Silicon Valley finally catches up with tech's bleakness, but it should avoid ending in redemption

The New York Times

The stakes were smaller when Silicon Valley premiered on HBO in 2014 during a time when billionaires like Bill Gates were lauded for their philanthropy, Jeff Bezos was poorer than Mark Zuckerberg, and startups like Uber and Theranos looked promising, says Farhad Manjoo. "Over five seasons, Silicon Valley has been viciously precise in lambasting techies’ antisocial foibles, but as to the industry’s fundamental contribution to the world, the series has mostly aped the zeitgeist, handling tech with loving, kid gloves," says Manjoo. "The gang of awkward bros who are trying to make it big with Pied Piper, the show’s heroic central start-up, have always been mostly good dudes, at least compared to their real-life start-up bro analogues. They weren’t abetting Nazis. They weren’t breaking democracies, or taking money from murderous petromonarchs. Compared to pop cultural portrayals of the nation’s other power centers — to Wall Street, Hollywood or D.C. — Silicon Valley long found in Silicon Valley some capacity for inspiration, wonder and awe. But in much the same way that later seasons of Veep had to amp up an atmosphere of dystopian peril to match the real-life descent of American politics, HBO’s tech satire has also had to adjust. Society is now drowning in tech, and as we’ve all curdled in the glare of our phones, Silicon Valley got more sour, too." As Manjoo notes, the final season of Silicon Valley "seems to be catching up with the bleak mood in and about the technology industry," tackling important issues like privacy and ethics. Yet co-creator Mike Judge has hinted that Silicon Valley's series finale could show tech's redemption. "Despite the show’s darker turn, I worry that a neatly redemptive end — in which Pied Piper finally makes it big, crushing the competition without losing its soul — might be in the offing," says Manjoo. He adds that "a redemptive end would mar (the) truth. What we’ve seen in real-life Silicon Valley in recent years is that it might be impossible to be successful and good. Success in tech almost necessarily involves exploitation — of users, of investors, of employees — and when it comes, it arrives at such disruptive scale that it invariably hurts someone, somewhere, in ways that nobody could see coming. I’m curious how Silicon Valley will navigate these treacherous threads."