Beavis and Butt-Head

[This article appears in the September-October 2015 issue of The Austrian.]

With Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill, Mike Judge earned his place in pop culture history. His new HBO comedy Silicon Valley seems an unlikely follow-up to his earlier successes. The man who made a film called Idiocracy has been specializing in portraying really dumb people, or, at least in the case of propane salesman Hank Hill, really ordinary people. “It’s not exactly rocket science” pretty much sums up the lives of all Judge’s earlier characters.

So why has Judge now turned to computer science as his subject? His new show is set in the glamorous and sophisticated world of high tech, featuring a brilliant programmer who comes up with something called a “lossless compression algorithm.” The answer is that Judge wants to show that computer programmers and software moguls can be pretty dumb, too. The joy of Silicon Valley is watching these would-be high-flyers crash and burn in one self-created disaster after another.

In pop culture, innovation is usually presented as a purely technological matter, not at all as an economic problem. Businessmen are typically depicted as obstacles to innovation, not the people who in fact make it possible. Pop culture celebrates the oddball inventor, the nerd who comes up with a new gadget, a gizmo that does something that has never been done before. But a gizmo is not yet a product. A genuine product requires a business team to make it succeed. For example, it requires capital to develop and produce it, and it also needs to be marketed properly. That is the lesson Hendricks must learn in Silicon Valley — and the audience learns it too. Rather than Computer Science 10, the show is Economics 101.

Hendricks begins with the programmer’s pride in his mathematical know-how and contempt for the business end of Silicon Valley. In the first episode, he dismisses Apple’s Steve Jobs as “a poser,” points out that “he didn’t write code,” and belittles him because he only “knows how to package ideas.” Within a few episodes, Hendricks is desperately wishing that he had a bit of Steve Jobs in him. Under pressure to preserve his venture capital funding, he is incapable of articulating a vision for his company in a business plan, and he has to rely on a glib partner to regale Gregory with marketing clichés and buzzwords like “The Cloud.” In the second season, Hendricks has to link up with a rival company that has a weaker compression algorithm but does have a marketing staffalready in place to push a product that really works.

Silicon Valley does portray some businessmen as greedy, childishly competitive, pretentious, and vain. But on the whole it offers a refreshing alternative to the negative view of business generally found in American pop culture. Even while making fun of the follies in the world of start-ups and venture capitalism, it makes a point familiar in Austrian economics — that the true entrepreneur is a visionary and the chief motive force behind technological progress.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post Beavis and Butt-Head appeared first on LewRockwell.