“The Audacity” Is a Brutal Silicon Valley Satire with an Agenda

My personal data had been found online, it said. This time, it was my phone number; previously, it had been more private information. The most I could do, it seemed, was ask Google to remove the offending pages from its search results, one by one, over months, then years. I wish I could say I was more bothered. These days, violations of digital privacy are a routine calamity that we’ve by and large given up on addressing. There are only so many things we can be outraged about at once, and surveillance capitalism—the business model summed up by “if you’re not paying, you’re the product”—seldom makes the cut.

“The Audacity” wants to shake us out of that stupor. The opening episode of the AMC dramedy introduces an algorithm that’s a gift to stalkers everywhere. Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the C.E.O. of a data-mining startup called Hypergnosis, has just found out that his wife, Lili (Lucy Punch), slept with another man the previous night. Never mind that Duncan and Lili are in an open marriage, and that he is more likely to confide in his former mistress than in his wife. He asks one of the company’s engineers, a pink-haired, nonbinary coder named Harper (Jess McLeod), to use their latest project—a program they describe as “God’s eye”—to identify his new rival based on a few scant details. Within moments, Duncan learns not only the man’s name but his current location, his salary, and his penchants for herring, wheat beer, and anal sex. The tech is terrifying, but it’s treated matter-of-factly, played for barked laughs. The vibes are less “Black Mirror” than “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”—less the near-future than the now.

Marketing for “The Audacity” has focussed on Duncan as the latest prestige-TV gazillionaire to hate on, but the show is, in fact, a panoramic lambasting of Silicon Valley’s particular form of trickle-down rot. Duncan’s daughter attends a private high school that so reliably sends its students to Stanford that even its principal isn’t above committing a bit of fraud to insure her own daughter’s place there. His financially strapped therapist, JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), tells herself that, if she keeps her C-suite clients “sane enough” for them to make ungodly amounts of money, she should be entitled to some of it—a line of reasoning that lets her justify the insider trading she commits based on their in-session disclosures of imminent mergers and acquisitions. The one-per-centers have warped society so thoroughly with their endless advantages that the ten-per-centers feel that they need to break the rules to have a chance at keeping up.