Satirizing Silicon Valley Should Be Easy. So Why’s It So Hard?

Playground-style slides. Corporate-issued backpacks and fleeces emblazoned with company names straight out of a Pokedex. A CEO who brazenly circumvents local regulation. If the tech industry was a person, it would sew MOCK ME onto all of its shirts so as not to deplete the global supply of scotch tape. Nothing could be easier, one would think, than satirizing Silicon Valley—but as a deluge of startup-skewering projects this week shows, making good satire about Silicon Valley is quite a bit harder.

In the novel Startup, published on April 25, titular company TakeOff checks all the boxes for a bewildering startup. Whether it's employees dressed in unicorn onesies or social media managers being called "Engagement Ninjas," everything about TakeOff—which makes a data-mining mindfulness app that offers hyper-targeted relaxation tips (“think of us like technological Wellbutrin, without the side effects")—is eyerollworthy.

Much of that is due to author Doree Shafrir's eye for detail, no doubt honed by her day job as an editor at BuzzFeed. Like any good roman a clef, virtually every proper noun in the book has a real-world counterpart—they just tend to be companies rather than people. Young employees start their day at MorningRave, a spin on Daybreaker, where “we dance our faces off before work and feel gloriously healthy while doing so”; ShareWork offers the iced-coffee kegerators and Ping-Pong tables of coworking space wework; founders of a failed Uber-but-for-strollers startup pitch new ideas at bars below the Google offices in Chelsea.

Yet, while Startup offers entertaining details of New York tech, it lacks a compelling plot, which ultimately dooms the book. The tech world may have once been insular, but its peculiarities and jargon have long since become part of the zeitgeist; from Silicon Beach to Silicon Alley, everyone is an insider. If you've hailed a Lyft or bemoaned Instagram's move away from a chronological feed, you too have an expert's opinion—and without that plot to propel you through the novel, you too can see through the details. The way Shafrir's characters text, the anecdotes about startup parties, the descriptions of 24-year-olds’ Williamsburg apartments: If any of it rings hollow, the satire can’t stick.

Startup's challenge is doubly daunting because HBO's Silicon Valley, which came back on Sunday for its fourth season, already hits those notes so well. When TakeOff's corporate slogan proclaims “Do good work, and the work will help the good," it's hard not to think of Silicon Valley's Season 1 montage of algorithms and data centers aspiring to make the world a better place. Granted, Silicon Valley gets the details deliciously right thanks to a legion of consultants, and the narrative luxury of long-arc TV: Unlike a novel, a show can adjust to avoid seeming dated, finding its footing along the way.

But the gags in Silicon Valley succeed because they’re anchored by beloved characters. Sure, the Season 4 premiere wrung laughs out of Uber-napping and the petty whims of private jet owners, but you keep watching for Gilfoyle and Dinesh's frenemyship, or Jared's ever-evolving backstory, or Russ Hanneman's wildly profane analogies. At its core, Silicon Valley is a tale of navigating post-college uncertainty: sanctimonious housemates, first-job stumbles. It's not a comedy about startup culture, it’s a comedy set in startup culture.

If universality and specificity are the ends of the satire continuum, though, *The Circle *veers fully off the path. Dave Eggers' futuristic 2013 novel read less like satire and more like a dystopian thriller: a villainous COO on a quest to take over the world and eliminate privacy, analogized by his transparent, all-consuming shark. Eggers never claimed to be an expert on tech, turning his back on authenticity for maximum allegorical impact; indeed, he intentionally avoided visiting or researching tech companies while writing it.

The Circle's film adaptation, directed by James Ponsoldt and out today, still feels like a futuristic thriller, but hews closer to reality than its outlandish source material. The most fear-mongering aspects of the book are absent from the movie: PartiRank, a measure of workplace popularity that consumes Mae Holland (Emma Watson); PastPerfect, which unearths family secrets that send Annie (Karen Gillan) into a permanent catatonic state; even Tom Stenton, the power-hungry COO, is good-natured and fish-free when played by Patton Oswalt. The Circle’s all-seeing cameras, now including trollish pop-ups from online commenters, seem less morally suspect when they save Mae’s life. And while the revised ending keeps Mae relatable, it softens the moral stance: Is privacy more important than equal access for all? Eggers’ didactic novel says yes; the movie hedges—and suffers for it. By attempting to make Eggers’ preachy hyperbole relatable, Ponsoldt holds the dystopia accountable for accuracy, which diminishes its power as a thriller.

Satires of Silicon Valley have to strike a difficult balance: Seek out moral high ground and lose a real-world setting, like The Circle; rely too heavily on details, like Startup, and commit to impossible accuracy. Silicon Valley manages to thread the satirical Scylla and Charybdis by focusing on the relatable lives of its characters, set within a tech world. The Pied Piper team isn't really trying to make the world a better place—mostly, they’re trying to stumble through their twenties. Take out the in-office nap pods and drum stations, and that’s still a story every viewer can relate to.