Ours is an age of banality. Despite all the yammering about diversity and cross-pollination of cultures, we live in a bland, uniform time. I’m fond of pointing out that the typical American parking lot looks like something an East German planner would have imagined. In the 1960’s the most popular car colors were shades of green. One year turquoise was the top color choice. In 1972 the most popular color choice for the Corvette was orange. Imagine that. Today, black and silver account for half the car colors, followed by gray and white. You may think that does not mean much, but when was the last time you associated shades of gray with vibrant and interesting?

Anyway, that came to mind reading this very odd column. Milo Yiannopoulos is what passes for clever and interesting in London apparently.

You’ll think this is weird, but for three years now I’ve taken what might be described as a “data-driven” approach to my social life. Specifically, I’ve been maintaining a gigantic spreadsheet of friends and business contacts, updated with columns such as “Hotness Index,” “Income,” and “Strategic Value.” And I spend about four hours a week keeping it up to date.

Why? Well, it’s not because I’m east London’s answer to Patrick Bateman. At least, that’s not the only reason. No, the spreadsheet is simply the best tool I’ve developed so far for managing an ever-increasing contact list of interesting people I am anxious to introduce to one another, or with whom I want to spend more time.

Of course, not everyone makes the cut. As I write this, there are only 746 people in the database out of a possible 4,500 entries in my address book. Included and assessed on a variety of metrics are A-list celebrities, board members of multinational corporations, investors in my previous ventures, and people I went to school with. And, yeah, a few randoms from 2009 I sort of maybe might consider calling at 2am.

Reading his wiki entry, he passes himself off as some sort of taste maker and techno-culturalist. The fact that he wastes four hours per week cataloging his relationships on a spreadsheet certainly makes him uncommonly dull. Interesting people don’t waste valuable time on mundane tasks. They have people for that. In the Imperial Capital (Washington DC), powerful people, the real movers and shakers, don’t carry their own mobile phone. They have people for that. In my day, you could spot the status by the briefcase. A big overstuffed briefcase was a lawyer working in a staff job. A thin European briefcase was a lobbyist. No briefcase, but an aide with an overstuffed briefcase meant an elected official or presidential appointment.

I’m thinking a guy sitting at home on a Friday night tabulating his relationships is a nobody.

Present and past relationships appear in the database, as do family members and work colleagues; these days, most of us have heavily overlapping constituencies of work and play.

I won’t pretend I don’t get a frisson of childish amusement from “shorting” the “stock” of people who show up late for an appointment (I’m hoping to commission a mobile app so I can do that on the fly) or even demoting those who have annoyed me in some way.

But the primary objective of maintaining this information is to enable me to quickly and easily filter and rank contacts before I send out invitations for parties and suppers.

The image above gives you an indication of what the spreadsheet looks like. I rank pretty much everyone I meet that I might want to see again in a number of different ways: subjective cultural assessments, estimates of income and intelligence, how much they like to party, how much trouble they like to get into, and obviously, how physically attractive they are.

The scores are normalised across the whole group. This enables me quickly and easily to drill down and generate lists from which I can craft the perfect party. I can even engineer how the photos will look, since I have a column that covers personal style. Politics is covered by a simple “Pass” or “Fail.”

There’s a term, which I no longer recall, for the use (misuse) of field-specific words in areas outside the specific field. Today, everyone is trying to pass themselves off as a quant. Milo, according to his bio, has no science or math. He had some training in philosophy, which suggests an irrationalist inclination. His misuse of the word “normalize” suggests he just thinks it sounds cool. That’s the habit of the modern fake nerd. They pick up the jargon from statistics, mostly, and fertilize their language with it.

I’ve made some interesting discoveries about my social life. For example, people ranked closer to me (with a “Tier” of A or B) are more physically attractive, and have politics that align with mine. But there’s no correlation between a person’s income and how highly I value our relationship, unless there’s been romantic interest.

My close friends (Tier A) tend to have high IQs, but their partying, troublemaking, and strategic values don’t follow any patterns. All of which implies that I am attracted to pretty, smart people with sound politics, but I don’t particularly care whether or not they are wealthy or like to party.

Look, I know all this is a bit odd. And it must sound terribly calculating. I suppose there’s a reason I’m writing a book called The Sociopaths of Silicon Valley. Perhaps it’s what jacket blurbs refer to as “unique insight.” But the truth is, this is simply the best tool I have developed to help me navigate a complex environment.

Actually, it just makes Milo sound like a shallow dickhead. My bet is his “high IQ” friends are just mediocrities like Milo. Posers like this guy tend to be quite dimwitted if you can get past the act. His writing is clever enough, so maybe he is not a dimwit. I’m not familiar enough with his work to make many judgments on his reasoning skills. The small sampling here suggests he is just another hipster passing himself off as whatever is popular at the moment.

That’s something I keep coming back to. I’m old enough to remember when being a nerd was the opposite of cool. As a kid, the cool guys were tough and rugged, disinclined to intellectualize anything. They were John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Guys who wrote code and liked math were Jimmy Stewart. Guys who liked trouble were Lee Marvin. For Generation Onesie, John Wayne is dead and they can’t imagine that a Lee Marvin could exist. They have been insulated from that type of man. It is all Jimmy Stewart. Their masculine ideal is the sensitive Jewish guy who writes interesting code, dates a tough gal who looks good in spandex and has bromances with other sensitive guys in self-actualizing jobs.