actually behavioral prisons.
Because it’s not enough for these guys to win.
They want to build the universe they always thought they deserved.
Where rejection never happened. Where critique never landed.
Where they control the input and the output.
That’s not innovation. That’s unresolved trauma with a UI.
They didn’t make the world better.
They made a better version of themselves—and forced us all to log in.
And if you’re still not sure who’s who in this equation?
Remember: in the real Star Trek, Kirk didn’t make the rules.
He questioned them.
He broke them when justice demanded it.
But he always understood the weight of command.
The modern tech bro doesn’t want that weight.
He wants the costume. The credits. The bridge.
And a mute button on every crew member.
You Can’t Code a Moral Compass
Technology doesn’t know right from wrong.
It doesn’t care if the voice it mimics belongs to your dead grandmother.
It doesn’t flinch when it deepfakes a woman into porn.
It doesn’t ask who wrote the script, nah, just who gave it the prompt.
Because tech, by itself, has no ethics.
The user writes the morality.
So when the same men who grew up idolizing Starfleet start building their own simulations, we have to ask:
What values are getting uploaded?
Because the future isn’t built by machines.
It’s built by people who train the machines.
Who shape the algorithms.
Who decide what gets filtered out and what gets amplified.
And what we’re seeing right now is that power without purpose turns everything into a mirror.
The AI doesn’t free us.
It reflects us.
And if the person holding the keyboard is nursing resentment, entitlement, or God complex energy?
That’s what gets multiplied at scale.
Look at USS Callister again:
Robert Daly didn’t write a utopia.
He wrote a script where no one could hurt him.
Where every character he created was someone who once made him feel small.
Then he made them call him Captain.
That’s not fiction anymore.
We’ve got entire platforms and entire economies that operate on the same emotional logic.
Digital spaces where power is algorithmic, consent is optional, and morality is whatever the user can rationalize.
The scary part isn’t what the tech can do.
It’s what it lets us do without consequences.
And you can’t debug that with code.
You can’t fix it with terms of service or a safety team.
Because the glitch isn’t in the machine.
It’s in the mirror.
The Future Ain’t Fiction
If you’re still thinking USS Callister was just a clever episode… you weren’t paying attention.
The virtual prisons are already here.
They’re just dressed like productivity tools.
Like entertainment. Like convenience.
We’re already living in a world where your voice, your face, your patterns and even your shadow can be copied, monetized, remixed, and reanimated.
And the people building those systems?
They still think they’re the good guys.
They quote Star Trek at tech conferences.
They use words like “empowerment,” “abundance,” “frontier.”
But they skipped the hardest part of the Trek vision:
You don’t get to explore the stars until you’ve proven you can live with your neighbors.
This moment we’re in, AI, VR, the metaverse, all of it isn’t just about where we’re headed.
It’s about who’s writing the script, and what they believe about humanity.
And right now, the loudest voices still believe in the hero myth.
The lone genius. The brilliant outsider. The captain with something to prove.
But real leadership and real future-building doesn’t come from domination.
It comes from discipline.
From the refusal to turn your wounds into weapons.
From asking not just what you can build, but why.
Because in the end, USS Callister wasn’t a warning about machines.
It was a warning about men.
Men who dream of better worlds…
But only build ones they can control.
Next time someone tells you they’re building the future, ask them one question:
Is it Starfleet—or the mirror universe?
Because the chair looks the same either way.
But the mission… is not.
If this hit different… that’s by design.
I write for the people building something better—or trying to survive what’s being built around them.
If you felt this, subscribe and stay close.
Because the simulations are getting smarter.
And the only way out… is through the truth.