In a world where Jack Dorsey can go on Zoom to announce he’s laying off 40% of Block’s workforce, explicitly so he can replace them with AI, while wearing a hat that reads “LOVE”, only to see his company’s stock skyrocket by 24%, there’s no cultural use for a Big Tech satire.
We’re obviously already living in one.
Nevertheless, Emmy Award-winning creator Jonathan Glatzer has made such a show anyway.
The Audacity, which premieres on AMC on April 12, is a sharply observed, well-acted series about the self-serious zillionaires disrupting our very humanity. The show’s Achilles’ heel, however, is timing. In the same way it became tough to watch Veep after Trump was elected president—and even tougher to make it, apparently—watching a comedy about Big Tech’s utter lack of ethics in the wake of DOGE and any number of recent developments is just depressing.
But at least Veep’s satire of government incompetence had been on TV for years before reality rendered it redundant. The Audacity’s timing problem extends to the fact that an earlier show had already hit some similar targets, at exactly the right moment. Fittingly enough for the era of enshittification, this show is a less fun, wholly unrevelatory version of HBO’s Silicon Valley.
Mask-off mentality
The Audacity tells a sprawling story, mostly centered on data analytics CEO Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen). He is, if you can believe it, an enormous a-hole with a powerful algorithm and zero scruples. One of the other series leads is Park’s therapist, Dr. JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg), who has negligibly more scruples—when we meet her, she’s using confidential dirt from her well-heeled Cupertino clientele to make a quick buck on insider trading.
If this already sounds a nightmare blunt rotation, rest assured every other founder, coder, and hanger-on in the ensemble is also ethically compromised in some way—more often, in just about every way. Watching them squirm might make for more riveting TV, though, if there were any ambiguity as to whether this portrayal had a basis in fact.
At least it was more riveting back when we watched it on HBO’s Silicon Valley.
At the time that show debuted, in 2014, CEOs were still striving to cultivate an optimistic mythology of techno-idealism. All Mark Zuckerberg wanted was to “make the world more open and connected.” Elon Musk’s then-recent open-sourcing of Tesla’s patents was an altruistic effort to go green and the planet. With the Arab Spring of the early 2010s looming in the rearview, Twitter was still a force for democratizing speech around the world, rather than a misinformation-spreading machine that also generates AI revenge porn on command. And Google was a year away from, in a bit of a tell, abandoning the slogan, “Don’t Be Evil.”
It was in this smarmy environment that Silicon Valley took a sledgehammer to the moralistic facade surrounding Big Tech, exposing the venal, devious swamp just beneath. The character Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), for instance, CEO of that show’s version of Google, was a Zen-coded walking-word-cloud of TED Talk jargon—who also happened to be a vengeful, law-breaking megalomaniac. That incongruence between his public and private personas had juice at the time because viewers could only speculate on its accuracy. All we had to go on back then was the fact that it sure seemed Belson’s real-life counterparts were completely full of shit.
Now we routinely find out that companies Meta are actively pursuing harmfully addictive products, even though they’ve been warned about their potential for harm, and it seems perfectly in keeping with everything else we know about them.
After witnessing Zuckerberg, Musk, Jeff Bezos, and many other tech CEOs free themselves from the pretense of a moral imperative recently—shredding any policies that might be considered “woke” and openly embracing the authoritarian president they’d once opposed, not to mention exchanging the mission to the planet for the mission to build more data centers—every ounce of ambiguity has evaporated.
It’s impossible to puncture an illusion that no longer exists.
The post-privacy era
Another widely held assumption about tech companies that now seems almost adorable in retrospect is the idea that they took reverent care not to violate users’ privacy.
Back when Silicon Valley was first airing, there remained at least some doubt around the vast extent of data mining and surveillance. Jokes abounded online about whether Amazon’s Alexa was maybe listening, or if it was actually just a coincidence when Instagram served up ads about whatever you’d just been talking about—and we didn’t yet know that we were the punch line.
In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, however, far more people understand data harvesting as just an unfortunate fact of modern life. If they didn’t read about it in the news, they may have absorbed it from some of the frequent breach notification emails clogging their inboxes, inviting them to change a vulnerable password or two.
The only surprising aspect about how data mining is portrayed on The Audacity is that any of the show’s characters would be surprised about it. And yet here’s military veteran Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry), aghast at the notion that shady CEO Park has only been pretending to care about Ruffage’s fellow veterans in order to partner with an organization that serves them.
When it comes to Big Tech’s lack of concern over our privacy, the cat’s already out of the bag—and it’s been caught running down the street by the Ring Search Party camera network.
The state of surveillance is now such that the same sort of panopticon deemed so unethical it made Batman’s tech guy resign at the end of The Dark Knight is now a real product featured in a Super Bowl ad ostensibly about finding lost pets. So it’s neither surprising, revealing, nor particularly entertaining to see The Audacity’s main character build a hypercharged version of that tool. Instead, it’s just sadly relatable, in exactly the wrong way.
The real shame of it is that The Audacity does occasionally hit exactly the right note. In a pitch-perfect, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke, ethically compromised therapist Felder’s young son has the middle name “Barack.” Another diamond-cut gem is when one young character is surprised that the daughter of a tech CEO isn’t allowed to have a smart device, she fires back: “Arms dealers don’t give their kids landmines.” Details these suggest there’s still plenty of mockery to be mined from modern-day Big Tech.
Just not enough of them to sustain an entire TV series, and certainly not right now.
Who is a show this even for, at this moment? Who is meant to laugh cathartically while watching introverted tech genius Martin Phister (Simon Helberg) consult the AI robot he made, after they’ve just read the news that Zuckerberg himself has built an AI to assist him with CEO duties? Where is the evidence of any demand for seeing the depraved hellscape of 2026 tech culture gently wrapped on its knuckles by Zach Galifianakis?
Perhaps the only industry better than Silicon Valley at serving consumers something they never asked for is Hollywood.
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Fastcompany.com
