“Silicon Valley,” now in its third season, is one of the funniest shows on television; it is also the first ambitious satire of any form to shed much light on the current socio-cultural moment in Northern California.
.. “In the writer’s room, I talked a lot about how the founder of a company has a moral authority that no other C.E.O., no matter how accomplished, will ever have,” Costolo told me.
.. “That’s the first thing you notice,” Judge said. “It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’”
.. “If someone is holding a document on the show, that document is written out, in full, the way that it would be in real life,” Dotan said. “We don’t think of it in terms of, ‘How little can we get away with showing on camera?’ It’s more, like, ‘Let’s go through the process of making the world as complete as possible and see if that process leads us to better stuff.’ Which it usually does.”
.. His answer was, ‘I think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.’
.. “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.”
.. By satirizing them, you’re holding up a mirror. Some of these guys look in the mirror and go, ‘Fuck, we look silly.’ Others look in the mirror and go, ‘Wow, I am so fucking handsome.’”
.. “The more I meet these people and learn about them, the more I come away thinking that, despite all the bullshit and greed, there actually is something exciting and hopeful going on up there.”
.. “I think it’s a combination of the pretentiousness of the people involved and their total market penetration,” O’Keefe said. “It’s no longer necessary to tell you what the product is. Now the goal is just to make you feel better about using it.”