A new order of nerdery – and why Silicon Valley is such a sexual wasteland

In Silicon Valley, you have to be busy. As Alexandra Wolfe discovers in her rip-snorting dissection of nerd central, the only status symbol that counts is being way too tied up to boast.

Though as they dash between coding conferences and investor meetings, the shabby chic entrepreneurs might just have time to tell you this: they are changing the world.

In San Francisco’s booming tech belt they see themselves as social engineers, embarking on an evangelical calling to improve the circumstances around them. Wolfe has another way of putting it. For many, she writes, ‘changing the world meant “changing the wallet”, to make it much fatter in as short a time as possible’.

And my, that time can be short indeed. The first customer checked into an Airbnb rental in 2010. Seven years later the company is valued at $25billion, the largest hotel chain in the world. Pretty impressive given it doesn’t own a single hotel bed. With that sort of speed of return, it is little wonder that Silicon Valley is awash with money-men hoping to fund the next big thing. The trouble is, as one chastened investor tells Wolfe, ‘the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad’.

Wolfe meets some young, would-be world-changers as they first head west. One of them has an idea about mining asteroids. Another is looking for a way to hasten immortality. It is the kind of thinking that elsewhere might be reckoned, well, unlikely. But then, as they note in Silicon Valley, five years ago the idea that the entire world would be summoning an Uber ride from a mobile might have been considered fanciful.

As her would-be next Mark Zuckerbergs start the process of changing the world, Wolfe introduces us to the strange new order of nerdery. The deliciousness is in her detail – like the gluten-free menu at a favoured Silicon Valley eatery, full of chia seeds, green-tea extract and ‘chicken-apple sausage scrambles’. Or that the most coveted personal possession in the Valley is not a Ferrari but a 2007 Facebook staff T-shirt with its implication that you were in at the start of the revolution. ‘They all acted like their bodies were nuanced machines in need of special treatment,’ Wolfe writes. But of course, many of them are as fallibly human as the rest of us. After failure to get backing, her asteroid-miner withdraws from the Valley and falls in with another sort of religious sect: the Catholic Church. His idea, it turned out, was merely that: an idea. According to Wolfe, the Valley is littered with the corpses of ‘companies having the same problem where they promised some sort of magic, but had a difficult time delivering’. Brad Stone isn’t interested in such failure. In The Upstarts, his account of the bulldozer tech firms disrupting the established order, he only has time for success. And frankly, it’s not as interesting. Sure, Airbnb and Uber have risen at eye-melting speed, but the way he presents their stories of share-holding dilution and ‘the IRS rejecting 501(c) (3) application’ quickly dilutes any excitement. Much more intriguing is Wolfe’s discovery that for the nerds, the overwhelmingly male Silicon Valley ‘was a sexual wasteland’. For all their worldchanging ambitions, the geeks are finding it tough to get laid.