Let me get something out of the way: I am not a techie. Though my parents marvel at my ability to perform such Herculean tasks as shutting down a computer and browsing Netflix, Silicon Valley is not knocking at my virtual door. When I say that a show all about glittering Palo Alto is one of the best things on TV right now, then I do so as a concerned citizen and not someone trying to get my app funded. I’m just trying to make the world a better place—which also happens to be a slogan the characters of Silicon Valley chant like it’s scripture sent from the Cloud.
Our hero is, at first, anything but. Richard (the wonderfully geeky Thomas Middleditch) is one of several nondescript programmers getting free room-and-board to develop their ideas in return for giving a share of the company to a vivaciously overconfident marketer named Erlich (T.J. Miller, a revelation). Other notable house members include Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), whom Freaks and Geeks fans will recognize as a grown-up version of the monotonal Bill. If it isn’t already clear, the cast is almost exclusively nerdy guys. The real Silicon Valley, though, is not so different, so the uniformity is easily forgiven. The whole point, after all, is to accurately lampoon an industry, and there’s obviously a lot of material.
At his day job, Richard’s an easily ignored cog in the machine that is Hooli, a Google parallel with spiritual gurus and absurdly tiny smart cars. The social hierarchy is, somewhat unexpectedly, less Revenge of the Nerds and more Mean Girls, in that there are macho “brogrammers” and then there are the groups of timid nerds travelling in packs of five. Richard is one of the latter, his idea for an app that detects musical plagiarism the brunt of an office joke.
Of course, the joke ends up being on the brogrammers when it’s discovered that within Richard’s aggressively unmarketable app is a really effective compression algorithm (fellow laypeople, that just means it’s good at making files smaller). Apparently, that’s all it takes to become a hot commodity overnight in Silicon Valley. Richard is caught in between an aggressive bidding war and soon has to decide whether to sell or keep the nascent company.
Let me digress for a moment and point to a scene at the beginning of the film that detailed the birth of Facebook, The Social Network, that sets up the entire movie as a creation myth inscribed on the collective millennial consciousness, though it’s only a girl breaking up with her boyfriend because he is, in her words, “an asshole.” It’s not what you’d expect to kickstart an empire, but it’s the loud rip needed to loosen something huge in said boy genius-asshole’s mind. The wheels start turning and, soon enough, there’s a lofty equation written on the window of a Harvard dorm room.
The reality, of course, is probably not so simple. If it takes an asshole, or at least someone who’s trying really hard to be an asshole, to start Facebook, then Silicon Valley is about the guys without that steely exterior. Richard is shy and unsure of himself, clueless about starting a business (he even Googles “business plan”) and even more clueless about getting people to take him seriously. As Erlich so bluntly puts it to him, “you’re being a complete tool right now and I need you to be a complete asshole. If you’re not an asshole, this company dies.” The history of human power, captured in one eloquent line.
Though there are apparently a thousand inside jokes for programmers that go completely over my head, Silicon Valley never loses touch with the broader audience, whose lives are saturated with the products of these overblown companies. We use these gadgets from afar, seduced by the marketing that the show so brilliantly parodies, without really understanding what it’s like to be the brains behind the operation.
The show is undeniably fresh because it unceremoniously pops the bubble of mystery and glamor of a new frontier that seems to have so many college students pitching app ideas under the influence. (True life: I once spent a summer rooming with someone coding for a website that sells massages.) It’s the irreverence for a such a glorified industry that is the foremost part of its appeal. At the end of the day, it’s just a group of guys sitting around a hotel room calculating how efficiently they could jerk everyone off at a tech conference.
