"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."

"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 p"

A message from Google reports that personal data has been found online, such as a phone number, and removal requires requesting takedowns from search results over long periods. Digital privacy violations are treated as routine and often ignored, while surveillance capitalism continues to profit from data extraction. A tech-satire series aims to disrupt that numbness by showing a “God’s eye” algorithm used to track a rival. A CEO asks an engineer to identify a man from minimal information, and the system quickly returns the man’s name, location, salary, and sexual preferences. The technology is portrayed as terrifying but delivered with matter-of-fact humor, set in the present rather than a distant future.

Read at The New Yorker