When “Silicon Valley” premiered on HBO in 2014, Silicon Valley hadn’t yet ruined the world. Those were the salad days for the titans of tech: Digital billionaires were superheroes feted on magazine covers and in the White House, not super villains hauled before Congress for fixing elections, sowing genocide, undermining truth and monopolizing all the globe’s commerce.
At the time, Theranos was a promising medical start-up and Uber looked like a slightly rough-around-the-edges solution to urban traffic. Bill Gates was the world’s greatest philanthropist, and you’d have been laughed out of town for suggesting — as presidential candidates and billionaires themselves now routinely do — that people as rich as him should not even be allowed to exist. This month both The New Yorker and the Atlantic published lengthy investigations into Jeff Bezos’ designs on owning basically everything. In 2014, the Amazon founder was hardly so existentially menacing; he seemed happily married, most decidedly not jacked, and he wasn’t even close to being the richest man in the world. LOL, he was poorer than Mark Zuckerberg.
The stakes were smaller then, is what I’m saying. Over five seasons, “Silicon Valley” has been viciously precise in lambasting techies’ antisocial foibles, but as to the industry’s fundamental contribution to the world, the series has mostly aped the zeitgeist, handling tech with loving, kid gloves. The gang of awkward bros who are trying to make it big with Pied Piper, the show’s heroic central start-up, have always been mostly good dudes, at least compared to their real-life start-up bro analogues. They weren’t abetting Nazis. They weren’t breaking democracies, or taking money from murderous petromonarchs. Compared to pop cultural portrayals of the nation’s other power centers — to Wall Street, Hollywood or D.C. — “Silicon Valley” long found in Silicon Valley some capacity for inspiration, wonder and awe.
But in much the same way that later seasons of “Veep” had to amp up an atmosphere of dystopian peril to match the real-life descent of American politics, HBO’s tech satire has also had to adjust. Society is now drowning in tech, and as we’ve all curdled in the glare of our phones, “Silicon Valley” got more sour, too. This works well as a story arc for a show set in the tech industry: Though Pied Piper has always been an idealistic company (fake idealism is the whole joke about this place), each season brought new avenues to abandon its ideals — the time they signed up thousands of fake users, or when their software caused phone explosions that injured their customers’ genitals.
But now the show is going even darker. In its final season, “Silicon Valley,” which returns on Oct. 27, seems to be catching up with the bleak mood in and about the technology industry.
Even filtered through a zany lens — El Pollo Loco’s logo has a prominent role — the show is asking big questions, maybe the biggest questions: Can good coexist with greed? Is it O.K. to act unethically in the service of ethical ends? Does money necessarily ruin everything — and how much does that matter, if we’re talking billions?
It’s a delicious, somberly hilarious turn. The new season begins with Richard Hendricks, Pied Piper’s gangly chief (played by Thomas Middleditch), testifying before Congress about his company’s noble efforts to undermine Facebook, Google and Amazon — corporate “kings” who “monitor every moment in our lives” and “exploit our data for profit.”
But taking the high road isn’t easy in Silicon Valley. Unbeknown to Richard, Pied Piper has indeed been spying on its users, and in his maneuverings to save the company, Richard must decide whether to take a billion dollars from a Chilean investor with ties to the Pinochet regime. The second episode ends with a mordant scene illustrating the dilemma. As Richard weighs taking money from the threatening would-be savior, a parade of birds fatally crashes into the investor’s glass windows in a steady drumbeat, each one landing in a beautiful outdoor water display, where a gardener is waiting to fish out the carcasses with a pool net.
It’s an awfully telling metaphor. In tech, you build a gleaming edifice for the whole world to enjoy — and if it results in some unexpected deaths, hey, you can always hire someone to clean it up. “What are you going to do?” the investor says with a shrug.
You might worry that the show risks losing laughs by languishing in the gloom. Much of the early episodes are concerned with ethics, after all, a subject that has long taken a back seat in real-life Silicon Valley. At one point, there is an extended meditation that feels ripped from tortured tech-company boardroom discussions about how to behave under newfound scrutiny. Richard and his long-suffering sweater-clad biz-dev exec, Jared Dunn (Zach Woods), ask themselves: how much wrong can we do and still live with ourselves?
But the laughs come in their pretzel-twisting justifications.
“Even if this is wrong, I suppose you could argue that it’s wrong in the service of rightness,” Jared suggests.
Richard chimes in with rising approval: “It’s unethical in the defense of ethics. Unjust in the quest for justice.”
Jared: “It’s like stealing from your pimp to pay for your friend’s appendectomy.”
So, yes, “Silicon Valley” is still a comedy. And in mining tech primarily for humor rather than dread, I suspect it will be the last show of its kind at least for some time. Newer takes on the industry — in “Black Mirror” most notably, but also upcoming adaptations of the scandals at Theranos and at Uber — depict the perils of technology and the business of tech more squarely, seriously and scarily.
It’s true that “Silicon Valley” has often ridiculed techies’ insistence that their primary goal is improving the world. The series’ best-ever quip, from Season 2, is the Hooli chief Gavin Belson’s insistence that “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”
Yet even now, the show still holds out hope for tech’s redemption, and still seems to buy into its characters’ idea that they are mainly in this for the betterment of humanity. Mike Judge, the series’ co-creator, has often argued that there is a stark difference between Wall Street and tech: Wall Street only cares about money, but in tech, people do want something bigger, realer, better.
In the years since “Silicon Valley” hit the small screen, I’ve grown less and less sure that Judge is right. And despite the show’s darker turn, I worry that a neatly redemptive end — in which Pied Piper finally makes it big, crushing the competition without losing its soul — might be in the offing. The show’s best feature is its well-researched verisimilitude. Just about every gag and personality trait in the script seems copied from real life; many tech insiders, including Dick Costolo, the former chief executive of Twitter, consulted heavily with writers to ensure its realness.
But a redemptive end would mar that truth. What we’ve seen in real-life Silicon Valley in recent years is that it might be impossible to be successful and good. Success in tech almost necessarily involves exploitation — of users, of investors, of employees — and when it comes, it arrives at such disruptive scale that it invariably hurts someone, somewhere, in ways that nobody could see coming.
I’m curious how “Silicon Valley” will navigate these treacherous threads. If it were up to me, I’d rather Richard and the gang fail honorably, letting Pied Piper die, than succeed by selling out. But that, too, would be unreal.
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