“The Audacity” Is a Brutal Silicon Valley Satire with an Agenda

Midway through my watch of the new tech-satire series “The Audacity,” I received an e-mail from Google that I had received many times before. My personal data had been found online, it said. This time, it was my phone number; previously, it had been more private information. The most I could do, it seemed, was ask Google to remove the offending pages from its search results, one by one, over months, then years. I wish I could say I was more bothered. These days, violations of digital privacy are a routine calamity that we’ve by and large given up on addressing. There are only so many things we can be outraged about at once, and surveillance capitalism—the business model summed up by “if you’re not paying, you’re the product”—seldom makes the cut.

“The Audacity” wants to shake us out of that stupor. The opening episode of the AMC dramedy introduces an algorithm that’s a gift to stalkers everywhere. Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the C.E.O. of a data-mining startup called Hypergnosis, has just found out that his wife, Lili (Lucy Punch), slept with another man the previous night. Never mind that Duncan and Lili are in an open marriage, and that he is more likely to confide in his former mistress than in his wife. He asks one of the company’s engineers, a pink-haired, nonbinary coder named Harper (Jess McLeod), to use their latest project—a program they describe as “God’s eye”—to identify his new rival based on a few scant details. Within moments, Duncan learns not only the man’s name but his current location, his salary, and his penchants for herring, wheat beer, and anal sex. The tech is terrifying, but it’s treated matter-of-factly, played for barked laughs. The vibes are less “Black Mirror” than “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”—less the near-future than the now.

Marketing for “The Audacity” has focussed on Duncan as the latest prestige-TV gazillionaire to hate on, but the show is, in fact, a panoramic lambasting of Silicon Valley’s particular form of trickle-down rot. Duncan’s daughter attends a private high school that so reliably sends its students to Stanford that even its principal isn’t above committing a bit of fraud to insure her own daughter’s place there. His financially strapped therapist, JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), tells herself that, if she keeps her C-suite clients “sane enough” for them to make ungodly amounts of money, she should be entitled to some of it—a line of reasoning that lets her justify the insider trading she commits based on their in-session disclosures of imminent mergers and acquisitions. The one-per-centers have warped society so thoroughly with their endless advantages that the ten-per-centers feel that they need to break the rules to have a chance at keeping up.

Sometime in the past two decades, the M.B.A.s took over the industry from the nerds, and it became more imperative to scale and extract than to innovate. “The Audacity” reflects this shift; its primary characters aren’t the socially inept weenies of “Silicon Valley,” awestruck at their proximity to Scrooge McDuckian wealth, but middle-aged businesspeople who already have more money than they know what to do with. Duncan lives with the knowledge that his entrée into the upper echelons of the tech world was paved by the co-founder of his first startup, the real genius of the two; his eventual partner at Hypergnosis is Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis), a legendary venture capitalist said to have “invented the future”—a nice way of saying he helped to make spam ubiquitous. By definition, these guys are a duller lot than their predecessors—more Tim Cook than Steve Jobs—and the series’ creator, Jonathan Glatzer, a former “Succession” writer, doesn’t have much insight into what makes them tick, beyond above-average avarice and shamelessness. After Duncan uses ayahuasca to cope with a business setback, he pleads his greatest wish to a hallucination of his father: “Help me stay rich.”