That reaction of “how dare you?” runs both ways in The Audacity.
From them to us through Zach Galifianakis’s character, a tech founder, who bemoans aloud, “People act like we took something, not that we built everything they touch. Where’s our parade?”.
And from us to them in that they did take from us – our data, our privacy, our social unity, our mental wellbeing, our optimism for a human-grounded future, our barometer for what is truth and what isn’t – and built profit-driven corporate empires like we’ve never before seen.
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It is, indeed, audacious.
The eight-part Silicon Valley-set drama series comes out at a moment in time when hostility to the tech industry is at all-time levels.
Through The Audacity’s irredeemable, ego-centric characters, it reflects back to us our anxieties and distrust of the tech billionaires with their unfathomable wealth and elastic ethics.
Sarah Goldberg and Zach Galifianakis in The Audacity. Credit: AMC
The show centres on a handful of characters, including Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), a co-founder of a data mining company which develops a (highly illegal) algorithm which can with a few keystrokes discover everything about you – your financial history, your dental records, everything you’ve ever typed on a device connected to the internet, that you like sweet beer and had your tonsils taken out as a child.
Duncan is a narcissistic manchild, overwhelmed by self-esteem problems and anxieties, lurching from one disaster to the next in his quest to be acquired, not acquired, stay in control, give up control.
He is also, very clearly, a pathetic loser. Which is, when you look at people such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, exactly what comes to mind.
Duncan and The Audacity’s other characters, including Galifianakis’s Carl Bardolph, one of the richest men in the valley, Sarah Goldberg as a therapist to all these neurotics and Simon Helberg as a tech dude developing an AI friend, are almost all irredeemable.
Certainly more irredeemable than past characters in this sub-genre of tech genius stories. It really speaks to how much the wider culture has turned against them.
When David Fincher directed The Social Network from Aaron Sorkin’s script in 2010, Facebook was a child, it was only six years old.
Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network. Credit: Derek Pool
That film’s fictionalised Zuckerberg was a mercurial figure. He certainly wasn’t warm-and-fuzzy but that character had a drive and a purpose tied to his creation.
Sorkin has made a follow-up to The Social Network and the title alone is instructive: The Social Reckoning. It’s due for release in October but Sorkin was on hand this week to briefly preview it at the American CinemaCon in Las Vegas.
He said, “A while back, we told a story about a college kid who built a website in his dorm and connected the world. Well, as you might have noticed, a couple of things have changed since that dream exploded into a global corporation.
“There isn’t a life that Facebook’s algorithm hasn’t touched, and that influence has changed everything”.
What Sorkin didn’t explicitly say there is “for better or worse”. Facebook did connect people across the globe, across interests and across cultures, but it’s also responsible for misinformation and disinformation, and for disseminating and promoting content and ideas that have had a documented negative effect on individuals and society.
What we know about The Social Reckoning is that its story will be centred on the episode involving former Facebook engineer turned whistleblower Frances Haugen who publicly revealed the company had prioritised profit over the safety of its users, including young and vulnerable members.
The Mountainhead is streaming on Max on June 1. Credit: Warner Bros
Last year, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong turned his razor-sharp wit to the tech barons with Mountainhead, a satirical nightmare portrayal of four billionaires (OK, one is only a half-billionaire and for that, he has the nickname “soup kitchen”) gathered for a retreat in which they play games of dick measuring as the world around them burns.
The off-screen global crises, beamed in via news reports, concerns them not, other than plotting how to carve up what remains into their own little power fiefdoms (one character opined, “I don’t know if I want to run Argentina on my own”), and that they could “upgrade” the whole world as if all human networks needed was a software patch.
Never mind that one of them is responsible for the AI social media algorithm that has fuelled social collapse. Humans have no value beyond user and engagement numbers.
If you go back a decade or so, there were a pair of tech-centric shows that, while not a paean to these guys, was certainly more complex, and gave them more grace.
One was Silicon Valley, the Mike Judge sitcom about a group of young nerds, led by a man named Richard, who were trying to make it in the hyper-competitive world.
Silicon Valley series. Credit: HBO
The series definitely played up the absurd elements of the tech culture, including its obsession with longevity, but ultimately, Richard was spurred more by a future that could be shaped by his compression algorithm, than he was by power, control and riches.
The other was Halt and Catch Fire, a character-driven drama set in the 1980s and 1990s, initially set in Texas (home of “Silicon Prairie”) in the race for the personal computer. Its characters, including a slick marketer (Lee Pace) and a visionary programmer (McKenzie Davis) were deeply flawed but they too were imbued with purpose beyond money. This is a great show if you’ve never seen it.
Both of these series, as well as The Social Network and the Danny Boyle-directed Steve Jobs biography Jobs, wrestled with smart figures that wanted to change the world, genuinely for what they thought would be for the better.
Halt and Catch Fire. Credit: AMC
They could be mean and hurtful, that archetype of the trouble genius, but they had complexity. In the way that we, the end user, at the time still wanted to believe in the utopian promises of technological advancement, before we could really grapple with what the cost would be.
That was then. Those screen projects reflected that era, and The Audacity and Mountainhead – and along the way, WeCrashed, The Dropout and Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber – is emblematic of our relationship to Silicon Valley now, how we see it as a malevolent force.
Just today, OpenAI and its controversial boss Sam Altman backed a proposed state bill in the US that would limit the legal liability of labs against AI-caused deaths and large-scale disasters including financial ones. Cool cool cool.
That’s the kind of behaviour that continues to entrench tech barons as some of the greatest villains of this current moment. They want to create these technologies, profit off them enormously and then wipe their hands of any real-world consequences.
The Audacity is streaming on SBS On Demand
