Annotating the tech references in Mountainhead
"What we have is toxic, not terminal"
Summited “Mountainhead”? The new movie from “Succession” showrunner Jesse Armstrong is loaded with Big Tech references and jargon that layer this satire with meaning and depth. Here are some notes on each character, as well as some lines that are irresistible for unpacking a bit more. Spoilers below!
Venis and Traam
At first blush, Ven’s company, Traam, is said to have four billion users and is an obvious stand-in for Meta and their social media apps Facebook and Instagram. The interface we see looks a bit like Instagram Reels and TikTok. The update to Traam that kicks off the drama of the movie is a “full suite” of content tools described as enabling easy creation of “hyper-personalized” AI-generated messages and “unfalsifiable deepfakes,” or fake videos made to look real featuring the likenesses of real people.
I think the messaging piece implies something on the order of a global messaging app like Meta’s WhatsApp. Whereas the deepfake creation tools might be something like TikTok Studio (the app for editing TikTok videos) mixed with Veo 3, the AI video generation model Google just showed off at I/O, without any sort of guardrails or limits.
Traam also makes sense as a stand-in for Meta because the global violence unleashed over the course of the movie is an obvious analog to Meta’s involvement in violence aboard, especially in Myanmar, where it infamously contributed to genocide in 2017. Recently, Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director at Meta, shared far more detail about the company’s international misadventures in her book “Careless People”.
However, I don’t think Venis is meant to be like Meta’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (although, like Venis in the car at the beginning, Zuckerberg is reportedly surrounded by yes-men). Rather, Venis is Elon-coded. Not only is Venis described as the “richest man in the world,” he shares Elon’s obsessions with getting humanity “off this rock” and digitally uploading human consciousness. He also jumps around like a dipshit, is weird with his kid, and has some unusual sex stuff going on.
Randall the money man
Randall, in a few different ways, seems to be a stand-in for libertarian tech accelerationist venture capitalists, especially Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel. Andreessen, of the firm Andreessen Horowitz, swung towards Trump in the last election and is notorious for his manifestos like “It’s Time to Build” and “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Like Randall, Andreessen has invested far and wide, and this has made him incredibly rich and powerful.
As he condemns Jeff to death, Randall labels him with what he would consider a derogatory smear, calling Jeff a “decelerationist” or “decel” — someone who would slow technological progress. Further, Randall can justify anything, even murdering his friend, if he thinks it has the potential to “save a multiplicity of lives.” That’s a nod to effective altruism, a popular ethos in Silicon Valley that overlaps with utilitarianism, which the characters also invoke. They scoff at “solving malaria,” a common focus of effective altruists and tech philanthropists like Bill Gates. Their glib arrogance about the potential for global “creative destruction” is a tough watch.
Randall also has military connections and a “backdoor” (a way of surreptitiously controlling tech) into defense systems, which seems more like Peter Thiel. Thiel is maybe best known for taking down Gawker. He was the first investor in Facebook (like Randall and Traam) and founded Palantir, a big data firm heavily integrated into the military industrial complex. I really enjoyed seeing Randall doing yoga with a Yoga With Adriene video.
Jeff and Bilter
Jeff comes from the AI world, and like many AI CEOs, he has seen his net worth rise dramatically in a very short timeframe. His company, Bilter, is described as “guardrails” for the AI chaos being caused by Traam, but as a startup, it lacks “compute.” Without getting too deep into this, AI models rely on GPU computer chips, which are extremely sought after by the whole tech industry. Traam, as presumably one of the world’s largest tech companies, has this computational power to make use of Bilter’s seemingly revolutionary AI model.
While we’re talking AI, Randall and Venis are obsessed with AGI, which, depending on how you define it, usually means superintelligent AI. Depending on who you ask, this might mean a model that can do any job performed by a human on a computer, and/or be as smart as a large collection of Nobel laureates. This sort of thinking is seemingly widespread in Silicon Valley, as well as a lot of discussion of p(doom), or how likely you think it is that AI will bring down all of humanity. Jeff is also accused by Randall of having “crazy p(doom).”
The story of Traam acquiring Bilter resembles Meta’s acquisition of many companies, including WhatsApp and Instagram. But I think it looks most like CrowdTangle. CrowdTangle was created to track how social content moved around the internet, and Facebook bought it in the aftermath of the 2016 election. It wasn’t exactly guardrails, but it was a helpful outside tool that was useful in tracking toxicity. Then, after it became embarrassing, Meta wound it down.
Hugo and Slowzo
Hugo (Soupes), played by one of my favs, Jason Schwartzman, is kind of a catch all. As far as I can tell, he represents the striving builder class, the founders who are listening to the podcasts and reading the books — even the racist ones! They’re looking for any kind of advantage that can help them “go unicorn,” or earn a valuation north of one billion. These are folks who fill accelerators like Y Combinator and who go up and down Sand Hill Road, the stretch of Silicon Valley where VCs give out seed money to apps like Slowzo.
Slowzo seems to fit into the wellness category of apps, like Headspace and Calm. As Hugo admits, the only way a lot of apps like this make money is from subscribers forgetting to unsubscribe. For many VC-backed startups, the goal is to survive until they can “exit,” either through acquisition (like Traam buying Bilter) or going public on the stock market. VCs make lots of little bets, in the hope that a couple will go unicorn and make it all worth it. But in many cases, like with Uber, there is a cycle of enshittification: first get popular and then get worse in order to get profitable.
Random other references
“NSC wants a circuit breaker” – Before he speaks with the president, Venis is briefed that the National Security Council wants a “circuit breaker.” Internally, social media companies have a lot of control over how and when things go viral. The idea is to introduce friction, so as something starts to spread exponentially, it can be automatically paused and reviewed, in the same way there are automatic breaks when there are huge swings in the stock market. In some cases, like during the 2020 election, social media companies have shown just how capable they are at ratcheting down viral falsehoods and propaganda, if and when they want to.
“Founder energy” – We don’t know exactly what Venis said on that podcast about Jeff, but it had to do with “founder energy,” a phrase that sounds a lot like “founder mode.” This essay, which was extremely influential in Silicon Valley last year, is about how the Airbnb founder, Brian Chesky, had to take over, get his managers out of the way, and get really involved in the details of his company.
“Khashoggi” – This isn’t really a tech thing, it’s just pretty grim. In the hallway, on the way to murder Jeff, they’re chanting “Khashoggi,” the name of the Washington Post journalist murdered on behalf of Saudi Arabia in 2018.
“Sunk cost fallacy” – Jeff tries to convince his would-be murderers to give up, but Randall says they have to finish what they started. Jeff reminds them that this is an example of the sunk cost fallacy, a term from psychology and behavioral economics: just because you’ve invested a lot of time or resources into something doesn’t mean you have to keep going down that path. This is widely invoked in tech, and a common phenomenon in VC, where investors continue to fund “vaporware” (tech that never amounts to anything) or outright frauds like Theranos, despite clear signals that it’s time to stop.
“New Zealand sitch” – At the end, Jeff tells his partner he has to go figure out the “New Zealand sitch.” He has essentially agreed to go into exile, and New Zealand is a popular place for uber-rich tech elites to bug out to. Theil got citizenship there, but seems to have changed his mind about the country.
“Big learnings” – Tech jargon for “knowledge.” I don’t know why this is a thing either, but it very much is.
“We are definitely white hat” – As in, white hat hackers, or those hacking for good, as opposed to illegal or unethical black hat hacking.
What am I missing? I’m sure there’s more. What did you think of Mountainhead? Did it scratch the Succession itch?