In a world the place Jack Dorsey can go on Zoom to announce he’s shedding 40% of Block’s workforce, explicitly so he can substitute them with AI, whereas wearing a hat that reads “LOVE”, solely to see his firm’s inventory skyrocket by 24%, there’s no cultural use for a Large Tech satire.
We’re clearly already dwelling in a single.
However, Emmy Award-winning creator Jonathan Glatzer has made such a present anyway.
The Audacity, which premieres on AMC on April 12, is a sharply noticed, well-acted collection concerning the self-serious zillionaires disrupting our very humanity. The present’s Achilles’ heel, nonetheless, is timing. In the identical means it grew to become robust to look at Veep after Trump was elected president—and even harder to make it, apparently—watching a comedy about Large Tech’s utter lack of ethics in the wake of DOGE and any variety of latest developments is simply miserable.
However at the very least Veep’s satire of presidency incompetence had been on TV for years earlier than actuality rendered it redundant. The Audacity’s timing drawback extends to the truth that an earlier present had already hit some related targets, at precisely the proper second. Fittingly sufficient for the period of enshittification, this present is sort of a much less enjoyable, wholly unrevelatory model of HBO’s Silicon Valley.
Masks-off mentality
The Audacity tells a sprawling story, principally centered on knowledge analytics CEO Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen). He’s, in case you can consider it, an unlimited a-hole with a robust algorithm and 0 scruples. One of many different collection leads is Park’s therapist, Dr. JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg), who has negligibly extra scruples—after we meet her, she’s utilizing confidential grime from her well-heeled Cupertino clientele to make a fast buck on insider buying and selling.
If this already feels like a nightmare blunt rotation, relaxation assured each different founder, coder, and hanger-on within the ensemble can be ethically compromised in a roundabout way—extra usually, in nearly each means. Watching them squirm would possibly make for extra riveting TV, although, if there have been any ambiguity as as to if this portrayal had a foundation in truth.
Not less than it was extra riveting again after we watched it on HBO’s Silicon Valley.
On the time that present debuted, in 2014, CEOs had been nonetheless striving to domesticate an optimistic mythology of techno-idealism. All Mark Zuckerberg wished was to “make the world more open and connected.” Elon Musk’s then-recent open-sourcing of Tesla’s patents was an altruistic effort to go inexperienced and save the planet. With the Arab Spring of the early 2010s looming within the rearview, Twitter was nonetheless a power for democratizing speech world wide, relatively than a misinformation-spreading machine that additionally generates AI revenge porn on command. And Google was a 12 months away from, in a little bit of a inform, abandoning the slogan, “Don’t Be Evil.”
It was on this smarmy surroundings that Silicon Valley took a sledgehammer to the moralistic facade surrounding Large Tech, exposing the venal, devious swamp simply beneath. The character Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), as an illustration, CEO of that present’s model of Google, was a Zen-coded walking-word-cloud of TED Speak jargon—who additionally occurred to be a vengeful, law-breaking megalomaniac. That incongruence between his private and non-private personas had juice on the time as a result of viewers may solely speculate on its accuracy. All we needed to go on again then was the truth that it certain appeared like Belson’s real-life counterparts had been utterly stuffed with shit.
Now we routinely discover out that corporations like Meta are actively pursuing harmfully addictive products, although they’ve been warned about their potential for hurt, and it appears completely consistent with all the things else we find out about them.
After witnessing Zuckerberg, Musk, Jeff Bezos, and lots of different tech CEOs free themselves from the pretense of an ethical crucial just lately—shredding any policies that might be considered “woke” and openly embracing the authoritarian president they’d once opposed, to not point out exchanging the mission to save lots of the planet for the mission to build more data centers—each ounce of ambiguity has evaporated.
It’s not possible to puncture an phantasm that now not exists.
The post-privacy period
One other broadly held assumption about tech corporations that now appears virtually lovable on reflection is the concept they took reverent care to not violate customers’ privateness.
Again when Silicon Valley was first airing, there remained at the very least some doubt across the huge extent of knowledge mining and surveillance. Jokes abounded on-line about whether or not Amazon’s Alexa was possibly listening, or if it was truly only a coincidence when Instagram served up advertisements about no matter you’d simply been speaking about—and we didn’t but know that we had been the punch line.
In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, nonetheless, much more individuals perceive knowledge harvesting as simply an unfortunate fact of modern life. In the event that they didn’t examine it within the information, they could have absorbed it from among the frequent breach notification emails clogging their inboxes, inviting them to alter a susceptible password or two.
The one shocking facet about how knowledge mining is portrayed on The Audacity is that any of the present’s characters could be stunned about it. And but right here’s army veteran Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry), aghast on the notion that shady CEO Park has solely been pretending to care about Ruffage’s fellow veterans as a way to companion with a company that serves them.
With regards to Large Tech’s lack of concern over our privateness, the cat’s already out of the bag—and it’s been caught working down the road by the Ring Search Party camera network.
The state of surveillance is now such that the identical type of panopticon deemed so unethical it made Batman’s tech guy resign at the end of The Dark Knight is now a real product featured in a Tremendous Bowl advert ostensibly about discovering misplaced pets. So it’s neither shocking, revealing, nor notably entertaining to see The Audacity’s predominant character construct a hypercharged model of that device. As an alternative, it’s simply sadly relatable, in precisely the incorrect means.
The true disgrace of it’s that The Audacity does often hit precisely the proper observe. In a pitch-perfect, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke, ethically compromised therapist Felder’s younger son has the center identify “Barack.” One other diamond-cut gem is when one younger character is stunned that the daughter of a tech CEO isn’t allowed to have a sensible gadget, she fires again: “Arms sellers don’t give their children landmines.” Particulars like these counsel there’s nonetheless loads of mockery to be mined from modern-day Large Tech.
Simply not sufficient of them to maintain a whole TV collection, and definitely not proper now.
Who’s a present like this even for, at this second? Who is supposed to giggle cathartically whereas watching introverted tech genius Martin Phister (Simon Helberg) seek the advice of the AI robotic he made, after they’ve simply learn the information that Zuckerberg himself has built an AI to assist him with CEO duties? The place is the proof of any demand for seeing the wicked hellscape of 2026 tech tradition gently wrapped on its knuckles by Zach Galifianakis?
Maybe the one business higher than Silicon Valley at serving customers one thing they by no means requested for is Hollywood.
