7 - Dystopian Diversity

Summary

In the very first episode of Silicon Valley, Gavin Belson spots from his panoptic office window a multitude of Hooli computer engineers wandering around the company's grounds. ‘They always travel in groups of five,’ he muses, ‘a tall skinny white guy, short skinny Asian guy, fat guy with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair and then an East Indian guy. It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group.’ Belson here revealingly highlights Silicon Valley's racial diversity. Yet his observation overlooks the under-representation of African and African American people in these groups and the fact that each man in each group seems no older than thirty. His final elision relates to the tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman's observation that sexism is much more prevalent and explicit than racism in Silicon Valley: no women appear in the groups he sees and thus employs. The Circle and The Internship confirm this heavily masculine and almost completely white environment, even as both over-represent women and global majority people in Silicon Valley corporations. As important, each film highlights Silicon Valley's problematic approach to the concept of diversity, while both force their leading female characters to ensure a series of punishments that at once highlights Silicon Valley's casual misogyny while extending the gender critique embedded in the biopics of Jobs and Zuckerberg.

Racial Diversity

The Internship ostensibly presents Google as a paragon of diversity and anti-discrimination, beginning with Vaughn and Wilson's introduction to Google's workers. As if to reinforce the notion that Generation Xers lived in a different age, they must endure a humiliating interview process before being inducted into Google. Echoing their former boss's lamentations about a computer-driven economy, this is not a face-to-face meeting but one that takes place in a virtual zone. Naturally, as unemployed, superannuated oldies, they do not possess a home computer with a broadband connection fast enough to host live video, so they retreat to a public library for the interview. Significantly, they meet in the children's section, suggesting that Google will release them from their emasculating perpetual Gen-X childhood and enable them to grow (up).