Earlier this month, on a clear, dry evening in Tempe, Arizona, a 49-year-old woman named Elaine Herzberg decided to cross the street with her bicycle. She never made it to the other side. A driverless Volvo XC90 owned by Uber—which, along with other tech companies like Lyft and Waymo was testing out unmanned cars on Arizona’s open roads due to a 2015 executive order lifting regulations in the state—hit her and she died shortly thereafter. The incident—the first fatality to involve a self-driving vehicle—caused an immediate maelstrom in and around the tech world; Uber suspended all of its testing in California, Toyota pulled all autonomous models off the road, and one of the founders of Otto, a self-driving car startup acquired by Uber and responsible for much of its new technology, suddenly left the company, though Uber claimed the split had nothing to do with the crash.

The day before the Tempe incident, the Guardian published a bombshell report about breaches of privacy at Facebook. A pink-haired whistleblower named Christopher Wylie admitted that, while he worked for the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, he harvested tons of private info from profiles that allowed him to turn Mark Zuckerberg’s invention into “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool” during the 2016 election. Suddenly, even people whose main interface with the Internet is checking Facebook are thinking of leaving Facebook.

It is a strange time for Silicon Valley to debut its fifth season, but also oddly apt. The HBO comedy has always been about laying bare the dark side of the tech business, the myriad ways that captains of industry so often lose control of their ships. If anything, there has never been a better time to satirize the hubris and folly that pervades the world of tech. Creator Mike Judge knows this: He was thinking of terminating the series after six seasons; now, as he told the New York Times, he could see it running as long as Dallas. “It’s taken on a second wind,” he said.



When Silicon Valley debuted in the spring of 2014, it thrived on satirizing the excesses of tech culture, seen through the adventures of Pied Piper, a little-startup-that-could launched by a rag-tag group of friends living in an “incubator” house near Palo Alto. The leader of the crew, Richard Hendricks (a delightfully twitchy Thomas Middleditch) is an awkward, cerebral ball of nerves. He is a genius programmer, whose innovative data compression algorithm shows instant promise and value, but is a terrible businessman. The other coders who make up Pied Piper’s oddball fraternity include the dueling duo of Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), who are locked into an ever-spinning hamster wheel of cruel pranks and undermining snark (they are the Mutt and Jeff of the South Bay, often in a separate slapstick sitcom of their own). Then there’s Jared (Zach Woods), a gawky, tender-hearted business brain who decamps from the tech juggernaut Hooli (the show’s Google cipher) to work for Pied Piper pro bono because he believes in Richard’s vision to a zealous, almost self-abnegating degree.

The main gang was rounded out with the boorish presence of Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller), the landlord of the incubator house who, having sold one tiny startup to a VC firm, swaggers around the Valley like a puma prowling the foothills. Erlich was the super-ego of Silicon Valley, its most bombastic, and therefore divisive) character. He was often lunging into meetings uninvited, claiming territory for himself at the conference table. Constantly stoned, with a huge leonine mane, Erlich was the comic distillation of Silicon Valley’s insulated pomposity; despite having few talents outside of schmoozing, he felt entitled to success, destined for greatness, confident that he would come up with an idea that would change the very way that humans live. Other characters floated in and out of the mix: Gavin Belson, the narcissistic CEO of Hooli, Monica Hall, an angel investor who never stops believing in Richard (and one of the rare women on the show), Jian-Yang, one of Erlich’s tenants who refuses to leave the house, and Laurie Bream, a droll, withholding head of a VC firm who becomes financially entangled with Pied Piper’s future.