South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Satirizing SILICON VALLEY W
There’s a lot to mock, but Mike Judge also sees good deeds being done there
riter, director and producer Mike Judge has a talent for bringing an almost anthropological understanding to his subject. With “Silicon Valley,” now in its sixth and final season on HBO, he has turned his gaze to twentysomething startup engineers navigating the world-building narcissism of Big Tech.
A former engineer himself, Judge somehow finds the real players of Silicon Valley — despite it all — rather decent.
Fast Company: Season 5 of “Silicon Valley” ended on an optimistic note, with the show’s protagonists walking into this huge, amazing new office for their suddenly successful company. After years of letting viewers watch the team flail, why did you decide to conclude the season this way?
Mike Judge: I was in a coffee shop recently, and (the barista) recognized my name on my credit card and asked what I’m going to do now that “Silicon Valley” is done. I said, “No, there’s another season.” I guess because last season was so positive, he thought that was the end of the run. We had gotten a little fatigued with always beating these characters up. They’re fun to watch, and you care about them when they’re like the Bad News Bears. But as we were getting toward the end of the run, we thought, “Let’s just see what it’s like to take them to the next level.”
FC: What originally drew you to Silicon Valley as a topic for parody?
MJ: My interest started in the months leading up to the dotcom bust in 2000, when there was this frenzy of (digital entertainment companies) trying to sign people to animation deals. Companies like Icebox and Z.com were putting tons of money into it — and they had sort of lost their minds. I was going to these meetings where people were saying, “In two years, you will not own a television.”
Even I knew, from my engineering days, that all the stuff they were talking
about was technically a lot further away. I saw how absurd it all was and thought about doing something with it. It just took me a long time to get around to it.
By the time we started writing the pilot (in 2012), I thought that maybe we were too late. Then I saw “The Social Network,” the Facebook movie. There was also the movie “Primer,” where the engineers seemed like real engineers. But as we started doing the show, the tech world began blowing up and was more in the news and the public consciousness, so the timing worked out.
FC: When you started writing the show, the public perception of Silicon Valley was still pretty positive.
MJ: Definitely. Something about Silicon Valley has always triggered my bullshit detectors. But there are a lot of good, well-intentioned people there. In the world of Wall Street, people are there to make money — it’s pure unadulterated capitalism. Silicon Valley has people who are actually interested in the technology, so it’s a little different.
As much as I make fun of Silicon Valley, I prefer its personalities to pure Wall Street people. (But) it can be frustrating when you see these basically decent people who believe that their technology is going to make things better, but who are not quite in touch with humanity. A lot of this technology that we’re living with is designed by not-social people.
FC: Has it been hard to keep the show funny while the stuff going on in real Silicon Valley has become so fraught?
MJ: It is a little scary what’s happening, and we talk about it in the show: For the sake of having things be easy, people have given up a lot of freedom and access to their data. We try to find the funny part of it, but not make light of anything that is too serious.
We want the show to be realistic about the way these technologies affect the world and the people who build them. At the same time, we want to root for our main characters. I like them, and I don’t like to see them building something that’s wrong without realizing that it’s wrong.
FC: Elon Musk reached out to you early on to discuss the show. Do you have ongoing dialogues with people in the industry?
MJ: Yeah. (Venture capitalists) Marc Andreessen and Roger McNamee have sent me ideas. Evan Spiegel, (founder and CEO) of Snapchat, will tell us stories. We’ve gotten some good stuff from him, along with Drew Houston from Dropbox and the Winklevoss twins. There are some others who have asked not to have their names mentioned. There’s a woman from Facebook — not anyone famous — who’s given us a lot of stories, and one from Dropbox. Both of them have been really helpful.
FC: Do they get that the joke is kind of on them?
MJ: Most have a pretty good sense of humor about themselves. Almost every company we meet with, they say, It’s great the way you’re making fun of the whole “make the world a better place” idea.
And then they’ll say, Now we’re going to show you how we actually are making the world a better place.