It's Time To Burst Silicon Valley's Tech Bubble

As the country starts to experience the dangers of technology, Silicon Valley itself could be ripe for disruption.

- Austin Carr

Silicon Valley showrunner Alec Berg just wanted to let viewers in on the joke. When he started writing the satirical HBO series five years ago, the Valley seemed to him like a caricature, rife with overhyped tech products and self-aggrandizing corporate mission statements. It was full of “arrogance” masquerading as “altruism,” Berg says—and he and show creator Mike Judge began skewering the startup industry for dressing up dumb social media apps as world-changing innovations, producing self-driving cars that can’t follow directions, and lionizing machinelike engineers who build things without fear of the consequences. “Those people scare the shit out of me,” laughs Berg, who remembers meeting with various developers in the early years of writing the show and being alarmed by how little consideration they gave to the potential dangers of what they were coding. “It was like, ‘Hey shithead! You understand this has massively bad applications, right?’ But they just don’t see it.”