The Audacity: this witty tech-bro takedown from a Succession writer is packed with glorious one-liners

Many of us yearn for the return of an analogue world, but it’s never coming back. You can’t buy potato waffles without a QR code. I had to arrange an IRL bank appointment for my mother to check her balance, and it took, I don’t know, 100 days? A friend of mine has boycotted WhatsApp, but I can’t tell you how that’s going because we haven’t spoken in a year.

Watching The Audacity (from Thursday, HBO Max) this week, I was shaken by how much of our dystopia can be traced to a small number of men in Silicon Valley. Their products and platforms, an expression of their shortfalls as much as their skills, have reshaped our world more seismically than any political party. Their power-brokering has turned a small collection of towns and villages south of San Francisco into a modern-day Camelot.

The Audacity is interested in the perverse psychology of pioneers. Our hero is Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), founder of data analytics company Hypergnosis (ugh). They’re on the verge of being bought out by Cupertino, an Apple-coded corporate big dog, until greedy Dunc leaks the news to jack up the price. When the deal falls through, he’s desperate to regain his reputation as a power player, and morally bankrupt enough to break any law to do it. His plan involves blackmailing his therapist, for reasons I won’t spoil. His hobbies include using the privacy-hacking algorithm created for him by an exploited employee, to spy on his wife’s boyfriend – a result of the open marriage Duncan himself suggested. This show’s title is on the money.

In a valley, everyone is shady. Therapist JoAnne Felder spends her days massaging the fraught egos of her billionaire clientele, yet has her own game going. There are rival startup CEOs, all vying for top spot on the podium of douchiness. The inane trappings of untethered wealth are satirised, from orthorexic diets to ayahuasca ceremonies, performative spending and pool parties. High-budget shows are a bit like a kebab shop, mind you: through the skewering of these things, we also get to enjoy them.

So far, so Succession. But there are stranger, more melancholy strands. An eccentric inventor, developing a digital ‘friend’ for alienated teenagers. A teenage misfit who starts to live in wall cavities, his surveillance of others an eerie mirror of the adult world that has forsaken him. A reclusive CEO called Carl Bardolph, played by Zach Galifianakis. Retired into generational wealth, he misses the spotlight. Bardolph has a ‘law’ named after him, an ethos of infinite profit he once wrote on a napkin, while on speed. “It was based on the logic of the cancer cell,” he explains to Dr Felder.

The Audacity excels at one liners. When Duncan’s daughter expresses qualms about her “admissions consultant”, who games the system and guarantees her spot at a top-tier university, Duncan reassures her with a Trump-y aphorism. “Cheaters never lose. And losers – they never cheat.” When the Veterans Association comes to Silicon Valley, looking for partnership, an executive dismisses them with relish. Cupertino helping the charity would be “like France helping your mother to set up a printer. Only we have much, much more money than France”.

Wit is a drug The Audacity mainlines, but the show is interested in longevity. Creator Jonathan Glatzer has written on Succession and Better Call Saul. Like the latter, this is a show content to work its hand slowly, building intrigue within a complex plot. I can’t say yet whether it lands all the pieces. Still, I’m enjoying the wild-eyed performance from Magnussen. In real life, the actor is absurdly handsome. Here, his fair curls are piled atop his head (possibly inspired by the way Zuckerberg grew his hair out?). The effect makes him resemble a young Jerry Stiller, or a fried doughnut.

An irony strikes me – if these tech bros do bring about the apocalypse, burning up the planet and making most of humanity extinct, those who survive will actually be living an analogue lifestyle; sucking runoff from a storm drain by an abandoned shopping centre. Something to look forward to. I might even have my mother’s bank appointment by then!