The other side of Silicon Valley.
A new Neon sci-fi drama presents a sinister side to Silicon Valley.
All the best science fiction disturbs people because it is as much about the present as the future. That is certainly true of Devs, an unsettling new future-shock drama created by British writer-director Alex Garland.
The eight-part American thriller centres on Lily (Sonoya Mizuno, who also worked with Garland on his two well-regarded sci-fi movies Ex Machina and Annihilation). She is a computer engineer at Amaya, a powerful Silicon Valley tech company run by the enigmatic Forest (Nick Offerman, Parks And Recreation).
She is probing the disappearance of her boyfriend, Sergei (Karl Glusman). He had been working for the company’s clandestine development division, known as Devs.
The nature of the department is so secretive that “not even the Devs team knows what the Devs team does, not all of them, anyway”.
When Lily finds a mysterious, password-protected programme on Sergei’s phone masquerading as Sudoku, she begins to suspect he may have been murdered because he found out too much about the true purpose of Devs. But Forest tries to put her off the scent.
The more Lily investigates, though, the more sinister information she uncovers about the top-secret quantum computer at the core of Devs. Where are these potentially transformative developments leading?
Garland, who also scripted the movies The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, and Dredd, says Devs is a commentary on today rather than tomorrow.
“It’s the present that keeps me up at night,” he says.
Devs suggests that Silicon Valley firms represent more of a threat to the world than Wall Street.
“Unchecked power typically causes big, big problems.”
– Alex Garland
Garland, 50, explains that, “Wall Street wears its capitalism proudly, like a badge. That’s demonstrated literally in the expensive suits and sharp ties.
“Silicon Valley presents itself in a completely different way, which is more of a ‘man of the people’ vibe. And that message confuses us. A lot of these companies have the same amount of wealth and power as nation-states. A lot of them pay hardly any tax.”
The writer-director adds that, “There are some other concerns of mine, which have to do with the specific nature of some of the tech companies in terms of power – the kind of power they take for themselves and also the power we confer on them.”
Garland likens the Silicon Valley behemoths to cults.
“A product gets presented to us, like maybe a new smartphone, and it’s offered up as a kind of devotional object. People in these product launches react with a sort of feverish enthusiasm. Cults should always be distrusted.”
Devs demonstrates that many of these tech companies appear to be above the law.
According to Garland, “We live in a world which is partially dominated by the power of quite a small group of very, very, very big tech companies.
“In the US, after the revolution, they put in place a very brilliantly constructed set of checks and balances, which were designed to avoid monarchies.
“In some respects, these tech companies are like monarchies because they don’t have those checks and balances.” The drama also explores many fascinating philosophical conundra.
“This drama is about me trying to get my head around ideas to do with determinism,” says Garland. “That’s an area of philosophy that stems from science and quantum mechanics, which is the underlying state of everything.
“It’s like a very good account of how everything functions.”
Above all, this thought-provoking drama poses the audience a serious question: are Silicon Valley companies subject to the same degree of ethical scrutiny as the rest of us?
Garland muses that, “There are areas within corporations that are doing things which are extraordinarily ambitious and if they were to be achieved, it would be not just be life-changing but paradigm-changing. It’s not that I mind that power existing.
“What I mind is the lack of regulation because unchecked power typically causes big, big problems.” Streaming on Neon.