'Silicon Valley' - Seasons 1-3

Comedy In The Tech Age

It is nice to see a punchy comedy and it comes courtesy of Mike Judge, creator of 'Beavis And Butthead' and 'King of the Hill'. Mike Judge is a polyglot. He's played in bas as a musician, he's created some of the iconic animated comedy of the 90s, and he's even given us superlative films in the 2000s. Turns out he even worked in Silicon Valley once upon a longtime ago, and so he conceived of this series based his observations from that time.

The show is a masterstroke.  It brings into light a world we only ever dream about, even if it's through a distorting mirror glass of comedy. The world of tech development is a funny strange paradise of ideas.




What's Good About It

As a comedy writer Mike Judge is unforgiving. I don't know where all the energy for furious satire comes from, but it is something fierce in his output. This is after all, the man who gave us the magic mushroom hell scene in 'Beavis and Butthead Do America' as well as Lesbian Seagull from the same movie. He is equally unforgiving with his satirisation of the tech billionaires as well as those who aspire to be one. Indeed, Silicon Valley and the tech sector has grown to rival Hollywood and the entertainment sector in America as being the most representative industries. There are a lot of people digging for gold in the world of tech. 'Silicon Valley' goes after everybody imaginable for their foibles as well as greed. And it is a delight to watch.

The characters are excellent. It finds a perfect balance between the apparent mundane-ness of being tech workers together with the absurdities that arise from the stupendous wealth that cane had. It depicts the gold rush of the Twentieth Century that is unfolding with tremendous satirical bite.

What's Bad About It

Look, there's not enough okay? There needs to be more. More episodes. Lots of them.

What's Interesting About It

The show has an interesting way of infecting your sensibility about money and the tech business. Without knowing, by relating to the characters, you are drawn into the fundamentally speculative nature of life. In wanting the characters to succeed, we are wanting what they want and with them, failing to understand its meaning.

Elon Musk apparently doesn't think the show is accurate, but TJ Miller who plays Erlich Bachman thinks it's because the joke is on Elon Musk and his fellow tech billionaires. Erich Bachman is the most interesting character in the ensemble of characters because he alone seems to understand how the worlds interrelate - that is to say he has perspective on what it means to be tech worker as well as a non tech worker, and aspires to be a tech billionaire specifically because the victory conditions are seemingly so attainable. The other characters are funny, but they have some part of the combination missing.

Richard and his programming cohorts, as well as Monica desire to be tech billionaires but they have no idea what it is to be a non tech worker any more. Jin Yang wants to be a tech worker, but he has no idea how to live a normal life in America. Gavin who runs Hoopli has no idea how the world looks outside theSilicon Valley any more and only seems to have tenuous grasp of the relative importance tech outside it, and Bighead singularly lacks the intelligence to understand the meaning of work or wealth.

As crazy as Erich seems to be, it's actually the other way around - everybody else is a little nutty because they're living and working in Silicon Valley, divorced from the world outside. Erlich is driven batty precisely because he understands all aspects of life and knows where he wants to be. He's not faulty because he's crazy. He's crazy because what he wants to be is essentially faulty and yet he is working very hard towards it. If you've ever wanted be a rock star, this is very easy to understand.

Backstage To The World's Greatest Magic Show

Arthur C. Clarke of course said that high tech would be indiscernible from magic to a lower tech society. We're at the point in history where we don't quite get the tech we have running at our fingertips. In the Big Now, our technology has become divorced from our own understanding of the world unless one is firmly working within technology. That is to say the problem of car mechanics being the gatekeepers of car maintenance knowledge,is exacerbated by just howler down the road computers and technology have become.

Today, humanity can use this technology but it is very unlikely they understand how it is made. Nobody can fix this stuff - and the solution has been to make the tech disposable. In a sense, the whole technology industry is the industrial light and magic for all of us to keep playing and working in this brave new world.

The delightful thing about this show is how it gives us a snapshot of how precarious the magicians live and breathe as they try to carve out a niche. It is very much like the sorcerer's apprentices trying to animate the brooms. The topic of animated automata going out of control appears more than once in the three seasons so it is not like the show hasn't considered its own logic.

"Making The World A Better Place"

One of the funnier mantras of the show is how every tech startup entrepreneur sells their vision with the tag line, "making the world a better place". When you think about it, it's the kind of line that could apply to any piece invention in history, and yet the tech sector solemnly embraces the mantra. The mantra itself is rather Steve-Jobs-ian.

The co-founder of Apple who famously dropped acid and dropped out and meditated and went to India and thus drops a long shadow over this world, particularly so in the world of 'Silicon Valley'. The world of tech heroically (in its own eyes) tries to tug the future out from the unseen into our hands. To do this, the tech sector gives itself tremendous licence to explore our own desires. The unbounded funniness of 'Silicon Valley' rests in the fact that most of our desires that need serving are spurious, trivial and maybe a little deranged. It isn't a fine line between wanting to do some useful things with a computer like work, and wanting to animate a moustache on every video feed. The inability to discern that line can be very funny.

Is the world a better place if all of our trivial, spurious and little deranged needs are serviced by technological innovation? The show leaves it for us to laugh the notion out of the room. The answer to that rhetorical question, as Erich intimates is, who cares? The world can be a bacchanalia of technological innovation. Something is always better than nothing. Ultimately technological innovation which would make the world a better place - like the means to reverse Global Warming in an economically viable way - will come out of Silicon Valley. But until it actually does, it can be the butt of jokes in this series.