What They’re Really Thinking in Silicon Valley
'Devs' Revisited
The 2020 Science Fiction mini-series Devs was little-seen when it came out during the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic. The work of British director and writer Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), perhaps it was always destined to reach a niche audience, but the show deserves more than that, as my recent revisit confirms.
Devs is many things: it is a techno-thriller set in Silicon Valley; a science fiction story about futuristic inventions; a meditation on free will and determinism. That it manages to juggle these different themes with relative ease and finesse shows how accomplished the series is. Moreover, it is perhaps one the best-looking show that I have seen in a long time, with Alex Garland pushing the boundaries of set, art and sound design. His patient, precise, almost Kubrickian cinematography gives the series a unique look and atmosphere, and I would recommend it for aesthetic reasons alone.
First, a quick plot summary. The first episode follows Russian computer programmer Sergei who works at the tech company Amaya. Amaya is Apple, Google and Meta all in one and it has a gorgeous Silicon Valley campus full of airy offices and shaded by leafy trees. A giant statue of girl towers the campus ominously but no one seems to pay it any mind. Sergei’s girlfriend, Lily, works in the encryption division of Amaya, and they live together in San Francisco. Early on Sergei impresses Amaya founder Forrest and gets inducted into a secret division of the company known as ‘Devs’. Devs is based in an elegant and futuristic bunker at the edge of the Amaya campus and Sergei is given a computer and told to get to work. He isn’t told what to work on however, and Forrest tells him to figure out what Devs does by himself. Sergei quickly pieces things together and we see him take pictures of the Devs facility and the computer code that he had been reading. As Sergei leaves Devs he is confronted by Forrest and accused of espionage, he is then strangled to death by Amaya’s head of security. After this shocking twist at the end of the episode the rest of the series follows Lily as she tries to work out what happened to her boyfriend and what is really happening inside Devs.
At the heart of Devs is the character of Forrest, the founder of Amaya. We find out that Amaya is named after his daughter, who died alongside his wife in tragic car crash just meters outside of their house. Forrest blames himself for their deaths and is dedicated to somehow bringing them back. The entire Devs project is his was of doing that. As the show goes on, we find out that Devs is working on an extremely powerful quantum computer. This computer can project both backwards and forwards in time with exact precision by calculating the trajectory of every particle in the universe. Characters witness a fuzzy version of the crucifixion and go back in time to see Kennedy assassination – ‘It was Oswald’ one of them drolly remarks. In a wry commentary on how pornography is always on the bleeding edge of technological development one of the programmers even watches Arthur Miller and Marylin Monroe’s wedding night. Crucially, in order to work, the quantum computer is operating under the principle of determinism; If one can accurately measure the state of all particles at one point in time, one can predict their state at any future point in time, and vice versa for past events. By projecting backwards (and forwards) the Devs computer can understand the past and predict the future.
This raises many questions, as a good sci-fi premise should. What makes Devs great however, is that not only does it explores the future, but it is also revealing about the present. Devs is the best cinematic portrayal of San Francisco I have seen. Each episode begins with an expressionistic montage, mixing sound and image, and many of these focus on San Francisco, an innately cinematic city with its bright orange colossal bridge, hilly urban landscape and foggy, eerie surroundings. Devs’s portrayal matches Fincher’s Zodiac but updates it for the 21st century; there are more homeless people and more tech workers, but the city is still beautiful and sinister. Aside from San Francisco, the show also has a deep understanding and portrayal of the workings and politics of Silicon Valley.
When we think of Silicon Valley, we tend to think of progressivism gone awry. Giant American tech companies promoting extreme, intolerant social liberalism, censoring opposing viewpoints and getting us all hooked on their addictive algorithms and apps. However, the politics is Silicon Valley has always been more interesting and contradictory. In a 1995 essay by British cultural theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron identified the ethos of Silicon Valley and they called it ‘The California Ideology. ‘This new faith,’ they write, ‘has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.’ The California ideology combined neoliberal capitalism with the 60s counter-culture – think Steve Jobs’ experiments with LSD – and had a profoundly utopian outlook. New technology, its adherents claimed, would lead to positive social change. Allowing the internet to run free would make us all better off.
The California Ideology may seem naïve now, after all the prevailing wisdom has swung the other way. The internet and so-called ‘disinformation’ is hurting out children, destroying democracy and ruining the world. As ever, the truth is somewhere in the middle. The dream of the California Ideology failed but it made some pretty great things along the way. What replaced the apolitical libertarianism of California Ideology as the main political view of Silicon Valley, the extreme progressivism of the late 2010s, was worse, but now that luckily seems to be fading too. The characters in Devs aren’t progressives. The show in many ways shows the value shift that is underway in the tech industry, which culminated in the purchase of the social media site Twitter by Elon Musk.
Much of Devs can be explained through the lens of NeoReaction of NRx, a fringe online movement that has slowly gained a following in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley. NeoReactionary thought is deeply sceptical of enlightenment liberalism, democracy, and egalitarianism as a whole. It emphasises the need for hierarchical governance as centralised leadership is seen to be most effective. Its appeal to more right-leaning parts of the tech world should be obvious. Tech entrepreneurs believe themselves to be better than everyone else; they believe that equality is a fairy tale. If equality is a lie then the justifications for democracy collapse. And what do you replace democracy with? Well, perhaps you run the state like a firm. Not like an agro-business dependent on EU subsidies and hand-outs mind you, but like a real company, like a start-up. As PayPal founder Peter Thiel writes, ‘every start-up is basically structured like a monarchy’. There is one leader at the top who makes the decisions. Now the appeal of NRx in Silicon Valley makes more sense.
But there’s a downside to this ideology as Devs deftly illustrates. Forrest runs Amaya like a monarch. In fact, he runs it like an absolute monarch; he orders his employees to kill for him and commands absolute loyalty. The show is unsubtle with some of the imagery. Forrest sees himself as a prophet; his haircut makes him look like Jesus and the circular lighting in the Amaya campus creates a halo around his head. But the character of Forrest also suffers from a weakness that is prevalent in Silicon Valley; a combination of ignorance and arrogance. The world as a whole does not work like Silicon Valley. Life is more unpredictable than lines of code. In Devs, Forrest is a strong believer in the philosophy of determinism, but however strong the arguments for it may be, the average person knows that it doesn’t make sense – they know that they have free will and that their actions aren’t pre-determined. As George Orwell once said ‘Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals would believe them.’ But the rulers of Silicon Valley are not even intellectuals. In my favourite scene in Devs near the end of the series, one of the characters recites Phillip Larkin’s magisterial poem Aubade, which concerns the fear of death. Forrest overhears this, and thinks the character is reciting ‘Shakespeare or something’.
Tech CEOs aren’t well-read or well-rounded. Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto mogul currently on trial for fraud, said that ‘I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post’. I think this tells you everything you need to know about the man. Bankman-Fried was a promoter of another Silicon Valley fad ideology known as Effective Altruism or EA. This set of ideas shares something with all the other Silicon Valley ideologies: it sounds good on paper, but it doesn’t work in real life. Politics is a messy business and should be left out of the hands of utopians and put in the hands of realists. Devs shows that Silicon Valley is capable of many things, but Elon Musk’s late-night tweeting confirms that it is fundamentally incapable of understanding politics. People on the right may mock university degrees in Feminism or in Social Studies, and they would be right to do so, but an overemphasis on science, maths and engineering is just as damaging. In ignoring art and culture and history, in ignoring the importance of humanities, the tech overlords (both real and fictional) fail to grasp humanity as a whole. That’s the real lesson of Devs. It isn’t about free will, or determinism, or murder; it’s about one man’s God complex, and that’s a complex is remarkably prevalent in the men that control our future. We should wary of this.
This article originally appeared in Interkom magazine.