10 Years On, Silicon Valley's Vision of Tech Has Lost Its Valuation

For any self-respecting user of the internet in 2024, rewatching the now-decade-old pilot of HBO’s acclaimed tech-geek comedy series Silicon Valley is like traveling to another dimension. It’s a world where Elon Musk still carries a positive public image as a “real-life Iron Man,” where there wasn’t yet an app for everything and diligent code monkeys worked away huddled in ramshackle ranch-home “incubators.” Here, venture capital funding pours down on ambitious startups like a torrent, and tech CEOs still carry at least a passive, liberal optimism about their businesses “making the world a better place” — even if it was “through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility.”

But now, we’re on the other side of the tech world’s 21st-century mission to “disrupt” every possible industry — hotels, media, even geopolitics — the “place” these startups have ushered into the world. And it’s certainly not better. The Zuckerbergs, the Bezoses, and especially the Musks of the world have arguably made it worse, shaping our civilization into a never-ending vise grip of rapidly enshittified industries, hedge-fund vulture capitalism, and the specter of AI taking everyone’s jobs, regardless of whether it’s really better at doing them. (It doesn’t have to be; for the bean-counters, it just has to be cheaper.)

To its credit, Silicon Valley grew to understand this over the course of its six seasons, filtered through the lens of scrappy startup Pied Piper and its attempts to bring to market, at various points, everything from lossless file compression to a freer, democratized internet. It was populated by the same kind of flawed but well-meaning dorks co-creator Mike Judge leveraged to such lovely effect in his previous workplace masterpiece, Office Space: Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), the ambitious but neurotic founder whose quest to find his inner CEO becomes a bit of a Horatio Alger story; Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller), the ayahuasca-obsessed incubator host who coasts through life on charm and an unfortunate smear of incomplete facial hair; dueling coders Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Gilfoyle (Martin Starr); and obsequious-to-the-point-of-creepy COO Jared Dunn (Zach Woods, arguably the show’s MVP).

They were quirky and vulgar, but Judge and co-creators John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky clearly set them up to be different from the facile, self-congratulatory tech bros they saw at the time. Their flaws were mere obstacles to their personal and professional growth, not endemic to the system in which they participated. We, as audience members, wanted them to succeed, especially against the likes of self-aggrandizing Hooli CEO Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) — one of the show’s many amalgams of real-life tech giants like Jeff Bezos, who style their quest for profit as a means of effective altruism.

Miracles could happen at the behest of extended riffs on the most efficient way to give a crowd of conference-goers hand jobs or last-minute saves by way of esoteric contract law. If you had the right idea, and the right people to implement it, you could win TechCrunch Disrupt. You could bring your world-saving idea to life.

But as the years went on, and the vagaries of the tech industry grew more public, the show, and Judge (along with head writer and EP Alec Berg, who’d later create Barry with Bill Hader), grew more cynical about the industry’s impact on civilization. Richard’s brilliant idea of a user-based compression algorithm gets hijacked in favor of a clumsy networking accessory that doesn’t work as well but will earn the company more profit in a shorter period of time.

VCs who seem like lifelines turn out to be, well, Chris Diamantopoulos’ vain, idiotic billionaire Russ Hanneman (pathologically obsessed with being part of the “three-comma club”). Over the years, Pied Piper would grow, shrink, die, be bought, reborn again, liberated from bondage, and so on — hanging on to its sense of identity through sheer stubbornness and more than a few contrived bits of good luck.

Eventually, it became clear to the writers that the tech industry wasn’t just a harmless cult of dorks using fluffy corporate jargon to mask their desire to get rich via stock vestments and IPOs; its thirst for disruption spanned as far as the human experience itself. Suddenly, subplots involved Bangladeshi click farms, the suicidal conditions at Chinese electronics factories, the very ethics of handling private citizens’ personal data. (The specter of AI rears its ugly head in the show’s final episodes; the finale, “Exit Event,” chronicles the Pied Piper gang’s agonizing decision to kill their AI-powered “New Internet” before it inevitably leads to the end of all private data and, thus, the world.)

The corrosive nature of the startup business takes its toll on our characters, as well: see Season 4, where Richard’s greedy chase for the brass ring leads him down more deceitful paths, like scamming convention-goers with a fake landing page to gin up users for his own app. The executive’s chair becomes something of a One Ring for anyone who touches it: Richard’s dogged desire to hold onto it because Pied Piper is his, damnit takes a toll on his physical and moral health, and at one point an empty CEO chair torments him like Tantalus. Even Dinesh’s flirtation with the position in Season 5 is blissfully short-lived after it turns him into a blazer-wearing douchebag.

Still, Judge et al. could hardly guess the depths of ghoulishness our modern tech disruptors would get up to in the years since the show’s finale. Sure, there were the odd jokes about Peter Thiel-ian “blood boys” and jokes about Elizabeth Holmes’ ignominious fall. But the comparatively apolitical series never flirted with alt-right politics the way Elon Musk would end up doing; the show’s time-lapsed title sequences, for all the corporate changes it would herald over Silicon Valley’s six years, kept Twitter that innocent blue bird. (A Season 5 subplot involving Dinesh’s Tesla obsession would both poke fun at its utility as an empty status symbol and a season-long advertisement for the EVs.)

Judge’s conception of the Valley always felt like thumbing the nose at the Bezoses and the Jobses of the world, more concerned with limousine-liberal hypocrisy than the more acute dangers of the third-richest man in the world parroting Great Replacement conspiracy theories on a platform he would foolishly buy for the totally epic price of $420.69 per share. Silicon Valley always populated itself with overgrown children with more money than they could handle, but they could never predict Musk’s journey toward ignominy.

None of that ever touched the Pied Piper gang, though; for all their bickering and feeble power plays, the expansions and contractions in staffing and funding, they always found themselves back at the wooden conference table in Erlich’s hacker hostel, one dysfunctional but inextricably linked work family. It’s a feel-good fantasy that defies all logic about the tech industry’s churn-and-burn rate, the plot’s stressors bending but never fully breaking our heroes. The cast remained game throughout, bouncing off each other and the writers’ chutes-and-ladders trajectories for each character over the show’s oft-convoluted story arc.

That family wasn’t always a happy one, even behind the scenes. Miller, after all, infamously departed the show after Season 4, given allegations of sexual misconduct and, more pertinently, reportedly unprofessional behavior on the set itself. And Middleditch himself would land in hot water a few years later, as his own alleged skeezy behavior in L.A. sex clubs would repaint the comedian’s reputation in ways that sour his Dickensian image.

But the Pied Piper gang was always a fantasy, albeit a welcome one, even within the surreal climes of Silicon Valley — the scrappy, essentially altruistic band of tech dreamers who, unlike the grifters and fakers around them, truly did want to make the world a better place. For all the claims of realism made by folks in the tech world, it’s hard not to see the show as a bit idealistic in retrospect, even naive. And that’s saying something for a show that saw generative AI’s apocalyptic potential coming and chose to smother it to death in its crib. Perhaps we’d do well to follow their example.

Clint Worthington is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Spool, an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com, and a Senior Staff Writer at Consequence. You can also find his freelance work at Block Club Chicago, Primetimer, Vulture, and elsewhere.