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The inside story
Views Culture The TV column
The inside story Silicon Valley, HBO’s hit series about the US IT industry, has laughout-loud moments and gratingly awful characters, but it lets the tech giants off their moral responsibilities too easily, writes Chelsea Whyte
Pied Piper staff watch their CEO fumble a speech to Congress on privacy
HBO
Chelsea Whyte is a reporter for New Scientist, based in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter @chelswhyte
TV
Silicon Valley HBO
Chelsea also recommends... TV
Veep HBO
Vice-president Selina Meyer and her motley crew of truly ridiculous aides try to get through the day without ruining her political image too badly. They rarely succeed. Film
The Social Network Directed by David Fincher
Adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, this film takes a more realistic look at the scheming that goes on behind the scenes of a tech company.
32 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
THESE days, when I think about the social media platforms I spend a lot of time on – and the people who run them with little concern for the privacy of my personal data – I get a bit sad and a lot angry. So, on the advice of a colleague, I decided to watch the final season of Silicon Valley, an HBO sitcom that parodies the culture that brought us everything from an extremely silly $400 “juicer” that squeezed bags of pre-cut fruit and veg slower than you could by hand to widespread election interference and the beginnings of the breakdown of democracy. I hadn’t watched the previous five seasons, but it was clear enough which tech companies and leaders were being skewered in each scene. As with Veep, an HBO comedy about a bumbling vice-president and her idiot staff, it is cathartic to laugh at how moronic decisions might be being made within organisations that touch all our lives. While the details in Silicon Valley can seem outlandish, it turns out that some are based on reality. For example, one of the most
gratingly awful characters in this season is a coder who rollerblades around a meeting room. He thinks it makes him look cool – of course, it doesn’t. The show’s writers lifted this from a real meeting they had at Google, which they described in an interview they gave The New Yorker several years ago. At the time, they deemed it “too hacky
“While the details in Silicon Valley can seem outlandish, it turns out that some are based on reality” to use on the show”. Now, though, it fits really well with the broad comedy that the sixth season of the show turns on. The standout performance is by Zach Woods, who plays chief operating officer Jared Dunn at Pied Piper, the fictional start-up the show follows. He is both reliably funny and capable of bringing a measure of realism to the absurdity. Overall, there were some genuine laugh-out-loud moments,
although I found the comedy a little overdone at times. Those laughs came with a twinge of painful reality. In the opening scenes of the first episode of the new series, the CEO of Pied Piper, Richard Hendricks, is walking into a hearing at Congress – an obvious parody of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent turn in front of a committee. An aide tells him she likes his tie and he responds, “Thanks, I tied it myself.” I snorted and then rolled my eyes at the all-too-real depiction of someone completely out of their depth, being called to account for the societal problems digital media have exacerbated. Later in the season, Dunn and Hendricks stumble into creating a truly upsetting and wildly unethical data-mining system based on recordings gathered from microphones on gaming headsets. This is shown as a moral person trying to do “the right thing” and accidentally putting the data his company collects in danger of being misused. But by portraying it as a misstep, instead of a decision made with clear minds and an obvious prioritising of money over privacy, it felt as if in the course of trying to skewer the heads of giant tech companies, the writers let them off the hook. What Silicon Valley gets right, though, isn’t the stuff about tech or the digital economy, but the human interactions. I am sure I am missing quite a bit without the full back story on these characters, but the emotional moments of old friends reconciling after a fight or coming through in a pinch are the best parts of the show. They had me cheering the dolts on, even if I don’t know them very well. ❚
The inside story Silicon Valley, HBO’s hit series about the US IT industry, has laughout-loud moments and gratingly awful characters, but it lets the tech giants off their moral responsibilities too easily, writes Chelsea Whyte
Pied Piper staff watch their CEO fumble a speech to Congress on privacy
HBO
Chelsea Whyte is a reporter for New Scientist, based in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter @chelswhyte
TV
Silicon Valley HBO
Chelsea also recommends... TV
Veep HBO
Vice-president Selina Meyer and her motley crew of truly ridiculous aides try to get through the day without ruining her political image too badly. They rarely succeed. Film
The Social Network Directed by David Fincher
Adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, this film takes a more realistic look at the scheming that goes on behind the scenes of a tech company.
32 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
THESE days, when I think about the social media platforms I spend a lot of time on – and the people who run them with little concern for the privacy of my personal data – I get a bit sad and a lot angry. So, on the advice of a colleague, I decided to watch the final season of Silicon Valley, an HBO sitcom that parodies the culture that brought us everything from an extremely silly $400 “juicer” that squeezed bags of pre-cut fruit and veg slower than you could by hand to widespread election interference and the beginnings of the breakdown of democracy. I hadn’t watched the previous five seasons, but it was clear enough which tech companies and leaders were being skewered in each scene. As with Veep, an HBO comedy about a bumbling vice-president and her idiot staff, it is cathartic to laugh at how moronic decisions might be being made within organisations that touch all our lives. While the details in Silicon Valley can seem outlandish, it turns out that some are based on reality. For example, one of the most
gratingly awful characters in this season is a coder who rollerblades around a meeting room. He thinks it makes him look cool – of course, it doesn’t. The show’s writers lifted this from a real meeting they had at Google, which they described in an interview they gave The New Yorker several years ago. At the time, they deemed it “too hacky
“While the details in Silicon Valley can seem outlandish, it turns out that some are based on reality” to use on the show”. Now, though, it fits really well with the broad comedy that the sixth season of the show turns on. The standout performance is by Zach Woods, who plays chief operating officer Jared Dunn at Pied Piper, the fictional start-up the show follows. He is both reliably funny and capable of bringing a measure of realism to the absurdity. Overall, there were some genuine laugh-out-loud moments,
although I found the comedy a little overdone at times. Those laughs came with a twinge of painful reality. In the opening scenes of the first episode of the new series, the CEO of Pied Piper, Richard Hendricks, is walking into a hearing at Congress – an obvious parody of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent turn in front of a committee. An aide tells him she likes his tie and he responds, “Thanks, I tied it myself.” I snorted and then rolled my eyes at the all-too-real depiction of someone completely out of their depth, being called to account for the societal problems digital media have exacerbated. Later in the season, Dunn and Hendricks stumble into creating a truly upsetting and wildly unethical data-mining system based on recordings gathered from microphones on gaming headsets. This is shown as a moral person trying to do “the right thing” and accidentally putting the data his company collects in danger of being misused. But by portraying it as a misstep, instead of a decision made with clear minds and an obvious prioritising of money over privacy, it felt as if in the course of trying to skewer the heads of giant tech companies, the writers let them off the hook. What Silicon Valley gets right, though, isn’t the stuff about tech or the digital economy, but the human interactions. I am sure I am missing quite a bit without the full back story on these characters, but the emotional moments of old friends reconciling after a fight or coming through in a pinch are the best parts of the show. They had me cheering the dolts on, even if I don’t know them very well. ❚