The impact technology designed in California's Silicon Valley means there’s a high probability that you are reading this on a computer or device designed by Apple, with Google as your homepage, and two or more windows open so you can casually skim through this article whilst also scrolling down Facebook simultaneously. But the cultural shift that has occurred within this bubble is almost of equal fascination.
George Packer of the New Yorker explores the Silicon Valley ethos at length in his recent article “Can Silicon Valley Embrace Politics?”, noting the widely-adopted mantra among the tech industry to perceive their work as an indubitably positive force for change. “The phrase ‘change the world’ is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of ‘early-stage investing’ and ‘beta tests’”, Packer writes.
All of this marks the target for Mike Judge’s latest barb-sharp satire, a half-hour HBO comedy-series named after the aforementioned area, which has just begun airing here on the SoHo channel. With a sizable cult following over the years for his cynical skewering of cubicle culture Office Space, Judge has now turned his fangs onto the tech industry.
Like the hybrid of Entourage and The Social Network you never knew you wanted, Judge’s series focuses on a socially inept programmer who engineers a groundbreaking compression algorithm and decides to launch his own company around it; so basically, the same rags-to-possible-riches structure we’ve all seen exhausted on countless occasions already. But Silicon Valley marks itself distinct by being really, really funny, and it’s Judge’s keen eye for the surrounding milieu that makes it so.
(Warning: Some language and content in this video may offend)
The casual, college campus-like grounds of fictional corporate giant Hooli (replete with its own Hooli Bus) is one of various recurrent digs at Google. Best exhibited in the delusional philanthropic bent of its CEO Gavin Belson (a promotional video for his own compression technology Nucleus offers “if we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make cancer smaller. And hunger. And Aids”), Silicon Valley textures its familiar beats with acutely observed caricatures of the people, places and properties constituting this cultural shift.
No sooner than the opening sequence - a lavishly staged, incredibly awkward launch party featuring a humiliated Kid Rock and one of the most cringe-worthy episodes of public speaking in recent memory – have the targets been drawn. The excessive wealth, the misguided sense of altruism (“most importantly, we’re making the world a better place ... through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code re-use and extensibility”), the self-conscious political alignment and namedropping, and chiefly, the wild success of a particular breed of personality that’s totally ill-equipped to wield it.
Is Silicon Valley really worthy of such scorn? Packer, when discussing his article for a New Yorker podcast, described the culture as one still in its adolescence; that period where one has only just started to become aware of the world outside of their immediate surroundings. There’s a crucial realisation in one of his article’s most memorable passages to accompany this: “It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being 20 years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up”.
Silicon Valley textures its familiar beats with acutely observed caricatures of the people, places and properties constituting this cultural shift.
It’s an industry dominated by and delivering for a very specific, very Western demographic, and while it’s easy to get caught up in the liberating power of connectivity and the far reaches of the globe that this technology has penetrated, we can easily forget that many of those far reaches have not yet achieved our basic standard of living. In this sense, it’s easy to see how there’s a detachment of sorts in translating the solutions of the virtual world to the problems of the actual one.
Judge’s Silicon Valley tackles this tunnel-vision with relish, flavoring its criticisms with absurd humor but always grounding itself in a studied accuracy. So far, it makes for pretty winning satire, but such accuracy nevertheless comes with its own issues. Upon the launch of the trailer, there was immediate discussion generated on the promotional material’s near-complete absence of women, save for a split-second of a scantily-clad stripper (the actual series hasn’t fared much better since, with only one regular female character to date).
It could be said that this disparity belongs equally to the subject as to the show, and that Judge is only representing his target as they actually are; employing that skew to further illuminate a blind ignorance to a world outside of their own.
It could be said that Judge is only representing his targets as they actually are; employing that skew to further illuminate a blind ignorance to a world outside of their own. One episode features an engineer – responsible for designing an app called NipAlert, which detects women in your area by tracking their erect nipples – realising how useless and reprehensibly sexist his invention is after showing it to an actual woman. But there comes a point where accurate representation ends and perpetuation begins, and to eventually start puncturing that bubble with increased regularity (and with characters of more varied gender, ethnicity and background) might afford the show a more lasting relevancy.
But in spite of this highly specific focus, Silicon Valley has a universal pull to it that means it will likely amuse both sticky-palmed programmer-types and everyone else in equal measure. Whether for those there to relish in the scathing stringing-up of this ever-evolving technological revolution or those tuning in for the dick jokes, I can only hope Silicon Valley will too grow to find an audience just a fraction the size of the industry it’s chomping on.
Cover image from HBO.
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