How Hollywood Failed Silicon Valley: Chronicle

We here in Hollywood owe the world a huge apologies.

No, I’m not talking about live-action snow White or another explosive box office joke of the day. I mean something much worse. While we could all use less doom scrolling, it’s hard not to feel like everything is on fire right now. Stagflation is rising, ICE is terrorizing our cities, AI waste is drowning the Internet — and, oh yes, a looming bubble of overcapitalized data centers driving up electricity costs and decimating drinking water here and abroad. Also, global warming: still relevant, despite AI death cults.

But wait, you ask, how is it going Hollywood mistake? Aren’t we too busy trying to revive 1950s comics for the umpteenth time? I thought this was all due to out of control Tech Bros? They’re the ones who are so obsessed with building RoboGod that they threw their golden horde behind Mad King Donald so no one could stop them from littering the earth with data centers like so many Amazon boxes piling up in the hallways at Christmas.

Yes, you are right. It’s their direct fault. But in Hollywood, we haven’t done enough to stop them.

It seems strange to think that Hollywood could somehow control the broligarchs with Old regime wealth levels. And obviously we did something. The 2023 strikes sounded the alarm about the damage AI frenzy would wreak on Silicon Valley, and West Los Angeles was nothing if not Kamala Country… before it was burned to the ground in a fire started by someone who may have been suffering from Chatbot Psychosis. But we didn’t do it RIGHT things.

The deeper truth of Hollywood is that, like cocaine, it exists primarily to help people with way too much money burn it in a relatively safe and ego-pleasing way, which sometimes results in art. They can dock their yachts in Cannes and Venice, party with a Hemsworth or two, then enjoy a standing O in a tuxedo for supporting something cool. This is how it worked for most of the 20th century. If successful, the incredibly rich walk the red carpet and get a movie poster to admire in retirement. And audiences have access to crazy movies and TV shows that would otherwise never be made, doing crazy and stupid things like recreating Napoleonic-era naval battles off the coast of the Galapagos.

Hollywood was, and always had been, the casino of prestige and glamor for the richest of the rich. The trick was simply to find the next pile of exorbitant wealth and lure it in with our siren song of cultural relevance and creative ambition. By the turn of the century, with Google’s de facto monopoly on Internet advertising revenue, it was obvious that this stack was in Silicon Valley. The guide was clear: go butter up those agoraphobic nerds with sweaty palms. Ask them to part with that money, invest in a wacky roll of film or ten. Teach them the ins and outs of artistic creation, skill and taste. Make them all want to make tomorrow’s dreams come true so they can fund the weird theater kids to dress up and play pretend. In return, we’d do a biopic or two about their favorite computer heroes. (PS: Math billionaires, if anyone is a die-hard Kurt Gödel fan, I have the script!)

But we failed. Maybe the STEM culture of social isolation was too annoying for Hollywood to break. Or maybe we were too reluctant to invite the hooded introverts to the cultural party. Of course, Apple, Amazon and Netflix have “invested” in “content”. But they did it with all the passion of a data analyst correcting a rounding error, which is all Hollywood is to them. They took our magic and made it mundane, probably because real creative risk-taking is so low on their priority list, like the panic room in the basement. (Apple might have some creative ambition; unsurprisingly, it’s the tech giant least inclined to brazenly jump into the AI ​​fire.)

If anything, the streaming era has moved away from the glory days of cable, resurrecting the network approach on digital steroids. There are exceptions and we always manage to slip a few funny ones past the algorithm, but the apotheosis of bean counting has resulted in “respectable” shows that chase trends but rarely stand out. As if there’s a magic formula for success: once you find it hidden in enough data, you can insert it into your sentient AI and remix the content stream over and over again and – you get the idea. We let them think that spitting out random “iterated” pixels was making a point or telling a story. So of course they plugged in GPUs to try to imitate us.

Hollywood has let Silicon Valley treat it like a logical, scientifically tractable enterprise that it only vaguely resembles, not what it really is: a crazy, shot-in-the-dark gamble. An excuse for wealthy individuals to indulge in their follies, burn their wealth, and create a “culture,” if only accidentally. It worked for the Medici, the Spanish crown, even for our first generation of crass robber barons: once these pirates became filthy rich, they headed straight to Europe, stocking up on antiques, now we have the Met. Because the very rich don’t really need taste or vision to play – artists provide that – they just need to feel like part of the team and party with us every time we hit the cultural jackpot.

But if that doesn’t happen, we get This world: the filthy rich indulge in other misguided follies that do much more harm. Silicon Valley dreamed up poor derivations of cautionary tales from the past and created a monoculture of exploitative social media feeds and data-hungry predatory apps that gave rise to Orwell’s surveillance state. Worse yet, they broke the number one rule of drug dealers everywhere and started getting high on their own supply. Thus, the quest for the AI ​​God was born. We now have a world where starry-eyed herds line up to hear Peter Thiel ruminate on the Antichrist while Larry Page, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk trade those mountains of gold for veritable piles of baked sand, so that “superintelligent AI” can spread across the “light cone” of the universe like cancer. Without our help, they succumbed to the unfulfilled dreams of children who were afraid both of living an emotionally healthy life and facing inevitable death. And they made a deal with a political devil so they could build their barren future unhindered while the rest of us live with the consequences.

It didn’t have to be this way. If there’s one thing Hollywood does well, it’s indulge in mind-blowing madness in the face of stubborn mortality. But we never forget to keep it strictly imaginary. Alas, we dropped the ball, and now the patriarchs of Silicon Valley have unleashed their very deep madness on this very real world.

So…sorry?

Los Angeles native John Lopez has written for Strange Angel, Seven Seconds, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Terminal List. He was also an associate producer on The Two Faces of January and spent years assisting Lost Highway producer Tom Sternberg.