Dating is tough when you’re a tech bro with more money than you know what to do with.
That, at any rate, is according to the said loaded tech workers who spilled their guts to Wired. One 23-year-old complained that his attempts at getting laid would get derailed as soon as he told a potential hookup that he worked at Palantir, the AI surveillance and defense company.
Dates quickly questioned his morals; one called him the devil.
“Sometimes people would just straight up stop talking to me,” he told Wired.
“I get nervous now. I don’t bring it up,” he added. He’s now fallen back on saying he works in AI — which also elicits “some pretty bad responses sometimes.”
A 29-year-old named James (not his real name) who works at Tesla, told the magazine he’s had similar experiences. Though he considers himself a “moderate liberal or moderate progressive” — pick one, dude — his dates typically assume he’s some sort of right wing chud because of his employer.
“If I don’t immediately say that I don’t like Elon Musk, people think that I’m conservative, which is generally not something that people like in San Francisco,” he says.
Their luck probably would’ve been better even just ten years ago. In the intervening years, there’s been a massive vibe shift in how Silicon Valley and tech workers are perceived. They were once viewed as quirky nerds working in a futuristic, if not naive, industry. Now, the tech industry is seen “as the locus of unchecked power,” the magazine writes. Tech workers aren’t tech workers, they’re tech bros. They listen to manosphere podcasts and laugh at the poor shmucks whose jobs they’re going to outmode. Their products are tearing society apart, rotting kids’ brains via social media and AI chatbots, and disseminating misinformation and slop, all while polluting the planet.
Amy Laurent, a renowned professional matchmaker, diagnosed the issue along the same lines.
“I think 10 years ago, saying you worked in tech was more about innovation, ambition, intelligence,” Laurent told Wired. Now, people associate Big Tech with “causing the breakdown of society,” be it “AI, job displacement, wealth inequality, privacy and surveillance, content moderation, or political influence.”
Anyhow, can you blame the ladies for harboring these assumptions? Just look at who’s leading the tech industry. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, happens to embody this vibe shift. He was seen as an eccentric visionary primed on sci-fi movies with oddball ideas. And he was making electric cars and championing solar power so, hey, he must be eco-conscious.
Today, though, he’s known as Trump’s sidekick — messy relationship notwithstanding — who gutted the federal government, as well as a conspiracy theory loving racist, a raging transphobe, and someone who has a creepy obsession with impregnating women. And tech workers, by and large, have not disowned him.
More on tech: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says That Sacrificing Our Children’s Minds to AI Is a Price He’s Willing to Pay