{"id":35,"date":"2026-05-19T20:09:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T20:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=35"},"modified":"2026-05-19T20:09:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T20:09:59","slug":"the-audacity-is-a-brutal-silicon-valley-satire-with-an-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Audacity\u201d Is a Brutal Silicon Valley Satire with an Agenda"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Midway through my watch of the new tech-satire series \u201cThe Audacity,\u201d I received an e-mail from Google that I had received many times before. My personal data had been found online, it said. This time, it was my phone number; previously, it had been more private information. The most I could do, it seemed, was ask Google to remove the offending pages from its search results, one by one, over months, then years. I wish I could say I was more bothered. These days, violations of digital privacy are a routine calamity that we\u2019ve by and large given up on addressing. There are only so many things we can be outraged about at once, and surveillance capitalism\u2014the business model summed up by \u201cif you\u2019re not paying, you\u2019re the product\u201d\u2014seldom makes the cut.<\/p>\n

Read more Boots Riley, Marx Brother<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Audacity\u201d wants to shake us out of that stupor. The opening episode of the AMC dramedy introduces an algorithm that\u2019s a gift to stalkers everywhere. Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the C.E.O. of a data-mining startup called Hypergnosis, has just found out that his wife, Lili (Lucy Punch), slept with another man the previous night. Never mind that Duncan and Lili are in an open marriage, and that he is more likely to confide in his former mistress than in his wife. He asks one of the company\u2019s engineers, a pink-haired, nonbinary coder named Harper (Jess McLeod), to use their latest project\u2014a program they describe as \u201cGod\u2019s eye\u201d\u2014to identify his new rival based on a few scant details. Within moments, Duncan learns not only the man\u2019s name but his current location, his salary, and his penchants for herring, wheat beer, and anal sex. The tech is terrifying, but it\u2019s treated matter-of-factly, played for barked laughs. The vibes are less \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d than \u201cLast Week Tonight with John Oliver\u201d\u2014less the near-future than the now.<\/p>\n

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Marketing for \u201cThe Audacity\u201d has focussed on Duncan as the latest prestige-TV gazillionaire to hate on, but the show is, in fact, a panoramic lambasting of Silicon Valley\u2019s particular form of trickle-down rot. Duncan\u2019s daughter attends a private high school that so reliably sends its students to Stanford that even its principal isn\u2019t above committing a bit of fraud to insure her own daughter\u2019s place there. His financially strapped therapist, JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), tells herself that, if she keeps her C-suite clients \u201csane enough\u201d for them to make ungodly amounts of money, she should be entitled to some of it\u2014a line of reasoning that lets her justify the insider trading she commits based on their in-session disclosures of imminent mergers and acquisitions. The one-per-centers have warped society so thoroughly with their endless advantages that the ten-per-centers feel that they need to break the rules to have a chance at keeping up.<\/p>\n

Sometime in the past two decades, the M.B.A.s took over the industry from the nerds, and it became more imperative to scale and extract than to innovate. \u201cThe Audacity\u201d reflects this shift; its primary characters aren\u2019t the socially inept weenies of \u201cSilicon Valley,\u201d awestruck at their proximity to Scrooge McDuckian wealth, but middle-aged businesspeople who already have more money than they know what to do with. Duncan lives with the knowledge that his entr\u00e9e into the upper echelons of the tech world was paved by the co-founder of his first startup, the real genius of the two; his eventual partner at Hypergnosis is Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis), a legendary venture capitalist said to have \u201cinvented the future\u201d\u2014a nice way of saying he helped to make spam ubiquitous. By definition, these guys are a duller lot than their predecessors\u2014more Tim Cook than Steve Jobs\u2014and the series\u2019 creator, Jonathan Glatzer, a former \u201cSuccession\u201d writer, doesn\u2019t have much insight into what makes them tick, beyond above-average avarice and shamelessness. After Duncan uses ayahuasca to cope with a business setback, he pleads his greatest wish to a hallucination of his father: \u201cHelp me stay rich.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Fate of Twenty-one Los Angeles Siblings<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But it\u2019s the focus on data harvesting that gives \u201cThe Audacity\u201d its strange verve, born of a conviction that it can make this perpetually overlooked issue an object of emotional investment. Its satirical aim feels spot-on. A couple of weeks after the series premi\u00e8red, reports emerged that Meta contractors had viewed intimate videos recorded by its smart glasses\u2014a real-world development that eerily mirrored a plot point in which Hypergnosis employees are found to be watching footage of customers in self-driving cars pleasuring themselves on their commutes. In the show, as in life, such unsavory impulses extend not just to the staff but to the user base. They\u2019re more often enabled by the company than constrained.<\/p>\n

That Harper\u2019s algorithm\u2014christened Gnodin\u2014has altruistic potential is swiftly deemed beside the point. Like a lot of splashy new tech, from cryptocurrency to deepfakes, it\u2019s mostly a boon to criminals and malefactors. (Duncan, after cyber-stalking his wife\u2019s lover, next turns his all-seeing eye on his therapist\u2014and promptly uses JoAnne\u2019s suspicious trades as blackmail material.) A chance to do good arrives in the form of Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry), a Veterans Affairs rep seeking a tech firm that\u2019ll upload and streamline the agency\u2019s antiquated files. Although Harper argues that Gnodin could be used to aid vets in crisis, Duncan is only convinced to get into business with Tom after a board member points out that the V.A. data sets could be sold off to sell life insurance, pharmaceuticals, even commemorative coins. That capitalist enterprises rarely bother with unprofitable activities is not a novel observation, but the show engagingly illustrates how easy it is for them to raze institutions, and how disinterested they are in cleaning up the wreckage. As Carl puts it, despairingly, \u201cWe\u2019ve broken and disrupted everything, and now there\u2019s nothing else to break.\u201d The would-be moral enforcers aren\u2019t much better. Anushka (Meaghan Rath), the chief ethicist at a tech conglomerate and the mouthpiece of the writers\u2019 noblest sentiments (\u201chuman dignity requires privacy\u201d), is the most obvious one to fall.<\/p>\n

What would it take for people to care about their own privacy\u2014to insist on their own dignity? And what would it take for corporations to curb their own industry? These are questions \u201cThe Audacity\u201d poses to its viewers, as its antihero\u2019s sweaty desperation impels him to devise ever-darker use cases for Gnodin. Duncan\u2019s panicked antics don\u2019t help his control of the narrative. Despite repelling everyone around him with his need to be admired, Duncan, the show argues, has a crucial role to play in the world: not as the success story he hopes to be but as a cautionary tale.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Art of the Ceasefire<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inkoo Kang reviews the AMC dramedy, which familiarly skewers tech bros while focussing on oft-overlooked elements of the world they\u2019ve created.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-television"],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cThe Audacity\u201d Is a Brutal Silicon Valley Satire with an Agenda - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=35\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u201cThe Audacity\u201d Is a Brutal Silicon Valley Satire with an Agenda - 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