Technicians are fighting. Literally.

Upon entering the conference room on the crowded hotel, Andrew Batey looked like any other guy in the technology attending Ethdenver, an annual cryptocurrency conference. An investor of venture capital based in Florida, Mr. Batey wore a black sweatshirt sporting logos of more than a dozen crypto companies, with names like Lunarcrush and Bitsmiley. He had arrived in town with expensive shoes-a pair of broken white air jordans, the type of sneaker, he said, that people generally do not remove from the box.

Mr. Batey, however, was at the conference not to network with his colleagues amateur of crypto but to fight one of them – to live on YouTube. At the hotel, a few minutes by car from the conference center of the conference, he was preparing for his official weighing, the last stage before a fight the next evening in an arena filled with cryptographic colleagues. Under the vigilant eye of a representative of the Colorado Combative Sports Commission, Mr. Batey, 40, undressed his boxers, who were decorated with a santa claus of cartoon leading a golf cart.

He weighed a little less than 195 pounds, on the target for the fight. The venture capital with naked torso raised its biceps and bents up for cameras.

The country’s technological elite, not satisfied with unfathomable wealth and a growing political influence in Washington, recently developed a new obsession – fights. In the United States, men like Mr. Batey learn to hit, kick, knee, elbow and, in some cases, hammer an opponent over his head with their fists. The figurehead of the movement is Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta billionaire director general, who has traced his impressive physical transformation of Skinny Computer Nerd in martial arts on Instagram, one of the applications he has. A recent article has shown that Mr. Zuckerberg, dressed in gym shorts and an American flag t-shirt, struggling with his opponent on the ground.

The new devotion of technological industry to martial arts is a facet of a broader cultural change that has upset American policy. Many of these technological founders become combatants pursue an ideal of masculinity rich in testosterone which is ascending on social networks and adopted by President Trump. An enthusiastic practitioner of the Brazilian jujitsu, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, deplored this year that the corporate culture became “sterilized” and was devoid of “male energy”. In 2023, Mr. Zuckerberg’s billionaire comrade, Elon Musk, a long -standing rival of the company, challenged him in a television match in the cage. The fight never took place, although Mr. Musk suggested at some point that he was ready to fight in the Roman Colosseum.