Goodbye, Mr Chips. Why brainiacs and Trump make easy marks

Résumé détaillé

Our future is being moulded by stunted tech bros who are immature, awkward and high on their own supply.

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In the front hall hangs a vintage poster from World War II, a sultry blonde at a cocktail party with three British officers leaning over her and the warning: “Keep mum, she’s not so dumb! Careless talk costs lives.”

I also have a Cold War honey trap: a photograph of the bewitching Tatiana Romanova, wearing nothing but a black velvet choker and black stockings, looking up saucily at James Bond after sneaking into his bed in From Russia With Love.

On my TV at night is the new season of Black Doves, the Netflix thriller in which the comely Keira Knightley is spying on her husband, the British prime minister, and working for a spidery organisation that sells state secrets to the highest bidder.

And on my coffee table is a DVD of the 1946 Hitchcock spy noir, Notorious, in which Ingrid Bergman honeytraps a Nazi played by Claude Rains. When the Rains character is forced to confess to his Nazi mother that he married an American spy, the mother sneers at him: “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity.”

Suffice it to say, Jensen Huang was not protected by the enormity of his stupidity.

Sexpionage in Silicon Valley looks too easy. It barely requires any real tradecraft. All it takes is a smile from the sort of femme fatale these nerdy brainiacs couldn’t get when they were young – before the billions, the makeovers, the personal trainers, the yachts and Jensen Huang’s ubiquitous Tom Ford black leather jacket.

Some Silicon Valley executives have warned their scientists and engineers to beware if they find themselves dating women who are “out of their league”, as one tech leader put it to me.

For a 2023 New Yorker profile, Huang told Stephen Witt that he was anything but a player, noting: “I did not have a girlfriend” in high school. His future wife, Lori, was his college lab partner in an introductory electrical engineering class.

Début de l'article, extrait de Brisbane Times. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.