Some Quick Thoughts on 'Mountainhead' after Watching It

I'm glad it’s a movie rather than a full, multi-season series. I gave up on Succession half way through the first season, and I would have given up on this too if I had to watch much more of it. That doesn't mean it fails--the writing is clever, and the humor burns--but that there's just so much nihilism that I can stomach. But I hope you watch it. It reminds me a lot of Adam McKay's Don't Look Up. Both are about the madness of life lived according to the logic that structures the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.

Like Succession and Don't Look Up, Mountainhead is satire, and satire takes something true and magnifies it while at the same time it minimizes whatever might complexify it. Great satire finds something in the complexity that might otherwise be missed and brings it out in high relief. If it works, it does so because it helps you to see or understand something that was getting lost in the shuffle.

So for someone like me, a movie like this doesn't work as satire because it's not bringing anything into view that was invisible to me. I've been writing about the morally stunted people who lead Tech and the nihilism of Silicon Valley and its Transhumanist ideology for years now.

I wonder, however, if it works for young people in Tech. All the thousands of young Computer Science graduates this Spring with stars in their eyes about the big paychecks and lavish lifestyle they'll be able to live. How excited they must be at the prospect of working at one of these companies whose b.s. they've come to believe is going to change the world and benefit humanity as promoted in so many hollow-sounding, formulaically, hyperbolic ways. So many of these kids with no real moral grounding or maturity will be quickly absorbed into the ethos of these companies and become good little Transhumanists. Perhaps watching a movie like this will give them pause, but probably not. A movie like this is easy to dismiss as too over the top.

But is it? What struck me as I was watching the movie was not so much how it was about the Silicon Valley nihilism, but about the nihilism in the Trump administration, and how the clownish, hubristic insanity in Washington is reflected in the clownish hubristic insanity of these tech billionaires. Think about everything we've learned about Musk since his buying of Twitter. Think about the portrait of Sam Altman that emerges in Karen Hao's The Empire of AI. Think about what came into view in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried.

Why is the behavior of these guys in the movie so implausible given what we know of the real behavior and attitudes that we read about in the news, about their materialist nihilism and their utilitarian calculus? What impedes people like them from doing the monstrous things this movie satirizes? These are people who see themselves as uebermenschen,superior humans who live beyond good and evil. As Roger Stone says, "Morality is for losers." Nothing really matters. Everything is a joke. So have fun playing the game. These are the people currently running our politics and our most powerful, future-shaping businesses. I don't think it’s exaggerating to say it.

Perhaps satire is dead because it's impossible anymore to exaggerate or oversimplify what in fact is over the top and so one-dimensional in its simplemindedness.