Take Up the Tech Bro's Burden
What if Kipling Had Been a Tech Bro? A Classic Reimagined
Take up the Tech Bro's burden— Send forth the best ye coders— Go add your code to Github To serve your markets' need; To build in heavy darkness For offline folk and wild— Your newly acquired peoples, Half luddite and half child. Take up the Tech Bro's burden— Through user churn abide To veil the threat of bias And check the show of greed; By open letter and simple, An hundred tweets made plain, To guard another's data, And work the investor's gain. Take up the Tech Bro's burden— The savage wars of reach— Bridge all the gaps of access And bid the friction cease; And when IPO is nearest The tool for others built, Watch regulators' folly Bring all your scale to nought. Take up the Tech Bro's burden— No tawdry rule of scrum, But toil of bot and intern— The tale of daily sprints. The apps ye shall not download, The links ye shall not click, Go make them with your coding, And lock them in your stack! Take up the Tech Bro's burden— And earn his old badges, The blame of all ye users, The hate of those ye fork— The cry of hosts ye upload (Ah slowly!) toward the cloud— "Why brought ye us from quiet, "Our loved unwired night?" Take up the Tech Bro's burden— Ye dare not debug less— Nor call too loud on mission To cloak your pivoting; By all ye pitch or ship out, By all ye hack or do, The mindless scrolling peoples Shall weigh your growth and you. Take up the Tech Bro's burden— Have done with demo days— The lightly proffered benchmark, The easy, debt-free raise. Comes now, to search your repo Through all the start-up years, Cold-edged with dear-bought feedback, The changelog of your peers.
1
Not the first reimagining: https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/748
2
I learned of the poem in AP World History, but it was too long ago to remember the full analysis. I used the following to help decode what the original poem meant: https://www.classicalpoets.org/white-mans-burden-by-rudyard-kipling-a-teaching-tool/.
3
Claude was used to build a word bank of tech words sorted by syllable count.