Publication: Configurations, "Middle-out from Bottom-up: Engineering and Close Reading Code in HBO’s Silicon Valley"

“Founder Friendly.” Silicon Valley. HBO, April 24, 2016.

I’m happy to share that my essay “Middle-out from Bottom-up: Engineering and Close Reading Code in HBO’s Silicon Valley” has been published in Configurations. In the essay, I use a selection of computer source code legible on screen to interpret the episode’s narrative and to exemplify how the work of expert consultants and teleparticipating fans parallels work processes used by the real-life technology industry.

So in one sense, this is about how we can pause a video and use details that we’d otherwise miss to inform our understanding of what’s going on. Laura Mulvey described this in 2006 as a viewing practice made possible by the technological affordances of DVD video. Here I am applying that principle to the more recent context of streaming high-definition television: image resolution is now sharp enough for us to be able to discern legible text (in this case, computer source code), and streaming video platforms make this sort of scrutiny widely and quickly available.

How does our understanding of those tiny bits of text inform how we understand the work as a whole? To what extent are these bits of text “in-universe” parts of the story? What sense can we make of them if we do not understand the programming language that they’re written in?

This project also engages with the practices behind the production of that text. I argue that the behind-the- scenes consultants’ work involved in creating compilable, working computer source code emulates in some ways the work arrangements and software development practices of the real-life technology industry. This is an issue that is, in some ways, particular to Silicon Valley, but has broader implications when we think about how satires work.

What does it mean when the work of satire is so invested in verisimilitude that it seems to relish emulating that very thing that it critiques?

The full article is available online to Configurations subscription holders.