I first encountered this show back in 2016, when I took on a gig with a digital media company whose creative director told me to watch the first two seasons and then turn out a script that was similar, but interactive, and set in Tel Aviv.  Which is the sort of thing that might turn up in a Silicon Valley script, so watching all those episodes probably prepared me for the experience more than the guy had actually intended.  That project ended up fizzling out, but I liked the show enough that as new seasons came out I watched them.  The final season I didn’t have time for due to my teaching job, but thanks to the pestilence that has descended upon the land, I have suddenly had time to catch up on some stuff.  (It was very weird to watch this show and see these people standing so close to each other.  And not disinfecting everything they touched!  It already feels like an artifact from the Before Times.)

I live in the Bay Area but not in Silicon Valley, so it was not really the shock of recognition that I responded to in watching this show.  Why did I like it, then?  Mainly because, y’know, it’s funny.  There’s a lot of crude humor that left me cold, and a lot of 30 Rock-style “it’s funny because these people are terrible” jokes, but there are also many bits that I found genuinely hilarious.  Some examples just from the last season: the video game in which the medieval tavern transforms into a Domino’s Pizza outlet; “YaoNet US”; the mockup of the proposed Belarusian Hooli campus; the discovery that the ethics statement Gavin strongarms company heads into signing was cribbed from an Applebee’s takeout menu.  Silicon Valley also excels at problem-solving sequences: over the years there have been any number of times that the members of the crew have gotten themselves into a fix, and the way they clamber back from the brink is nearly always inventive, sometimes even electric.  And it is satisfying to see loathsome characters (of which there is no shortage) get their comeuppance, temporary though this tends to be. 

Many have observed that Silicon Valley got darker as the show progressed.  Some of this has to do with the fact that in any endeavor, the moment that the conversation turns from “how do we make this” to “how do we make money off this” is the moment that everything gets poisoned.  But it also has to do with a shift in the cultural climate, as people are increasingly beginning to understand that the tech sector is populated by loathsome characters who rarely get their comeuppance.  Tech behemoths are undermining elections, enabling the surveillance state, and embodying the economic inequality that has left the median American household with one-seventh the wealth it would have in a fairer society.  And tech itself no longer feels like it’s leading us to a shiny utopian future.  I am just old enough to remember when personal computers seemed magical, and how eye-popping the advancements were from one year to the next… and then just when word processors and computer games had been around long enough that they no longer seemed quite so miraculous, along came the World Wide Web and the associated move of a critical mass of the population onto the Internet.  Not only was virtually all public information now a few keystrokes away, but you could create your own content and publish it to an audience of potentially millions, and build communities with people on the other side of the world just as easily as with those on the other side of the street.  For about ten years my primary social affiliation was with a pretty tight-knit group of around fifty people from around the globe who spent hours every day in an online chatroom that grew out of the interactive fiction world; basically, they were the group of college friends that I didn’t make when I was actually in college, because not until I had graduated did it really become possible to gather together the sort of people I could talk to, since a few were in Seattle and a few more in Boston and a few more in New York and a few more in Canada and etc. and etc.  And then, just as life started to send us our separate ways, along came the rise of social media and the chance to reconnect with people from one’s past.  As I caught up with folks I hadn’t talked to since I was a kid, it sure felt as though we were all living in the future.

But all of this has been hollowed out in recent years as the net evolved into a dangerous place to be a person.  It’s a less human space than it once was.  Most online discussion that I’m aware of has gone anonymous or pseudonymous; I guess Twitter is an exception, but that seems to be mostly blue-check celebrities sending messages to followers who share them around, along with a bunch of trolls and bots stirring things up.  Even on Facebook, people have emptied out their identifying information and disguised their names so they can’t be looked up, and the ability to send messages to people you’re not already friends with disappeared years ago.  For that matter, you can’t even find most people’s email addresses anymore.  My students’ online interactions with people they don’t know seem limited to making videos copying each other’s dance moves.  Meanwhile, the efflorescence of businesses and services that sprang up in the early days of the web has collapsed down to a few monopolies.  Most of the apps that make a splash nowadays don’t do anything particularly revolutionary:  “It’s like a taxi… but on your phone!”  “It’s like a credit card… but on your phone!”  So while Silicon Valley tries to recapture the energy of the old Silicon Valley by having its featured company try to reinvent the Internet itself, it seems a little anachronistic.  It’s hard to feel like the tech sector is building the future when a net-connected computer, which once seemed like a portal to a whole new realm of existence⁠—cyberspace!⁠—has to a great extent deteriorated into a television, a department store catalog, and a magazine rack.

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