THE IRONY THAT INFUSES THE BRUTAL LOGIC OF SILICON VALLEY.
WHY SILICON VALLEY IS ALL ABOUT ESCAPING CONSEQUENCES
During Silicon Valley’s t hird season f i nale, Raviga CEO Laurie Bream brings up “the elephant in the room” with Hooli impresario Gavin Belson. He is, at first, caught off guard: he has just quietly disposed of an elephant that died in Hooli’s garden after yet another Aesopian stunt with his board of directors. He’s genuinely relieved when it turns out she’s actually referring to the impending sale of Pied Piper, which he quickly offers to buy and burn to the ground.
There’s a deeper irony in this misapprehension, though. When we use the phrase “elephant in the room,” we tend to mean something lingering, some big emotions or information that goes unsaid, but not ignored. And the thing about Belson and his dead elephant is not just that he ignores it entirely, but that he isn’t willing to let it linger, going so far as to close his iron fist around anyone who even suggests the room might smell like elephant a little.
The finale opens with his response to the problem, his barely contained anger that someone can’t just chop it up into little pieces, or whatever, and get it offcampus. He jumps at his security director’s suggestion to use a helicopter to dump the elephant into the sea without a second thought; when another subordinate suggests that might go against Hooli’s Google-esque philosophy — “In order for us to achieve greatness, we must first achieve goodness” — he fires her. When she subsequently leaks the story to a gossipy tech blog, he buys the blog and buries the story. If he was any more insulated from consequence or responsibility, he could probably have the very concepts dropped into the sea along with the elephant.
Belson has always represented the hypocritical worst of Silicon Valley on Silicon Valley, the scrappy programmer who built a billion- dollar company out of his garage now blinded by his immense wealth and power. But this ultimate lack of responsibility is one of the curious threads that run through the show, one of the subtler touches that keeps it from being something as simple as Entourage for Brogrammers.
Silicon Valley would be every bit as fantastical as Game of Thrones if it wasn’t for the fact the real Valley is just as ridiculous. Nonetheless, the show remains relatively supportive of the kind of outrageousness that prods our more guttural reactions. Sure, it will mock the funding of an app called “Bro” — a “Yo” clone that just lets people send the word “Bro” to each other — but it is okay with the fact that someone like Richard, who has a smart idea and the skills to pull it off, can more or less instantly be rewarded with million-dollar funding rounds and billion-dollar valuations.
This ambivalence is even more pronounced when the show begins looking at what happens once you’re in that world, and the lengths to which everyone there is shielded, by themselves or by the system, from ill consequence. Sure, the money may eventually dry up, but as long as you can find someone to pony up, everything will work out — or at least no one will ever discover that elephant. Just look at what happened to Richard, the hero and probably second-most-moral person — after sweet, sweet Jared — on the show. Unhappy with new CEO Jack Barker, he drafted a skunk works project to sabotage the leader’s idea, and even when that was exposed, the ultimate consequence was that Jack was shuffled out and Richard was given back control over his company.
Things were even woollier in the finale. After finding out about Jared’s purchase of fake users to make the Pied Piper platform look better, he was given a script to hide them by his resolutely amoral employees Dinesh and Gilfoyle, and only bailed at the last possible second — where he was chided by Erlich, who was confident they could figure out any “issues” after they got their next round of funding. And Richard still ended up winning, with Erlich and Big Head ultimately buying the company.
That subplot is also proof that even when the money runs out, you can still escape responsibility in the Valley. Having thoroughly squandered Bighead’s $20-million Hooli settlement, they are ultimately saved by Gavin Belson’s purchase of their tech blog — a blog they bought to avoid the consequences of having a negative story written about them in the first place. It’s the great circle of squirming out from under your bad behaviour, and it ultimately forgives, then rescues, all of our scrappy, morally ambiguous tech upstarts.
There is another irony hiding in that particular bailout: it is the second time this season Gavin Belson has inadvertently saved Richard, who is ostensibly his nemesis. There’s hope in that development, or at least in the idea that you may one day have to face the consequences of not thoroughly destroying someone just as immune to their effects as you are. That is I guess the ultimate consequence of business, and it’s eminently fair to say that, as much as computer code, the Valley runs on that kind of brutal logic.
Still, in a year where we’ve started to see what kind of consequences the Valley’s real- life inspirations can inflict on other people, the show’s most damning idea is that no one, in either version of Silicon Valley, ever has to face the music.