When “Silicon Valley” premiered on HBO in 2014, Silicon Valley hadn’t yet ruined the world. Those were the salad days for the titans of tech: Digital billionaires were superheroes feted on magazine covers and in the White House, not super villains hauled before Congress for fixing elections, sowing genocide, undermining truth and monopolizing all the globe’s commerce.

At the time, Theranos was a promising medical start-up and Uber looked like a slightly rough-around-the-edges solution to urban traffic. Bill Gates was the world’s greatest philanthropist, and you’d have been laughed out of town for suggesting — as presidential candidates and billionaires themselves now routinely do — that people as rich as him should not even be allowed to exist. This month both The New Yorker and the Atlantic published lengthy investigations into Jeff Bezos’ designs on owning basically everything. In 2014, the Amazon founder was hardly so existentially menacing; he seemed happily married, most decidedly not jacked, and he wasn’t even close to being the richest man in the world. LOL, he was poorer than Mark Zuckerberg.

The stakes were smaller then, is what I’m saying. Over five seasons, “Silicon Valley” has been viciously precise in lambasting techies’ antisocial foibles, but as to the industry’s fundamental contribution to the world, the series has mostly aped the zeitgeist, handling tech with loving, kid gloves. The gang of awkward bros who are trying to make it big with Pied Piper, the show’s heroic central start-up, have always been mostly good dudes, at least compared to their real-life start-up bro analogues. They weren’t abetting Nazis. They weren’t breaking democracies, or taking money from murderous petromonarchs. Compared to pop cultural portrayals of the nation’s other power centers — to Wall Street, Hollywood or D.C. — “Silicon Valley” long found in Silicon Valley some capacity for inspiration, wonder and awe.

But in much the same way that later seasons of “Veep” had to amp up an atmosphere of dystopian peril to match the real-life descent of American politics, HBO’s tech satire has also had to adjust. Society is now drowning in tech, and as we’ve all curdled in the glare of our phones , “Silicon Valley” got more sour, too. This works well as a story arc for a show set in the tech industry: Though Pied Piper has always been an idealistic company (fake idealism is the whole joke about this place), each season brought new avenues to abandon its ideals — the time they signed up thousands of fake users, or when their software caused phone explosions that injured their customers’ genitals.