No one, I suspect, can fully process the cavalcade of absurdities and atrocities that make up each day’s news cycle. But art can help; it’s not fun to live in a dawning age of technofeudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channeled into comedy.
I liked "Succession" and will give this show a try, but the trailer did not appeal to me. Was that music needed to mask the deficiencies of the script and the acting?
"I hope you rich folks don't mind slumming it in the humble abode of the poorest billionaire in the gang" — that's the first line in the trailer! I can't believe present-day billionaires would talk like that. It sounds like the way a high-school student in the 1960s would write dialogue for a rich guy. Remember when any time a door was opened to reveal the innards of a mansion, some character would say "Welcome to my humble abode"?
I don't mind unrealistic dialogue if it's brilliant somehow — comically, tragically — but that's just so embarrassingly dumb. I don't get it. "Succession" was great. But I see this show was written and filmed very quickly:
In November, when the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, “Mountainhead,” he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premiers [sic] on Saturday on HBO — an astonishingly compressed timeline.
When writing about arrogance, should one take care to avoid arrogance? Or just barrel ahead? Daredevil speed is so cool when writing about the terrifying confidence of others.
What are you saucer-eyed with horror about? Surely not hastily written satire that "premiers" on HBO.
संदेश
92 टिप्पणियां:
Re "humble abode": It's been a cliché for a long time--in Pride and Prejudice (1813, but first drafted in the 1790s), Jane Austen can already assume her audience will roll their eyes at Mr Collins' typically stale formulations.
I hope Goldberg is keeping up with her Botox. The saucer eyes and agog-ness can take a toll.
That looks awful. Hard pass for me.
I’m not seeing this “rapid degeneration.” What I’m seeing is a country emerging from the Age of Scarcity into the Age of Plenty, courtesy of tech. One of my favorite writers on this subject is Mark Andreessen. His “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is one of the great recent essays on the Age of Plenty we now inhabit.
https://pmarca.substack.com/p/the-techno-optimist-manifesto
You gotta be kidding. Silicon Vally Tech "Masters" are mostly Democrat and were the moving force between Biden's election in 2020. Zuckerberg, Google execs, Bill gates, Ellison, and the billionaire guy who was secretly financing antifa.
There was a "Rightwing SV tech billionaire" who bribed the SIerra Club to stop opposing massive illegal immigration. And who can forget all the SV billionaire and multi-millionaires getting together in a zoom call after Oct 7th, to "help create the right image for Israel".
But a couple support Trump in 2024, and now we get a rushed "Satire" to attack them. Just like was got a Satire to attack the Murdochs. THe one rich family that doesn't have a liberal/left media empire.
HBO has had several outstanding shows over the years, but Succession isn’t one of them.
Extremely overrated, in my opinion… and I expect the same bilge from this “creator”.
But I see this show was written and filmed very quickly....
Well, the viewing public doesn't give them much incentive to take time and polish a script to perfection. Case in point; Taylor Sheridan's entire oeuvre.
When writing about arrogance, should one take care to avoid arrogance?
Do the arrogant realize they're arrogant?
Michelle Goldberg is such a liar, and so driven by her leftwing politics, I wouldn't trust anything she says. Maybe she actually likes the show. Or maybe she's just pushing it because of her politics or she has a relative involved in the company that makes it. I wouldn't assume a goodfaith assertion from her about anything.
Ah, there's Trump, I'm bored already. If anyone is holed up in Utah, it is the arty types in Park City.
Now, a show I liked about the tech world was Silicon Valley. You know how every* TV show or movie that features someone with an unrealistic dream ends with that character achieving the dream (embarrassingly, what's springing instantly to mind is Glee, wherein the teenage girl from Ohio or wherever auditions in NYC to play Streisand's role in a revival of Funny Girl on Broadway... and gets it, and the entirely unknown mechanic dad of the gay kid, concerned about his son's right to marry the man of his choosing one day, runs for state office... and wins)? Silicon Valley doesn't do that. And it's funny.
* Not "every."
Succession - I didn't find it funny or interesting. But that's just me. It seem to be well acted. I don't remember much profanity, sexual degeneracy or Christain bashing - the usual HBO hallmarks.
When it comes to comedy, its very subjective. I don't find the 3 stooges funny, others do. I found Lenny Bruce boring, others found him "Brilliant". When at the movies, the audience will roar with laughter at the most obvious and trivial jokes. OTOH, i found Dabney Coleman and Norm MacDonald very funny. And all their TV shows got cancelled.
My hunch is that the real war going on right now is between the technology billionaires and the hedge fund federal reserve money changing billionaires. Neither faction believes in any political ideology other than accumulating wealth and power.
That said, the labeling of the tech Bros as MAGA shills is the main defensive tactic of the financiers whom own Hollywood, the DNC and the now hibernating GOPe.
Gosh - a pack of wealthy leftist hollywooders mocking any and all not on the dedicated corrupt left.
They can all go F themselves.
Palmer Luckey is an interesting young billionaire. He got his start developing Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets, now he’s working on drones for the military. He’s only 32 and a Trump supporter.
Hey, I have a show concept that bashes crazy billionaires that want to rule the world. Just like Trump.
Great, have it written by next week. It is a sure fire hit.
Fast forward a month:
WTF happened to our sure fire hit?
"How do you do, fellow kids?"
Even the wealthy tech billionaires see the massive corruption of the left.
They were all forced to obey COVID speech control and other speech controls- thrust upon them during the Crook Biden Soros Puppet years.
Tech billionaires must be kept in line for the corrupt left to use - or they will be dutifully mocked.
See, they should have cast Megan Markle in there, woulda been a guaranteed hit.
The Progressive Left is slowly realizing they've gone from being the Kool Kids to being left behind, at the side of the road. watching the bus depart.
The Biden years = a complete sh*t show - high crime, drugs, illegals, lies, BS - massive inflation, speech controls...
And the left see everything as bleak as we shed all of that.
F the left.
A "delicious satire of the tech right." C'mon. That's pathetic. Because we all know there will never be a delicious satire of the tech left, which would be far more delicious.
The show "Silicon Valley" was propagandistic fiction, and bore no relation to the actual valley.
Maybe if those Bond villains can found a streaming service with programing that will leave its consumers less damaged than is customary, television can be forgiven all its sins.
This reminds me of the "Space Force" TV show that was rushed out in response to Trump's suggestion that we needed a space force. Steve Carell was in that also. It had a great cast, but the writing wasn't good.
The thought seemed to be, with a cavalcade of absurdities, the humor writes itself.
Most people are not gripped in saucer-eyed horror at the prospect of techno-feudalism. Fortunately, Mountainhead will be on HBO, instead of getting a theatrical release, so nobody will know how much money was wasted.
This trailer really impresses me, negatively. Can I say that it is gay? Or is that not allowed.
not omidyar, some oligarchs are good, hans gyss, or course the original bond villain, schwab, who seems to have come across a spot of me too, like pachauri of the ipcc, or khan of the icc,
then there is sam altman, and amodei, both men of the left, one is derivative of the other, like edison and westinghouse,
amodei is behind the anthropic platform, which wants to be the best skynet,
While leftist Hillarywood-landers do what they do best - North Korean style propaganda....Here is JD Vance on our pathetic education system:
"There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance."
"that's just so embarrassingly dumb. I don't get it." You shouldn't. The dumbness is the point, playing to prog confirmation bias. It works on the Goldbergs, not the Althouses.
"about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs" That in itself is dumb. The tech oligarchs don't all think alike, so treating them all as "right" is silly to begin with. Nor are they "nihilistic"--they are successful precisely because they create fantastic new products and services. Most think big and execute. Your ideas are not "grandiose" if you can back it up.
Methinks (sorry) this dumb lefty disparagement will drive a few more disgusted oligarchs to the right.
Josephbleau said...
"This trailer really impresses me, negatively. Can I say that it is gay? Or is that not allowed."
I believe "gay" is ok. I wanted to say this show looks "re**arded" but believe that is verboten.
The THICK of it 2.0, what’s not to like.
Is the title meant to be reminiscent of the ghastly Ayn Rand book, the Fountainhead — almost certainly.
If it’s half as good as Succession it should be a great watch.
Kak- A - Phony.
The show was made for you, and people like you.
So, just wrapping this up, a stupid article about a stupid show written by a -- well. By Michelle Goldberg.
the fountainhead was a love letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, a breaker of convention, or norms,
of course on a smaller scale you have chris holm of extinction rebellion, the vandals with a penchant for eco terror,
It could have been good if they had Ricardo Montalban reprise his role of Kahn from Star Trek as the host.
I see Ricardo is dead, that would make the trailer better than it is, but not as good as it would be if he were alive.
I personally know one tech 0.9 billionaire and he hosts Biden fundraisers and works.to provide legal representation for illegal-immigrant minors. Where is that movie?
Being holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February is actually a very wonderful experience.
"I don't mind unrealistic dialogue if it's brilliant somehow — comically, tragically — but that's just so embarrassingly dumb." Is it as dumb as our next aspiring fiction writer M>M>?
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/meghan-markle-flight-attendant-tiktok-note-b2757793.html
"There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
I think this is incorrect. I've repeatedly read that it's in the social sciences where the reproducibility crisis hits hardest. Half of the profession of psychology seems to be given over to the design of flimsy, biased "experiments" tailored specifically to prove that conservatives are stupid troglodytes and liberals are doubleplusgood Guardians of Science and Democracy.
Fred Drinkwater said...
The show "Silicon Valley" was propagandistic fiction, and bore no relation to the actual valley.
5/26/25, 10:13 AM
I don't think it was meant to be representative of SV, more to use that as a setting for showing the interaction of caricatures of personality types associated there. There are some very funny scenes... the "board meeting" where a company tries to steal secrets by providing white boards with permanent markers, the scheme where the antagonist and another rich guy are talking about their short getaway to the exact same place before trading chat usernames to play online chess as they board their own private planes, etc... Not every joke landed, but I recall it being more hot than miss.
Nor are they "nihilistic"--they are successful precisely because they create fantastic new products and services.
Elon Musk is as far from nihilistic as it is possible to be. Nihilists don't devote their lives and fortunes to populating the entire galaxy with human life.
When a dimwitted leftist pseudo-intellectual like Goldberg uses the word, it means "resistant to hysterical emotion-driven left-wing browbeating". Nothing more.
When I was a kid, the Beverly Hillbillies were merely oil rich with a few million rolling in annually from the bubbling crude on their land. Odd to see that tech billionaires are required to be the non-middle-class stereotypes for parody by the Hollywood millionaires of today. They can't see that they themselves are deserving of much more than parody for their political affiliations.
Howard said...
My hunch is that the real war going on right now is between the technology billionaires and the hedge fund federal reserve money changing billionaires. Neither faction believes in any political ideology other than accumulating wealth and power.
Astute insight.
“I think this is incorrect. I've repeatedly read that it's in the social sciences where the reproducibility crisis hits hardest.”
It’s both, see the fake microscope pictures that ruined Alzheimers drug research for years. Psychology and sociology fraud is not so bad because no one believes it anyway.
@Jamie: I hope Goldberg is keeping up with her Botox. The saucer eyes and agog-ness can take a toll.
Are you confusing her with Michelle Wolf? Michelle Goldberg is the New York Times/Nation/Slate op-ed writer who once wrote that pro-life marchers should be spit upon and kicked in the head. She has ordinary Semitic physiognomy and is not notably saucer-eyed.
most oligarchs like buffett gates are anti natalist, zuckerberg the wunderkind probably so,
the only challenge with Goldberg, is to what degree is her category error,
The quality of writing is bad. I picked up a book by Ocean Vuong and it sucked.
"Alan, on behalf of everyone here, I would like to welcome you to our humble chapeau."
"Two years at the Sorbonne, she still gets it wrong."
https://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/hjkvdwre1x so this is why goldberg celebrates it,
What would be fun is a Full House reboot where the three guys are tech bros and the girls are children that they fathered via artificial insemination with women they met on Twitter.
⬆️ Alternately, Danny is a podcaster, Joey is a regular on Bill Maher, and Jesse is a roadie for Imagine Dragons.
Silicon Valley was a pretty funny sarcastic comedy based on extreme stereotypes. Erlich Bachman, Guilfoyle and Jian Yang are classic characters. The show creator Mike Judge is a libertarian bro, not a Hollywood libtard
The actual tech oligarchs with the real money seem to go their separate ways and to be in competition with one another--Musk, Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Zuckerberg, Omidyar. Tech bros hanging out and showing off seems to be a made-up concept.
For all their great wealth and scheming, the Bond villains invariably lose to 007. Toxic masculinity inspires men to do great things. I would argue that one of the tech billionaires (you know who I'm referring to) is more of a Bond avatar than a Bond villain.
Hassayamper, the blog post title quoted Goldberg as saying she was saucer-eyed - I couldn't pick her out of a lineup, so I'm sure you're right about her resting Goldberg face.
Paging Dominique Francon and Howard Roark. Your room is ready in the Mountainhead. Mixed script or mixed metaphor?
@Howard: My hunch is that the real war going on right now is between the technology billionaires and the hedge fund federal reserve money changing billionaires. Neither faction believes in any political ideology other than accumulating wealth and power.
It's not just "right now". This goes back quite some time.
Twenty-odd years ago, when George Soros had only recently become the main sugar daddy for the Democrats, and the Koch Brothers were the Left's greatest bête-noire, and people still debated politics honestly in social settings, I was at a high school reunion at which an upcoming election was being discussed. A woman with whom I'd had a brief fling years before had become an extremely loudmouthed liberal since then, and expressed a very disparaging opinion about the corrupting influence of the Kochs. I pointed out that the Koch brothers employed tens of thousands of people in good jobs at union wages, making items of inherent value for which people willingly and voluntarily traded their own money, while THEIR favorite billionaire was a rootless cosmopolitan currency speculator who employed nobody except a handful of lawyers and spies and fixers, and made his fortune by looting national treasuries and depriving governments of revenue needed for social spending, and wasn't it several orders of magnitude more corrupting for someone like that to buy access to the upper levels of government and the Democrat party? She completely lost her temper and started shouting that, in essence, Republicans were the source of all evil in the world, and Democrats were the great glowing Sun whence came all truth and light, and the Kochs ought to be put against a wall and shot for daring to use their own money to promote political views that differed from hers. Now some of the anger may have been bubbling up because I had pretty callously kicked her to the curb a couple of decades previously, but a lot of it was obviously a deeply held belief that any opposition to left-wing pieties was inherently evil and wrong, justifying any action at all to eliminate it. This sort of deranged foaming at the mouth is usual from the Left nowadays, but back then it was rather rare outside the Communist countries. It was quite an eye-opener as to the nature of the enemy we now face.
Going back farther, the same split was nascent between the industrialists of the Gilded Age who made their money in railroads and mines and steamships, and the "money men" who brought us the Federal Reserve in 1913. Conspiracy theorists have spun elaborate and almost certainly false scenarios that purport to explain why so many of the former and so few of the latter were aboard the Titanic when it sank, but there is a reason they latched onto it.
when they came to write the character, they took one part howard hughes the empresario of the first half of the century, and one part elon, also one part downey's own insouciance,the latest character that downey played lewis strauss deemed the villain in Oppenheimer, has similar resonances,
"Succession" was okay but it was no GOT. I liked GOT. Lots of toxic masculinity and gratuitous nudity until that last season.....A lot of shows have an interesting premise, but rapidly wither and die....."Severance" got a lot buzz, but I couldn't figure it out. Perhaps it an elaborate metaphor for the conflict between our work personae and our true, authentic selves, but more likely the writers are just pulling things out of their ass. The show is totally devoid of toxic masculinity.
Murderbot seems to be a better offering,
Hassayamper - wow.
Good job.
But yes - leftist cultists will never for a second believe anything negative about their precious party - and the corrupt break-everything evil Soros a-holes - who fund their precious party.
P. Diddy is a true Bond villain. I'd like to see a tv show were someone like P. Diddy arranges fund raising freak offs for someone like Harris. That'd be a cool show They could integrate elements of Veep and White Lotus into the show.
Not as quick as a TikTok
diddy a small time degenerate, in the big scheme of things, he served his purpose with the vote or die scheme
in the smaller hollywood hiphop world, perhaps a bigger player,
If you dare step off the Hive Democrat Party Allegiance wagon - you will be mocked. Hillarywood-land- North-Korea Propaganda machine - at the ready!
Yeah...this is not happening. You can smell the "let's get this slapped together as soon as we possibly can" air all over it. I'm still shaking my head over Season 1 of "White Lotus". I finally decided to give it a view after listening to people talking about it for 3 years. Finished season 1 last night and...I'm wondering how I get those evenings back.
Yikes. What a vapid waste of time. HBO today is not the HBO that put out Oz, The Wire, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Leftovers, Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, Rome, Boardwalk Empire, Veep, Succession, Deadwood. This is light pap. It's entertainment- and that's fine. But based on the references to White Lotus for 3 years, the praise it received...I don't get it.
narciso said...
Murderbot seems to be a better offering,
5/26/25, 11:58 AM
Yes, but what about "The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon"?
More like "silence of the Lambs" writ large.
"It puts the lotion on it's skin so I can give it my hose again."
William 12:06 -
Great Idea. Will never happen with North Korean Hollywood.
The priorities are really different today. Quality of the art-form is unimportant. Jody Foster notices: “When I was a kid, I worked so much that by the time that I was 18, I needed to take a different approach. I see a lot of young actors, and I’m not saying I’m jealous, but I don’t understand how they just want to act. They don’t care if the movie’s bad. They don’t care if the dialogue is bad. They don’t care if they’re a grape in a Fruit of the Loom ad.”
Some people can't get it through their heads that Billionaires are mostly Leftwing globalists. They're not "Rock-ribbed Republicans". Most get their money from SV, hedge-funds, real estate, and Big Media/Entertainment. They aren't the friend of the USA working man or the small business man. But I guess if you worship money, you might be starry eyed fans.
I think it looks silly but probably entertaining. Reminds me of the All-In podcasters.
Musk sent, or said he was going to send, a silver medal with the numeral "2" on it to Jeff Bezos. This was after Musk unseated Bezos as #1
I can't find pictures or confirmation but there are a lot of stories.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/574456-musk-says-hes-sending-bezos-silver-medal-after-retaking-worlds/
John Henry
Kakistocracy said...
The THICK of it 2.0, what’s not to like.
Who plays Malcolm Tucker?
Malcolm is what made that series worth watching.
I do not get HBO but I may buy the first episode on Prime to take a look.
John Henry
"From the Creator of ‘Succession,’ a Delicious Satire of the Tech Right"
Because any "satire" of the "tech Left" is just not allowed
"I can't believe present-day billionaires would talk like that. It sounds like the way a high-school student in the 1960s would write dialogue for a rich guy."
Having met all kinds it seems to me that the rich, middle, and poor are equally populated with the decent, the ordinary, and the nasty. Affluence varies, people don’t.
Tech billionaires are much more likely to be libertarians -- or liberals -- than MAGA populists. Or uninterested in politics. It's hard to write good satire about people you don't understand.
Those cartoonish "male" voices sound like typical transmen. I.e. not men at all, just girls on testosterone.
Michelle Goldberg wonders: How is it that people other than me, people with such utterly different lives, have so much more impact than me? Michelle, the fact that you find this mysterious is one of the most significant reasons why you will soon vanish from human memory. But not soon enough.
As wide as her eyes were, Michelle Goldberg still couldn't see what everybody else could see, that Joe Biden was blood brother to the rutabaga? Bullshit.
Please delete the post at 7:58 PM. It is utter rudeness to post multiple pages of whitespace.
"It could have been good if they had Ricardo Montalban reprise his role of Kahn from Star Trek as the host."
"I see Ricardo is dead, that would make the trailer better than it is, but not as good as it would be if he were alive."
That should make him a shoe-in for playing Joe Biden in the inevitable telemovie.
Midsummer Mysteries for the humorless.
Hassayamper: the Kochs despise the populist Right. They are no different from Soros, and now that they have lied and astroturfed the real Populist Right to death, their foundations work openly with Soros, advocating for open borders, legalizing all drugs, and emptying all prisons. They're idiot leftitarians who frequently threaten to sue any former employee who disagrees publicly with them. Look up David Koch's 1980 VP run. All their top employees are from the Bush family's acolytes. They're even worse than Soros, because he spreads the graft around. They just lie and intimidate.
Didn't see the trailer, instead the video was about Jay Leno's Baker Electric Car, popular at the turn of the last century. Very interesting. In the course of putting two and two together, in this video Jay said that the Baker was his wife's favorite car, that they loved seeing Christmas lights and going to dinner in it. That seems to confirm my suspicion as to why Jay, a performance car (new, not historic) guy bought the all-electric Rolls-Royce. His wife is moving through the stages of dementia, and I bet the extra quiet and smooth ride of the RR is comforting as he takes her shopping, to dinner and to her various Drs appointments.
The first two seasons of "Succession" were brilliant. The third was pointless, and the fourth was horrible. Once you've proven that the second generation Roys are worthless, watching them scramble for power and try to organize coups and deals becomes unrealistic, repetitive and repellent.
Jesse Armstrong -- if that's who's behind this new series -- only started hating billionaires when it seemed like they'd turn on globalism and net zero. Stick with "Silicon Valley."
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