Hollywood has a new villain: the tech mogul.
And this time, it’s personal.
In the space of just a few months, no fewer than six feature films, documentaries and television shows are taking aim at the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley.
It feels almost like a vendetta: The most influential storytellers on the planet are depicting the world’s most powerful industry as full of greedy and venal people who don’t care whom they hurt.
Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” is in theaters now, featuring an angry, dour Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary “Musk,” featuring a creepy, artificial-intelligence-generated bobblehead version of the richest man in the world, is just hitting theaters. Nathan Fielder and Noah Oppenheim’s quasi documentary about the Theranos felon Elizabeth Holmes, “You Can See Everything,” is opening this week. CBS recently debuted a legal drama called “Cupertino” from the veteran showrunners Michelle and Robert King, about a couple of intrepid lawyers taking on the giants of the Valley with the zeal of David facing Goliath. Then next month, Netflix has “The Altruists,” dramatizing the $8 billion crypto-collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried, played with Mephistophelian dorkiness by Anthony Boyle. And Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial,” about Sam Altman, will arrive in theaters in December.
The tech world has eaten legacy Hollywood, humbled it, beaten it at its own game. David Ellison, backed by his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, buying Warner Bros. and adding it to Paramount, which he already runs, is just the latest example. But it’s been happening for over a decade now. Netflix is now the biggest game in Tinseltown. Amazon and Apple are major players.
Call it vengeance. Or jealousy. Call it the “Network” effect (by which I mean the 1976 movie). Hollywood is mad as hell.
The adorable dweebs of “Silicon Valley” are gone. That’s the HBO show of the 2010s by Alec Berg and Mike Judge that lampooned the rags-to-riches ethos of Silicon Valley start-up culture. The series portrayed a group of buddies living somewhere near Sand Hill Road as they faked it till they made it, eating ramen noodles and fecklessly trying to appeal to women. There was a billionaire tech villain in the series, Gavin Belson, but the heroes were the hapless nerds coding their way to sometime success.
The first movie Mr. Sorkin wrote about Facebook, 2010’s “The Social Network” (which David Fincher directed), was in many ways more sympathetic to Mr. Zuckerberg, who was depicted as the Hollywood trope of a nerd underdog trying to impress a girl and outmaneuver a couple of mean jocks — the Winklevoss twins. In “Steve Jobs,” a movie Mr. Sorkin wrote but did not direct, Mr. Jobs was depicted as a different Hollywood archetype: the troubled, single-minded salesman of his own genius who was too self-centered to be a decent father.
Now, more than a decade later, we are wiser to the more sinister ways of the Valley. The tech geniuses aren’t here to make society better, it turns out. They’re not here to offer harmless alternatives to real-life social interaction. No — they are here to enrich themselves no matter the social cost. They are liars, fabulists and narcissists.
Hollywood knows it’s being disrupted. It remembers what happened to the music business when it went digital. Streaming has upended Hollywood’s once-stable economics, which used to be buttressed by cable fees and DVD sales. The once-lordly entertainment conglomerates are now worth less than even a young company like Mr. Altman’s OpenAI, which a March funding round valued at $852 billion. Walt Disney Co.’s market cap is $187 billion.
Hollywood is now issuing its own moral judgment: Technology is wicked, a curse cloaked in virtue.
You can hardly miss Mr. Sorkin’s antipathy for Mr. Zuckerberg in “The Social Reckoning.” As written by Mr. Sorkin, the Facebook founder lacks any moral grounding, insisting that his platform continue to feed the spiral of hate speech and misinformation that drives advertising revenue.
It’s not just Hollywood foisting this on us, of course. These suspicions are reflected in American public opinion. There is widespread distrust of Big Tech companies, and of A.I. in particular. Data centers are positively hated by pretty much everyone. So these films are, in some sense, also giving the audience what it wants.
In the trailer for “Artificial,” which was dropped by Amazon MGM Studios for distribution but picked up by Neon for release in December, a character declares in grand fashion: “We’ve created a machine that will solve the world’s problems.” In the trailer for “The Altruists,” Mr. Bankman-Fried (Anthony Boyle) pronounces, “We are going to change the world,” before, a few seconds later, declaring: “There’s no such thing as criminals. There’s just people who get caught.”
Mr. Fielder and Mr. Oppenheim had to do little more than aim their camera at Ms. Holmes and her romantic partner, Billy Evans, before she leaves to prison. There isn’t a shred of regret or shame for the crimes established in court. Merely self-pity.
I went to a screening for a thousand Hollywood insiders last week for “You Can See Everything,” which opens this week, and there was laughter as Ms. Holmes shed tears over leaving her baby behind for prison. Some might say it smacked of schadenfreude.
On “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend, James Austin Johnson played the “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary defending his bid to build the world’s largest A.I. data center in Utah. “So what happened, Mr. Wonderful?” asks Colin Jost. “It’s very simple,” Mr. O’Leary answers. “All I want is to buy up 40,000 acres of God’s untouched splendor and replace it with a very loud computer that steals your job.”
This got laughs. Much of America agrees with Hollywood’s position these days, that Silicon Valley no longer even pretends to serve society, even a capitalist one. It’s just hellbent on getting richer. Hang the consequences.
After the credits roll, the changes wrought by technology are coming anyway. There’s a lot of happy talk in Hollywood right now that A.I. is going to create endless possibilities for storytelling. There are a host of new companies that aim to optimize A.I. tools to help filmmakers, writers and producers. And it may turn out that A.I. will be a wonderful tool to drive more creativity and — who knows? — jobs.
But that’s not today. Today, Hollywood is looking to torch it.
Sharon Waxman is the founder, chief executive and editor in chief of The Wrap.
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