Jensen Huang’s resignation and chips hanging by a thread

It had become clear that the apocalypse – the cold world of tech – was no stranger to the warmth of pranks and romance, the interplay of desire and frivolity. With the immediate resignation of Jensen Huang, the founder of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence company, three decades of sensationalism and progress—the chip industry hanging by a thread—come to a close with a pair of distinctly human, all-too-natural tales of love and adultery. That hip can be seen in the videos where the man with the light-bulb gaze – who radiates intelligence and shrewdness beyond the screen of his leather and rhinestone jacket – plays the affectionate sixty-year-old with his young sweetheart amidst the crowd in a lobby. A bad boy from this publication, many years ago, back in the days of Bill Clinton, had headlined the Monday edition thus: ‘Wall Street hanging by a blowjob’ (Giorgio Dell’Arti). Those were rough, intractable times – the days of Monica Lewinsky.

Jensen’s flirtation with Huang—who shares his surname and, it seems, is a Chinese spy straight out of a Fleming novel—takes a much more subtle turn, although it would be advisable to wait for the artificial mandrill’s testimony before Parliament, as he had added, as an afterthought to that flirtation—always choosing women of stunning beauty and with a heart-rending, superhuman smile—a corporate executive who reported directly to him. The matter is extremely serious; it unfolded like a bolt from the blue but could have slow and devastating consequences, as the markets have signalled with losses running into trillions (the stock market has fallen by 20 per cent since the start of November), and this despite the fact that the whole story is made up of obvious sweetness and, frankly, incomprehensible modesty.

The standard debriefing procedure is uncompromising: any American citizen caught maintaining personal relations with a foreign agent must, as General Stavridis pointed out yesterday, spend a great deal of time with the CIA and provide a full account of their relationship and the information involved; the National Security State is at stake. The handover process at the helm of an all-powerful company could not have been more fleeting and chaotic; it is difficult to foster a climate of trust around it. The breed of founders, to which Jensen Huang belongs, is loved and revered almost as a totem in Silicon Valley; they wield overwhelming control over the companies they helped to create and have guided over the decades towards unimaginable levels of profit, wealth and financial success. The Economist notes that Apple had acted with discretion and tact in the case of Tim Cook’s slow and steady replacement, and perhaps, in the end, the successor to the chip king—dethroned by this romantic comedy—will come from this rival in full regalia. Without resorting to facile rhetoric on a case that speaks for itself, it must be observed that, after so many postmodern and Nietzschean endeavours, the desiring machine of "The Anti-Oedipus" (Deleuze, 1972) had finally arrived on the market – that ideal type of schizoanalysis invented in the conceptual factory of the post-1960s French – and we had finally come to believe that desire was no longer a banal lack but a production workshop that naturalised the capitalist man within the revolutionary cycle. Once again, we were mistaken: a chip is a chip; desire is that thing over there.