6 - Technology Solutionism and the World of Work

Summary

Moving from foundational myths to twenty-first-century California, two films exemplify Hollywood's indictment of Silicon Valley's disruption of the American economy and its failure to respect its employees’ human lives. The Circle (James Ponsoldt, 2017), adapted from San Francisco native Dave Eggers's 2013 novel, uses its titular fictional tech company to attack Silicon Valley's Taylorism, authoritarianism and antihumanism. Thanks to its union of elements of Google, Facebook, PayPal, Twitter and Amazon, combined with its removal of online anonymity, the Circle dominates the world of the near future. The demands it places on its workers are such that they must abandon their private lives, temporally, geographically and eventually biologically. Dismissed as a feature-length advert for Google, The Internship (Shawn Levy, 2013) initially seems a whimsical, utopian mirror image of The Circle. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson essentially play themselves: Billy and Nick, two irreverent, optimistic and determinedly wacky Generation Xers – the generation of Americans born between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s – who have been cast aside when the watch distributor for which they work collapses. They improbably win internships at Google, where their can-do attitude wins the hearts of their fellow interns and secures all of them contracts at the corporation. The British film critic Mark Kermode denounced the film as ‘one of the most witless, humourless … self-satisfied, smug, unfunny comedies I have ever seen’. Yet a deep reading reveals that it presents Google as a Potemkin Village, where a utopian appearance covers the neoliberal dystopia at Google's heart. Reading The Internship against the grain – or, rather, analysing its political unconscious – enables us to consider more deeply the ideological assumptions that drive many people in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Also largely dismissed by critics, The Circle – which was financed by Image Nation Abu Dhabi – pitched itself as a dystopian critique of Silicon Valley, helped by a number of pointed casting choices. Playing against type, America's favourite uncle, Tom Hanks (as the Circle's head, Eamon Bailey), and the comedian Patton Oswalt (as the Circle's Chief Operating Officer Tom Stenton) reference the ruthless-capitalism-with-a-benign-façade that characterises tech evangelists such as Google's founders.