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If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

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Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#121

I always like to compare Silicon Valley to The Big Bang Theory. TBBT seems like a parody of the stereotype of the people they are parodying while SV is a true parody. I'm always thinking "haha, that's so true" when watching SV, but never while watching TBBT.

TBBT is not a "parody". It is your standard-issue broadcast network sitcom about 3 males, 3 females and their friendships as they date and break up with each other, marry each other and have kids. This is a successful premise that has stood for decades in American TV. Friends and How I Met Your Mother followed the same principles almost to a tee. That's how you get a show that runs for 10 seasons in this day and age.

Pointing out that TBBT's parody is poor is like saying Will & Grace did not portray a representative picture of gay urbanites.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#122

Amazing anecdote from a 2016 New Yorker article on the show: > During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me.... > “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred ma…

Reminds me of Steven Tyler reacting to Spinal Tap:

Tyler expounded on his reaction in a rare Library of Congress interview made public back in 2012. "That movie bummed me out," he said, "because I thought, 'How dare they? That's all real, and they're mocking it.'"

To be fair, Silicon Valley (the show) never interested me... kinda found it to be boring. But it _is_ hilarious when you run into these art imitates life imitates art things.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#123
post #73

I wonder what Bill Gates thinks of the character Jack Barker.

I thought he was more a send-up of Ballmer than Gates, although that might just be the physical resemblance.

He is a Steve Ballmer sendup, but Gates and Ballmer worked closely for many years at Microsoft and had many fundamental disagreements about the direction the company should take. Ballmer refocused Microsoft from software to hardware when he became CEO (hence "The Box" joke on the show).

Ballmer himself probably doesn't like the caricature (he's a bit of an internet darling, isn't he? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY), but would someone who worked with Ballmer find it accurate? Likely.

Not to mention, Gates wrote the article about Silicon Valley linked in this thread.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#124
post #76
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office Space and Silicon Valley, sure, but Idiocracy has aged _horribly_. That movie is full of memes that haven't been relevant since the mid-00s (and specifically, the humor in the movie has a distinct Bush-era vibe which straight-up feels foreign in 2018... it feels like a period piece even though it's set in the future), and I lost whatever enjoyment of it that I had left when actual Neo-Nazis began using the mov…

> Idiocracy has aged _horribly_. Are you sure? Who is the POTUS now?

When I said "Bush-era", I was talking more of the national zeitgeist during Bush's presidency and not so much about how Bush himself was perceived.

The Bush era—or rather the core of the era, from about 2002 to 2007 (i.e. after the dust from 9/11 settled and before the housing crisis), was a boom time, and much of the future situation feels like it comes from "what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work). Something made nowadays would probably start with a premise that comes from "Millenials can't afford anything".

Mainstream culture during the Bush era was also before the sudden explosion in nerd culture. Superheroes hadn't eaten the entertainment industry yet, nostalgia wasn't yet a driving force in pop culture, and it was still uncool to admit that you enjoy RPGs or reading comic books or doing whatever else nerds do. A parody of modern cultural memes would resemble Ready Player One more than Idiocracy, and Ready Player One wasn't even intended as parody. Instead, Idiocracy spends a lot of time lampooning shock reality TV (e.g. Ow My Balls), which was a huge thing in the mid-00s with shows like Jackass and Fear Factor but isn't big anymore. And the general culture is different. Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now. Even in bro-culture you wouldn't see that in 2018 (I mean, there's still a lot of homophobia around, but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore), and so a parody of modern bro-culture probably wouldn't even mention it. TBH, a parody of modern bro-culture would probably involve MRAs and redpillers and pseudo-intellectuals who worship Jordan Peterson.

Like, the _idea_ of a movie about the future being full of stupid people would still be relevant in 2018 (and you can thank Trump for that), but it wouldn't be Idiocracy because Idiocracy was more about parodying mid-00s pop culture than anything else. I'd imagine a late-10s Idiocracy would involve some combination of nerd culture turned mainstream eating the world, '90s nostalgia (with "only '90s kids remember" somehow being reiterated over and over 500 years in the future), avocado toast, and nobody being able to afford a house.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#125
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even Beavis and Butthead captured defiant male teens pretty well

Beavis and Butthead are hugely underrated. I recall people making fun of me for watching it back in the 90’s. It was almost the only TV I ever watched.

Did you watch the new season (2011)? It was pretty good.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#126

If you like Silicon Valley check out The IT Crowd, also equally hilarious take on the world of IT.

Aside from the completely overused line "Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?", the show has almost nothing to do with IT. Apart from a couple of IT-related plotlines, most of the episodes take place outside their office.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#127
post #101

I love the show, but there's a lot of things that Silicon Valley is that it does not cover. It's not the fault of the show - it probably would be much worse if it did. But some aspects of SV - like how much it is integrated into the big politics and yet how much they try to downplay it and make it look like their behemoth companies are just young and agile rebels playing this new Internet thing, as if it were the ear…

They did do an episode on the monocultural aspect in the latest season. Richard unintentionally "outs" a guy as being Christian and some of the programmers feel uncomfortable working with a Christian.

The guy later pulls Richard aside saying that he wasn't "openly Christian". The whole episode was hilarious.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Venn diagram always gets me. https://i.chzbgr.com/full/8291744000/h3159FC59/

This chart holds only in the sense that the Kardashians play dumb caricatures of themselves. They may cater their brand to the lowest common denominator but they most certainly aren’t dumb themselves. They essentially parlayed Robert Kardashian’s friendship with OJ Simpson into a media empire; there is something to be said for how media savvy they are.

I don't think anyone thinks the Kardashians are genuinely being themselves at this point.

I mean, the show is painfully obvious in being scripted. It's like the Truman Show sans Truman.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#129
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the movie the POTUS was Dwayne Camacho an ex pro wrestler... and in real life many people want an ex pro wrestler named Dwayne Johnson to run for POTUS as an improvement to the current POTUS?! I'd say you can't make this stuff up, but Mike Judge made this stuff up before it was real life!

The current POTUS is also an ex pro wrestler.

Yup, 2 WrestleMania events.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#130
My favorite Silicon Valley anecdote:

"During the review process once the footage [of Techcrunch Disrupt] was woven in, another editor criticized the crowd shots for not featuring any women and blamed Berg for the oversight.

'...Those were real shots of the real place, and we didn't frame women out.The world we're depicting is f---ed up.' said Berg"

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/hbos-si...

Sorry for the amp link, the main page was broken.

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