Good and Bad #4: WeCrashed, Super Pumped, The Dropout
Adam Rothbarth asks: There’s been a rash of great tech shows recently. But who are they really about?
Ever since The Social Network came out, I've been extremely attracted to films and shows about technology and startups. Whether it’s the quantum computing tech-thriller Devs, the mind-bending, underrated Mr. Robot, or the absurdist (but probably more on-point than we realize) Silicon Valley, I am definitely the target audience for anything involving some combination of computers, geniuses, and conflict. Recently, there’s been a new wave of miniseries that tell the stories of a modern generation of tech figures: WeCrashed chronicles the rise and fall of WeWork founder Adam Neumann and his wife Rebekah, who spent their money recklessly and prioritized regressive, incoherent projects; Super Pumped tells the story of the ousting of brusque Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who made the revolutionary service the behemoth it is; and The Dropout explores Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos, a medical company that never really came close to doing what she claimed for years that it could. I, of course, loved watching all of them.
What I like about these shows—and tangential big-business dramas like Succession and Billions—is that they try to show that their central anti-heroes aren’t motivated by abstract concepts like “greed” and “power,” but rather that they’re driven by extreme pathological motivations, serious emotional deficiencies given and engendered by society (usually delivered through the family and through one’s relationship to sex). We love to point towards prominent figures like the ones depicted in these shows and believe that they’re the problem with our world today, and these shows (not made by underdogs but top-tier places like HBO Max, Apple TV+, Hulu, and Showtime) bank on this. But the deeper truth, what we really cannot tolerate, is that these protagonists are driven by the same kinds of pain and trauma, the same base desires and needs, as we are. Further from Patrick Bateman and Gordon Gekko these characters could not be, but I’m not sure that most people are capable of seeing the difference today. Maybe you could be the next Adam Neumann. It all started with such a simple idea….
In Capital, Vol. I, Marx wrote, “So far, no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or diamond.” I think about this quote a lot with regard to the concept of “greed” when I hear people complaining about billionaires and politicians, who have become the easy scapegoats for “what’s wrong”; yet, I’m not sure I believe greed is inherent in man. To offer another quote, German critical theorist Max Horkheimer wrote in his essay The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom, “Men must submit to conditions they themselves constantly create as to something alien and overwhelmingly powerful.” When we look at figures like Holmes and Neumann (or Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, or even Donald Trump) we aren’t just seeing heartless capitalists and vulgar politicians, designers of our misery, but the logical endpoints of our own daily behaviors. Wanting to have money and power isn’t a cause, but an effect, in part an attempt to salve the unquenchable despair of living in the world today. On the level of the particular, it’s a matter of personal psychology, but in a broader sense, there’s a necessary hierarchy to capitalism: Somebody must oversee production and claim surplus value, and it must exist at everyone’s expense (though most directly, that of the worker). The Wu-Tang Clan were so deeply right when they said, “Cash rules everything around me.”
The people depicted in these films and shows, from Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network to the Neumann family in WeCrashed, aren’t the inhuman maniacs we need them to be (though The Dropout’s Holmes comes closest to this)—they’re normal, broken people. Yuppie-hippie Rebekah Neumann is dominated by an inferiority complex (her wealthy father’s relationship to money is complicated, her cousin is Gwyneth Paltrow), while Kalanick’s mommy issues lead, in part, to a supremely toxic work environment and a cliquey board of directors (you’ll see how this plays out). In Succession, BDSM and daddy problems are built into nearly every scene.
These new miniseries are great because they attempt to humanize their protagonists—assumed to be pure evil by most viewers—and help us see them as symptoms, not causes in themselves; and their success is due in no small part to deeply nuanced and often career-best performances from Jared Leto (Adam Neumann), Anne Hathaway (Rebekah Neumann), Amanda Seyfried (Elizabeth Holmes), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Travis Kalanick). Shows like WeCrashed and The Dropout are great alternatives to, frankly, significantly dumber attempts to understand the figures that run our world, like last year’s award-winning, list-topping Don’t Look Up, which depicts politicians, businessmen, and newscasters as one-dimensional, barbaric idiots, the root cause of the end of the world. It must be nice, though, to always think the problem is somebody else, as I’m sure many of the film’s fans and makers believe. If only the world were run by smart, nice people like us.