Why No One Wants to Date Tech Bros

为什么没人想和“科技男”约会

Engaged in a flirtatious conversation at a bar in Manhattan, 23-year-old Gary stood with a Guinness in hand as he explained to a woman why he took an engineering job at Palantir, the data analytics company cofounded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel. Raking in a $250,000 salary would allow him to help pay off his parents’ mounting medical bills, he explained.

在曼哈顿一家酒吧里，23岁的加里（Gary）正与一位女性调情。他手里拿着一杯健力士啤酒，向对方解释自己为何接受了帕兰泰尔（Palantir）的工程师职位——这家数据分析公司由亚历克斯·卡普（Alex Karp）和彼得·蒂尔（Peter Thiel）共同创立。他解释说，25万美元的年薪能让他帮父母还清日益沉重的医疗账单。

Gary wasn’t met with sympathy. Medical debt, the woman told him, was “not an excuse to work somewhere like that.” She was referring, of course, to Palantir’s controversial work with governments, including the US and Israel, which use the company’s surveillance tools for law enforcement and military operations.

加里并没有得到同情。那位女性告诉他，医疗债务“不是去那种地方工作的借口”。她指的当然是帕兰泰尔与包括美国和以色列在内的各国政府之间充满争议的合作，这些政府利用该公司的监控工具进行执法和军事行动。

Since joining the tech company in 2025, Gary has noticed that naming his employer prompts brutal reactions from prospective paramours. One woman, he says, called him the devil; another asked how he lives with himself. “Sometimes people would just straight up stop talking to me,” he says.

自2025年加入这家科技公司以来，加里注意到，每当他提到自己的雇主时，潜在的约会对象都会给出极其冷酷的反应。他说，曾有一位女性称他是魔鬼；另一位则问他怎么能心安理得地活下去。“有时人们会直接停止和我说话，”他说。

Recently, Gary’s buddies requested he not mention Palantir on their nights out together so as to not tank the whole group’s chances of getting laid. “I get nervous now. I don’t bring it up,” he says. (Gary, along with the other daters in this piece, have been given pseudonyms to protect against professional, if not romantic, repercussions.)

最近，加里的朋友们要求他在一起外出时不要提帕兰泰尔，以免毁了整个团队的“艳遇”机会。“我现在很紧张。我不会主动提起它，”他说。（为了避免职业生涯——如果不是浪漫关系的话——受到影响，本文中的加里及其他约会者均使用了化名。）

Gary has resorted to saying he works in AI. “Even that gets some pretty bad responses sometimes,” he says. His Hinge profile doesn’t mention his employer. And sometimes he makes up stories out of thin air to justify working for Palantir—like that line about the medical debt. His parents don’t have any, nor are they ill.

加里不得不改口说自己在做人工智能。他说：“即便如此，有时也会得到相当糟糕的回应。”他的Hinge个人资料里没有提到雇主。有时他甚至会凭空编造故事来为自己在帕兰泰尔工作辩解——比如那个关于医疗债务的借口。其实他的父母根本没有债务，也没有生病。

The bachelors of Palantir aren’t the only tech bros dealing with the industry’s fall from grace. Take 29-year-old James, who lives in San Francisco and works at Tesla. Earlier this year, on his third date with a woman he met on Raya, she asked whether he’d voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. A self-described “moderate liberal or moderate progressive” who “always votes blue and always will, probably,” James was offended. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Did I really give that off?’” She replied, “You work for Tesla, so I just need to check.”

帕兰泰尔的单身汉们并不是唯一面临行业声誉下滑的“科技男”。以住在旧金山、在特斯拉工作的29岁詹姆斯（James）为例。今年早些时候，在与一位通过Raya认识的女性进行第三次约会时，对方问他是否在2024年大选中投票给了唐纳德·特朗普。詹姆斯自称是“温和自由派或温和进步派”，并且“总是投给民主党，以后可能也会一直这样”，他感到被冒犯了。“我当时想，‘你在开玩笑吗？我真的表现得像那样吗？’”她回答说：“你在特斯拉工作，所以我必须确认一下。”

James says skepticism of his politics has “come up repeatedly” in his dating life. “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.

詹姆斯说，对他政治立场的怀疑在他的约会生活中“反复出现”。“如果我不立即声明我不喜欢埃隆·马斯克，人们就会认为我是保守派，而在旧金山，这通常是不受欢迎的，”他说。

Once seen as a groundbreaking leader in sustainability and a quirky futurist, Musk—recently crowned the world’s first trillionaire—is better known these days for his record-breaking donation to Trump’s 2024 campaign, being the brain behind DOGE, the dismantling of Twitter, an apparent Nazi salute, frequent ketamine use, racist tweets, and something of a breeding kink.

马斯克曾被视为可持续发展领域的开创性领袖和古怪的未来主义者，但最近被加冕为全球首位万亿富翁的他，如今更出名的是他为特朗普2024年竞选提供的创纪录捐款、作为“政府效率部”（DOGE）的幕后大脑、对推特的拆解、疑似纳粹礼、频繁使用氯胺酮、种族主义推文，以及某种程度上的“生育癖好”。

Long gone is the cliché of the optimistic tech guy in flip-flops and a ratty old hoodie. The tech industry is now seen as the locus of unchecked power. Meta created an environment where Russian bots could influence elections and designed features that foster social media addiction among teens. Amazon, which has been widely accused of unfair labor practices and of generating a staggering amount of waste, has aided in the collapse of small, independent businesses, while a glowed-up Jeff Bezos has become a poster child for extreme wealth inequality. More recently, the AI industry is being widely maligned over claims that it’s exacerbating job loss, pollution, and a critical-thinking crisis.

那个穿着人字拖、套着破旧连帽衫的乐观科技男的陈词滥调早已一去不复返。科技行业现在被视为不受制约权力的中心。Meta创造了一个让俄罗斯机器人可以影响选举的环境，并设计了助长青少年社交媒体成瘾的功能。亚马逊因不公平的劳工行为和产生惊人的浪费而受到广泛指责，它加速了小型独立企业的倒闭，而焕然一新的杰夫·贝索斯（Jeff Bezos）则成了极端贫富差距的代言人。最近，人工智能行业因被指加剧失业、污染和批判性思维危机而遭到广泛抨击。

Amy Laurent, the founder of a high-end matchmaking company, has a front-row seat to the way Big Tech’s moral failings are causing problems for single, rank-and-file tech bros. Turns out their cushy paychecks often aren’t enough of an upside anymore.

高端婚介公司创始人艾米·劳伦特（Amy Laurent）近距离观察到了大型科技公司的道德缺失如何给单身的普通科技男带来麻烦。事实证明，他们优厚的薪水往往不再是足够的加分项了。

“I think 10 years ago, saying you worked in tech was more about innovation, ambition, intelligence,” says Laurent. Now, many people charge Big Tech with “causing the breakdown of society,” whether they’re worried about “AI, job displacement, wealth inequality, privacy and surveillance, content moderation, or political influence.”

“我认为10年前，说你在科技行业工作更多代表着创新、雄心和智慧，”劳伦特说。现在，许多人指责大型科技公司“导致了社会的崩溃”，无论他们担心的是“人工智能、就业流失、贫富差距、隐私与监控、内容审核还是政治影响”。

Laurent says that when she pitches her tech-employed male clients to women, she acknowledges their hesitation right off the bat: “Listen, I have a great guy to tell you about. He’s such a good match for you. Now hear me out: He’s in tech.” The justifications are a new feature of her work.

劳伦特说，当她向女性推荐科技行业的男性客户时，她会直接承认对方的顾虑：“听着，我有个很棒的人想介绍给你。他和你非常般配。先别急着拒绝，听我说：他在科技行业工作。”这种辩解已成为她工作中的一项新内容。

Jessica Engle, a family and marriage therapist, has noticed that men in tech worry about being perceived as red-pilled. Recently, one of her clients expressed concern about having his Apple Watch visible in his dating profile photos. He wondered whether the gadget “would make him look like a tech bro” and whether it might signal a “very particular kind of toxic masculinity that we’re seeing more and more in the news.”

家庭与婚姻治疗师杰西卡·恩格尔（Jessica Engle）注意到，科技行业的男性担心被视为“红丸”（red-pilled，指代激进的男性至上主义思想）。最近，她的一位客户表示担心自己的Apple Watch出现在约会资料照片中。他想知道这个小玩意儿“会不会让他看起来像个科技男”，以及它是否会传达出一种“我们在新闻中越来越多见到的、某种特定的有毒男子气概”。

Engle’s client wasn’t wrong to worry. Mira, a 29-year-old Bay Area resident, says she perceives a career in tech as a possible “right-wing flag” or a sign that someone might be “manosphere-coded” or libertarian.

恩格尔的客户担心得没错。29岁的湾区居民米拉（Mira）表示，她认为科技行业的职业生涯可能是一个“右翼信号”，或者是一个人可能带有“男性圈子色彩”或自由意志主义倾向的标志。

When 28-year-old Helen was an undergraduate at Stanford from 2016 to 2020, she viewed men in tech as guys who “stay up late and maybe have bad hygiene.” But her feelings toward them have gotten even worse over time as she’s questioned the industry’s overall impact.

28岁的海伦（Helen）在2016年至2020年期间就读于斯坦福大学本科时，她眼中的科技男是那些“熬夜、可能不太讲卫生”的人。但随着她对整个行业影响力的质疑，她对他们的看法随着时间的推移变得更糟了。

Helen’s family is from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, whose population, beginning in 2020, was subjected to a prolonged period of human rights abuses. “When I started thinking about questions around genocide and the technology that kills or tracks or excludes,” Helen says, “I realized that the things these people are building are secretly, or under the surface, really nefarious, and I could not personally be with someone who is a puzzle piece in that tapestry.”

海伦的家人来自埃塞俄比亚的提格雷地区，该地区的人口从2020年开始遭受了长期的侵犯人权行为。“当我开始思考关于种族灭绝以及那些用于杀戮、追踪或排斥的技术问题时，”海伦说，“我意识到这些人正在构建的东西在秘密地、或在表面之下，是非常邪恶的。我个人无法与那些成为这幅罪恶图景中一块拼图的人在一起。”

Helen herself has worked in tech. Soon after graduating from college, she accepted a job at Grammarly. But after about a year, she went to work for a mutual-aid platform and now is employed at an impact investing firm funding technology for under…

海伦本人也曾在科技行业工作过。大学毕业后不久，她接受了Grammarly的一份工作。但在大约一年后，她转去了一家互助平台工作，现在则受雇于一家影响力投资公司，为那些处于弱势群体的技术提供资金……