The function of art, said the world’s most famous playwright, is to hold the mirror up to nature. Mike Judge’s new show, the HBO series Silicon Valley, holds Shakespeare’s mirror up to the unnatural land of geeks and computers, IPOs and incubators. Judge made his name by writing and producing comedies like the MTV series Beavis and Butt-head and the movie Office Space. He has now decided to transmute his experience working at a 40-person video card company in the late 1980s into a series that crystallizes national — or, more accurately, global — fascination with the Northern California tech industry.
Already slated for a second season, Silicon Valley premiered in April. (Its first episode was made available for free on YouTube, some development exec’s savvy acknowledgement that the way we consume and distribute media has been irrevocably altered by the very companies the show lampoons.) Its opening credits roll over an animated landscape of tech campuses marked with logos familiar and unfamiliar; the latter are fictional enterprises, including Hooli and Goolybib. The first episode begins with a Goolybib acquisition party, replete with liquid shrimp appetizers and a performance by Kid Rock.
The show means to reflect the excess, the self-inflation and the downright dorkiness rampant in one of the richest regions of the world. (As the points out, trashing the tech world — forebear of such stains on sober judgment as the Candy Crush IPO — is the cause célèbre of the moment.) But what can we learn about Silicon Valley from Silicon Valley? In the opening episode, right after Kid Rock finishes a song and a few fireworks shoot out into the awkward silence of his techie audience — a Goolybib exec delivers exactly the kind of jargon-laden, meaningless address a founder might offer. He wildly overestimates the global impact of the technology his company builds, all the while refusing to use anything but geekspeak. He yells cringingly nonsensical cheers into the microphone while his team members clap weakly, clutching their plastic cups.
This is all well and familiar, though, very much so to viewers familiar with Judge’s prior skewerings of the modern workplace. In a culture in which billions of dollars change hands in minutes, when the next tech elite are living in anonymity in Palo Alto and billionaire venture capitalists happen to be driving ecofriendly cars that look as if they’ve been manufactured by Fisher-Price, all that a writer has to do is describe what is happening, not wait for someone to pump millions of dollars into a television series.
Comedy can offer necessary criticism of a society adrift or blindly in love with the wrong values. It also consecrates the importance of its own subject. Judge’s experiences in tech came before the current boom, in the early 1980s, when Apple was young and Google wasn’t even a twinkle in the eyes of then-adolescents Larry Page and Sergey Brin. That was a boom time, too, but it wasn’t significant enough to inspire television or film. In fact, so much money now goes into and out of Silicon Valley that the old kings of California — that is, movie stars — aren’t just playing tech geeks. They’re heading north from Los Angeles to invest in the Bay Area. The actor Ashton Kutcher exposed himself to massive taunting when he began to back companies like the private social network Path. The comedian Conan O’Brien has been spotted in marketing efforts for ridesharing app Lyft — likely not a coincidence — and posing with founders of various small to medium-size start-ups.
One suspects that Silicon Valley will feature this sort of thing, sooner or later: a good-looking, clueless millionaire actor who can’t tell an app from a platform and gets taken for all that he has. The show isn’t a revelation in the ways one might expect. It doesn’t show Valley insiders anything they wouldn’t know about already. And if they’re enlightened enough to watch the show and enjoy its satire, they likely don’t need to be told that materialism, obscurantist jargon and sexism run rampant in the Valley, just as they do in Hollywood, on Madison Avenue and on Wall Street.
What Silicon Valley does is perhaps more interesting. Drama that focuses on the Valley — David Fincher’s The Social Network, for instance — already provides a depiction, often negative, of the flagrant waste and New Age silliness rampant in San Francisco and San Jose. But comedy of Judge’s kind doesn’t intend simply to portray Silicon Valley. Its target is not the Valley itself, or not primarily so — Judge means to skin the pretentious and the unreasonably powerful (say, the billionaire CEO who pays a spiritual guru to tell him he has deep insight into the human condition and who aims a secret contempt at his employees from his lofty offices). That suggests, too, evincing a healthy respect for the underdog — which is perfectly in keeping with tech’s best, healthiest ethos.
The show’s lead, Richard (played by Thomas Middleditch), has created an algorithm that can compress files of all kinds without loss of quality. He turns down millions of dollars to maintain ownership of that technology and of Pied Piper, his small company. Richard is quiet and self-effacing, genuinely intent on making a useful tool and seeing his work succeed on his terms while sharing his accomplishments with his misfit friends. The show isn’t just about excess or a part of the American business landscape that has reached new heights of frivolity and decadence. Although the powerful come in for their fair share of skewering, Silicon Valley secretly — and warmly, though not unconditionally — celebrates the odd, unselfish minds that drive real innovation.
But the 1990s beg the question: Can such entrepreneurs continue to push technological and economic progress when the entire glare — and hype — of American popular culture is cast upon them? That is a paradox the HBO series Silicon Valley contributes to more than questions.
