TV satire replaced reverence for Silicon Valley’s cultural authority

Evidence

In an episode of HBO comedy series Silicon Valley, fictional CEO Gavin Belson laments, “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place—better than we do.” By the mid-2010s, reverence for Silicon Valley’s innovation had been replaced with mockery of its self-importance. Created by Mike Judge, of Office Space, Idiocracy, and Beavis and Butt-Head fame, Silicon Valley cast tech workers’ quirks—productivity hacks, psychedelics, identical fleece vests—as laughable delusions rather than noble eccentricities. After the show, the industry’s grandiose mission statements and buzzwords like “local, mobile, social” began to ring hollow, their idealism reduced to wallpaper for profit-driven ventures. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 510

Categorization

• CANDY: The Gavin Belson quote about wanting to make the world a better place better than others is a light, quotable nugget.