‘The tech bro fight club is real!’ The titans of AI get the Succession treatment in a wild new TV show

Showrunner Jonathan Glatzer wanted the tagline of his latest TV creation to be: “We’re so fucked.” He laughs. “Sadly it got rejected by the network. Hey, maybe I can use it for season two!” The show in question is The Audacity, his darkly comic drama about AI tech titans. Instead, it went with the more PG tagline “Move fast and break people” – a twist on “Move fast and break things”, the Facebook motto coined by Mark Zuckerberg. The Audacity promises to do for tech bros what Succession did for legacy media. Considering Glatzer is a former writer on Succession, that is no empty threat.

This acerbic and all-too-timely Silicon Valley satire follows CEO Duncan Park (played by Billy Magnussen), the obscenely wealthy founder of a data analytics company. He’s a self-proclaimed “inventor of the future” who also happens to be a morally bankrupt man-baby. “Duncan is worth about half a billion,” says Glatzer. “Naturally, that’s not enough. He desperately wants to be a billionaire and ascend to what we call ‘God Mountain’. But he’s no God.”

Like Succession, The Audacity’s scripts are liberally spiced with baroque swearing. Park boasts about keeping investors “moist” and “Viagra-ing the share price to keep it up”. Magnussen delivers such juicy dialogue with relish. “Jonathan has a way of painting a picture with words while also getting nasty with it,” he grins. “My favourite line in season two is: ‘I pulled it out of my ass and it came out clean.’ You’ll have to wait and see what it refers to.” It’s a measure of The Audacity’s whip-smart relevance that the second season was commissioned before the first had even aired.

‘Basically created spam’ … Zach Galifianakis as Carl Bardolph. Photograph: Ed Araquel/AMC

“Unquestionably, there’s a tech bro mentality that is sexualised,” says Glatzer. “Silicon Valley is such a male-dominated culture. It’s also very white or south Asian. When I first came here, I didn’t see a person of colour for two weeks. That struck me as very odd in a major US city. Hiring practices are dictated by algorithms. The algorithms say that if you went to these universities, you’re our man. If you came from someplace else, and are maybe not a man, the algorithm says you might be problematic. And you could end up writing a book about us.”

The Audacity pulls no punches on how the tech sector is wrecking the planet. “It sure is,” says Glatzer. “Generative AI is environmentally ruinous. Datacentres are tremendous suckers of energy. Worryingly, it doesn’t take too many rampantly ambitious entrepreneurs to fuck up an entire planet for the rest of us.” When Park is warned about the huge carbon footprint of his “algo”, he shrugs: “I’ll sponsor a penguin.”

Zach Galifianakis plays billionaire genius Carl Bardolph, who “basically created spam”. He’s rich enough to retire but becomes a disruptor out of boredom. “I’ve always been very concerned about the people running tech,” says Galifianakis. “They have math minds, but that sometimes comes with a lack of empathy. About 12 nerds are controlling our lives and designing our futures. And they all tend to have the same profile. Most come from Stanford University. I don’t know what they’re teaching there.” He laughs. “It’s weird and kind of evil.”

Did Galifianakis base his portrayal on anyone specific? “He’s pulled from one dude I’ve watched over the years. I won’t give his name but he’s a real piece of shit. A major jerk. The guys running Silicon Valley are damaged. Carl has a giant hole in his heart and a ton of anger because of his dad. I’ve seen a lot of men like that in Hollywood, so I drew on them too. Most of the puppet masters are egomaniac weirdos and I wouldn’t mind saying that to their faces. Zuckerberg has something missing. Elon Musk is bizarre. They’re little boys. You almost feel sorry for them.”

“Duncan also deals with daddy issues and a lack of love,” says Magnussen. “A lot of tech bros are trying to fill voids. The great irony is that the most antisocial people work in social media. Those who don’t know how to be personable are controlling how we communicate. It’s nuts.”

Both actors view the show as a howl of protest. “I’ve done some cool shit in my career,” says Magnussen. “I’ve been in Bond [he played a CIA agent in No Time to Die]. I’ve been in fun, escapist movies. But this feels different. It’s a call to arms. People need to wake up to the audacious behaviour of this handful of people. Their decisions affect 8.3 billion people. That’s scary, man. I just hope our show opens some conversations. We’ve got to start making a difference.”

Galifianakis agrees. “It’s a warning. I’ve never felt this way before with my work – come on, I was in a movie with a baby wearing sunglasses [The Hangover] – but this show’s important. This industry has no guard rails. You can’t sue them, you can’t do anything, so of course they’re going to take advantage of the population. That’s exactly what they’ve done. The destructive environmental impact alone is enough reason to take to the streets and protest. Sure, there’s all this darkness online but also, we’re going to take your water and electricity from you, too.”

Park blackmails his therapist – sorry, “performance psychologist” (played by Barry’s Sarah Goldberg) – into giving him insider-trading tips from her other powerful clients. The pair are soon engulfed in a scandal over fraudulent stock pumping. It’s a familiar-sounding storyline. “Elon got into trouble for market manipulation,” says Glatzer. “It’s like Duncan says in the show: ‘It’s not a felony in Silicon Valley, it’s good hustle.’ That’s the mentality here. Laws are for morons, not us.”

Real world echoes are everywhere in The Audacity. The search engine of choice is called Spookle (slogan: “You Agreed to This”). A corporation called Cupertino is a thinly veiled reference to Apple, while its mythical boss “Big Tim” nods to Tim Cook. Are any of Glatzer’s characters directly based on real-life figures? “The truth is, I don’t find any of them worthy of a three-dimensional character that could go the distance of multiple seasons,” says Glatzer. “They’re interesting enough for a film like The Social Reckoning but not much more.”

In cahoots … Sarah Goldberg as JoAnne Felder. Photograph: David Moir/AMC

Indeed, Magnussen can currently be seen in The Social Reckoning as a Meta spin doctor. Is this his tech bro era? “AI is the most pressing issue of our time,” he says. “It affects our planet, our politics, our mental health, everything. Technology can do wonderful things but once it starts dividing us or swaying elections, it’s deeply damaging.”

“I don’t understand why people get on board with social media,” sighs Galifianakis. “We fed these machines for years. Now these machines are going to find us. I don’t believe the promises of AI because I don’t trust the people doing it.”

The Audacity’s protagonist has been described as “highly punchable”. Magnussen concurs: “You’ve seen these guys in front of Congress. They’re pretty fucking punchable.” An early episode includes a sequence at a Palo Alto fight club, where nerds whack each other with keyboards and strangle each other with cables. “That’s real!” laughs Magnussen. “The tech bro fight club is an actual thing.”

Despite the plentiful real-world parallels, Glatzer has never met a tech mogul. “That’s fine by me,” he says. “I don’t imagine the conversation would be anything other than stage-managed and dishonest. They have people workshopping their handshake and smile, so what am I going to get from that? But I have talked to a number of people who work in the tech world. The first thing they say is: ‘I’m not like that. That’s those other guys. I’m one of the good ones.’”

“Me too,” says Magnussen. “The response I get is: ‘I know that guy!’ It’s always someone else. You want to go: ‘No, it’s you. You’re that guy.’”

In America’s richest enclave, hi-tech goes hand-in-hand with hippy-dippy. The Audacity lampoons heath fads like ayahuasca ceremonies, microdosing and bio-hacking. “Tech titans feel as if they’ve got the golden ticket,” says Glatzer. “They want their prime to last as long as possible, perhaps for ever. Maybe the singularity comes when they upload themselves into an AI consciousness and become gods. I don’t have proof of that being the reason why so many datacentres are being built by these guys – but I don’t think it’s uninvolved.”

“There’s no limit to these people’s overreach,” agrees Magnussen. “They truly believe their life is more valuable than anyone else’s.”

Trying to play God … Simon Helberg in The Audacity. Photograph: Ed Araquel / AMC/HBO

The show also skewers the hypocrisy of execs who ban their own offspring from smartphones, reasoning that “arms dealers don’t give their kids landmines”. “It’s like how a lot of Hollywood don’t have TVs in their houses,” says Galifianakis. “Because they know the poison they’re selling.”

“They know the dangers,” nods Glatzer. “It’s a classic case of capitalism gone haywire. I don’t think they’d live next door to a datacentre either. None of them do what they’re telling us to do. It used to be that people in public life had to practise what they preached. That has quietly gone away. US congresspeople invest in the same tech companies they’re supposedly regulating. Look at what Trump’s doing. It’s a kleptocracy.”

He’s equally concerned by “screenification” in schools. “The amount of information gathered on our kids is frightening,” says Glatzer. “Shopping habits, medical history, exam grades. When schools get given tablets in the States, the law says it’s OK for the provider to track that student. We’re handing our kids these screens with the patina of being an educational tool but they are data-collecting devices. Just like everything is.”

“I can’t believe how much information people give up,” says Galifianakis. “If you go to LA, there’s all these cars that say Google on the side, taking pictures of everything. If those cars said US Government, people would lose their minds. But because it’s a corporation, we all sit back and go: ‘I guess this is the future.’ I think people are starting to wake up but maybe it’s too late.” He laughs. “What do I know? I’m just a dumb actor trying to alarm people. But our children are the new oil. They’re being mined for data.”

“I’m most scared for the kids,” agrees Magnussen. “They’ve been digital since they were born. They’re being manipulated without even knowing.”

Filling a void … Magnussen as Park. Photograph: Ed Araquel/AMC

In The Audacity, even seemingly benign tech is sinister. Eccentric inventor Martin Phister (The Big Bang Theory’s Simon Helberg) is developing an empathetic bot to be a digital “friend” for alienated teens. US viewers have likened him to OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who initially presented as a sympathetic mogul.

“Martin’s trying to do something good,” says Glatzer. “You later learn that he’s compensating for something very bad. Carl has a speech about his generation coming to a crossroads: ‘Leave a legacy of good or go full Dr Evil.’ Most choose the latter. They are drawn to doing something positive but they are Hungry Hungry Hippos. They can’t resist the allure of a good deal.”

“Carl knew the internet could have been a good thing for society if we’d done it right,” adds Galifianakis. “But greed and old-fashioned American competition, the need to win, became more important than human beings.”

Geeky idealism is long gone. “It began as a desire to change the world for the better,” says Glatzer. “A bunch of nerdy engineers wore hoodies rather than suits and put ‘Do No Evil’ slogans on their office walls. That’s all in the rear-view mirror.”

Glatzer freely admits that his work on Succession informed The Audacity. “There’s no way that it didn’t. But that was about institutional, dynastic wealth, whereas our characters are self-made. They are Logan Roy as a young man, if he had decided to be a tech guy rather than a media baron. What I certainly gleaned from Jesse Armstrong was finding a tone that enables you to give the establishment some real gut punches. Sarcasm might be the protest of the weak, but that’s all we’ve got. Speaking as a weakling.”

The invasive cyber-surveillance and data-mining in The Audacity are deeply chilling. “We consulted experts but all the information is out there,” says Glatzer. “The Guardian and New York Times do some terrific reporting on AI. It always feels like the journalists secretly want to headline their articles: ‘Wake the fuck up! This is happening!’”