When does the file extension .bro come with sexist, evil, female-hating misogynistic overtones?

Apparently it does when you live in the social justice-obsessed world of Silicon Valley with Google being forced to replace the extension in its new Brotli file compression software.

Google launched the Brotli lossless compression algorithm under an open-source Apache license on GitHub in late September with a promise that the new technology offers a 26 percent performance upgrade over previous offerings.

In discussing the new open-source package Google software engineer Jyrki Alakuijala said that Google “are hoping to establish a file ending .bro for brotli compressed files, a command line tool ‘bro’ for compressing and uncompressing brotli files, and a accept/content encoding type ‘bro’,” a fairly innocuous statement given that the name of the software in Brotli (emphasis is ours) but where there’s a will there’s a way when you’re a social justice warrior, and that’s where the fun begins.

In response to the post on Bugzilla, Mozilla SW engineer Patrick McManus has a proverbial hissy fit over the choice of the evil .bro, writing that

can I talk you out of it? Certainly not too late to change the draft registration.

“bro” has a gender problem, even though the dual meaning is unintentional. It comes of misogynistic and unprofessional due to the world it lives in. I received a series of ‘bro’ jokes in response to my posting about this new feature.

Best to avoid it rather than spending time defending an arbitrary nickname.

Apparently in Silicon Valley “bro” can only be about supporting the patriarchy while oppressing women, versus what the rest of the world would understand the word to be: an abbreviation for brother, and in this case clearly an abbreviation of Brotli.

Despite the insane stupidity of the argument, Google engineers don’t want to be accused of being woman hating nazis, so it didn’t take long for a back down, but only after other social justice warriors were consulted.

“I have asked a feminist friend from the North American culture-sphere, and she advised against bro,” Alakuijala later decided. “We have found a compromise that satisfies us, so we don’t need to discuss this further. Even if we don’t understand why people are upset from our cultural standpoint, they would be (unnecessarily) upset and this is enough reason not to use it.”

Insane

The compromise instead is now .br, which as some have pointed out on GitHub is the country extension and abbreviation for Brazil, and further most file names have 3 characters, not two.

What if .br unfairly oppresses the people of Brazil now? Google has now stolen their cultural identity and this is clearly a case of White Western privilege suppressing the developing world now, surely?!?!

In all seriousness though this whole case is just another example of how the world is going f**king insane, or in particular the bubble of people who live in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

Only the most stupid, victim-hood obsessed social justice warrior could interpret a file extension called .bro for software called Brotli as being an act of evil misogyny.

The scary thing is these minority views that hold that we should avoid all offense of any possible type, no matter how small, obscure, or in this case how stupid they are, may well one day lead to the downfall of Silicon Valley because it’s representative of people who are increasingly becoming out of touch with the rest of the world.

Image credit: chasecarter/Flickr/CC by 2.0