Showrunner Jonathan Glatzer wanted the tagline of his latest TV creation to be: “We’re so fucked.” He laughs. Hey, maybe I can use it for season two!” The show in question is The Audacity, his darkly comic drama about AI tech titans. Instead, it went with the more PG tagline “Move fast and break people” – a twist on “Move fast and break things”, the Facebook motto coined by Mark Zuckerberg.
The Audacity promises to do for tech bros what Succession did for legacy media. Considering Glatzer is a former writer on Succession, that is no empty threat. This acerbic and all-too-timely Silicon Valley satire follows CEO Duncan Park (played by Billy Magnussen), the obscenely wealthy founder of a data analytics company.
He’s a self-proclaimed “inventor of the future” who also happens to be a morally bankrupt man-baby. He desperately wants to be a billionaire and ascend to what we call ‘God Mountain’. But he’s no God.” Like Succession, The Audacity’s scripts are liberally spiced with baroque swearing.
Park boasts about keeping investors “moist” and “Viagra-ing the share price to keep it up”. Magnussen delivers such juicy dialogue with relish. It’s also very white or south Asian.
When I first came here, I didn’t see a person of colour for two weeks. That struck me as very odd in a major US city. Hiring practices are dictated by algorithms.
The algorithms say that if you went to these universities, you’re our man. If you came from someplace else, and are maybe not a man, the algorithm says you might be problematic. And you could end up writing a book about us.” The Audacity pulls no punches on how the tech sector is wrecking the planet.
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