By Chris Satullo
The premium streaming services and cable channels are pretty good at anticipating where the American zeitgeist is headed, then serving up dramatic flair that captures the shift. They need to be deft at it – or they go out of business.
So, when Hulu, Apple TV+ and Showtime launch, nearly simultaneously, new miniseries about young tech Icaruses who soared too high too fast, then crashed spectacularly, it signals something.
This confluence of brisk tales about disgraced unicorn founders – young entrepreneurs who lost their companies, erased billions in stock valuation and provided we simple folk with a rich helping of schadenfreude – suggests a major shift in public perception about Silicon Valley. It says that the PR heyday of the cocky, young “disrupters,” who only a few years ago could count upon largely fawning coverage and oodles of public admiration, is dead.
They may still get stinking rich, but they won’t be showered with awestruck love.
These days, Elizabeth Holmes, the wide-eyed, black-turtleneck-loving founder of Theranos (peak market cap, $10 billion), awaits sentencing on her multiple fraud convictions for hyping a blood-testing technology that never worked, in fact existed pretty much only in her fevered imagination.
In its miniseries The Dropout, Hulu is telling the astonishing story of how Holmes, after leaving Stanford at 19, got venture capitalists and luminaries such as Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Mad Dog Mattis to invest millions upon millions in her fantasy machine. Amanda Seyfried stars as the pathologically optimistic, in-way-over-her-head liar whom business mags once hailed as the “female Steve Jobs.”
Meanwhile, Apple TV+’s contribution to the trend is We Crashed, a look at the saga of WeWork founder Adam Neumann and his fiercely woo-woo wife and business partner, Rebekah. Together, they “manifested” his idea for plush and fun-packed techie co-working spaces into a short-lived global empire (peak valuation, $47 billion).
At least Neumann, unlike Holmes, had a good idea and executed it nimbly for a while before his Messiah complex and penchant for extravagant “self-care” and drug ingestion led WeWork into a danger zone of overleveraged overexpansion. A couple of episodes in, Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway seem to be having a heck of a time playing the yoga-loving power couple.
Showtime – whose long-running Billions, combined with HBO’s Succession, has captured a previous, Bernie-esque mood of public disgust/fascination with conglomerate moguls and hedge fund managers – has entered the growing field of Silicon Sucks entertainment with Super-Pumped. This one tells the sordid tale of Travis Kalanick, the reckless, sexist, norm-scorning founder of Uber (peak valuation under Kalanick, $48 billion), who finally got the hook when his penchant for drunken orgies, privacy invasions and wild spending got to be too much even for his meditation buddy, board member Arianna Huffington.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the actor having a ball here as he leans into this new Hollywood trope – the once-lionized, now-loathed young tech billionaire. (By the way, Kalanick and Neumann are, unlike Holmes, still billionaires; there is an advantage to actually providing a real product, rather than a fantasy.)
All three shows are pretty damn good. Watch ‘em if you can.
Years ago, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin got the jump on this trend with his skewering of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s marvelous film, The Social Network. Sorkin’s acidic scorn for Zuck – with his blandly titanic self-regard and self-righteousness, his rapacious contempt for others’ privacy and intellectual property – synched up with my own visceral, then contrarian, dislike of the techie darling. Back then, my Millennial acquaintances reacted to the film like: This isn’t fair. Zuckerberg is great. He gave us Facebook.
Today, though, my son wouldn’t be caught dead on Facebook and most young progressives like him are vividly aware of the platform’s myriad sins, from sheltering Nazis and gun merchants to facilitating genocide in Myanmar.
Most of America is catching onto a basic point: Just because you can do something with ones and zeroes does not mean you should do it, nor that the doing of it will inevitably prove to be a boon to mankind.
We’ve caught on that the mostly male coterie of young tech entrepreneurs, for all their chatter about making the world a better place, often (as one wag put it) just set out to invent ways for digital technology to provide the same coddling services their moms used to do for them.
We’ve realized that disruption, that battle cry of the would-be Forbes darling, is a Shiva-like phenomenon, often as wantonly destructive as it is usefully creative.
We’ve learned that in some cases, like that of Kalanick and Uber, “disruption” is just a self-excusing synonym for law-breaking and contempt for important norms.
We’ve also learned – heck, Kalanick practically screamed it at the top of his lungs – that tech and coding too often devolve into a den of Cro-Magnon-level sexism and Me, Too! offenses.
I hope you’ll believe me when I assure you I’m not a Luddite. I love my MacBook. My iPhone is packed with helpful, informative and fun-spawning apps (though, I must add, it leaves much to be desired as a phone). I spend my days roaming around my Google Drive, filtering spreadsheets and sprucing up slide decks. I hail Google search and even Wikipedia (more accurate than you think, really) as amazing, boot-strapped gifts to the spread of human knowledge.
But I’m glad these current miniseries are puncturing the constellation of myths that grew up in the last couple of decades about the filthy rich denizens of Silicon Valley and similar precincts.
Granted, they had some disruptive insights that earned them fabulous rewards, while punishing established companies appropriately for being complacent, slow-witted, stuck in dead paradigms. But being better at coding and at anticipating young consumers’ emerging needs doesn’t make you wiser than your elders. It just makes you richer.
It doesn’t give you superior ethical insight or a deeper grasp of what would make the world a better place. As the case of the insufferably self-righteous Zuckerberg and his disgusting Facebook minions shows, it just imbues you with arrogance and power that blinds you to the damage that the juggernauts you’ve built have done and will continue to do.
The case of Holmes and Theranos is particularly instructive. As is abundantly clear from the dozens of videos of her speaking that you can find on YouTube (yes, I do use the Interwebs, every day), this young woman absolutely believed her own bullshit about how her little blood-testing contraption was going to save millions of lives. Her vast narcissism did at least spur her to want to be a kind of digital age Florence Nightingale.
But, as Seyfried’s wonderful performance in The Dropout makes vivid, that altruistic kernel was worn down to a nub by Holmes’ mania to gain all the trappings of Silicon Valley founder worship – the Fortune covers, the TechCrunch interviews, the adoration of a loyal “team,” the iconic personal style that inspires hordes of young mimics, and most of all the “10X-plus” returns that propel someone too young to be a U.S. Senator onto the “richest women in the world” list.
Despite all the solemn, self-important babble at the posh retreats of the tech glitterati, what they do has rarely been about “making the world a better place.” It’s been about the 10X-plus returns, and the perks and power and attention that come with them.
That’s why so few of the products and apps generated by the unicorns really have much of anything to do with improving the plight of the bulk of the nation’s or the world’s people. They are mostly about affluent customer choice and convenience (the digital Mom syndrome).
(I’ll pause here to give the otherwise obnoxious Elon Musk due credit for his useful electric car obsession.)
What young tech megabillionaire has created any product to help feed the world? Or to reduce polarization and ethnic division – rather than overheat it? To educate the children unlucky enough to have been born in the wrong ZIP code (there’s good educational software out there, along with a lot of dreck, but nobody gets on the Forbes list for designing that stuff)?
The hype about digital tech helping to save the planet by conserving carbon is undermined by the fact that the celebrated “cloud” is a huge energy hog. Globally, the cloud’s servers consume more energy per year than Germany (!), according to Green America.
Tech’s young supernovas were too callow, too avid for fame and lucre ever to be truly thoughtful about the potential downsides of their disruptions – or dedicated enough to doing genuine good to forgo fabulous returns. (Even when as philanthropists they try to do good, their arrogance often trips them up – cf. Zuckerberg and the Newark public schools.)
We can only hope that the rising generation of digital entrepreneurs will watch The Dropout, Super-Pumped and We Crashed on their MacBooks, then vow to be better than the obnoxiously self-important, wildly overcompensated and ethically unevolved generation that preceded them.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia