To be tech-en seriously, be loud

Runaway eccentricity has been a new currency for a while. Once upon a time, Jobs and Gates could be taken seriously by virtue of their ideas, their products and their ability to make beige boxes desirable. Today, the tech billionaire must be brash, outlandish, and if they're perceived as downright nasty, that's taken to be a sign of 'genius', next in line for a Walter Isaacson biography.

The archetype is clear. The innovator is no longer the mad scientist in a garage, but a showman on stage, treating individuals as servers for 'a greater cause'. Employees are not colleagues but cult acolytes, expected to sacrifice weekends and sanity for the promise of disruption and payment in fava beans stocks. After all, visions of Mars colonies, AI utopias and immortality pills are so much cooler than spreadsheets and circuit boards. This is not accidental. In an age of attention economics, flamboyance is the business model, outrage is marketing, outlandish social media chuck-ups are shareholder updates.

To be taken seriously, one must be taken loudly. The tech billionaire's persona is the product; the tech's the packaging. In Silicon Valley, seriousness is measured not in patents, but in provocation. If you're not brash, or even absurd, you may as well be invisible. Unless, of course, you're a techie still fostering process knowledge in China.