Pretty Much Pop #93: Made for Love (and other Silicon Villainy)

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The tech genius has become the go-to bad guy in recent films: They’re our modern mad scientists with all imaginable resources and science at their command, able to release dystopic technology to surveil, control, and possibly murder us. Even Lex Luthor was made into a “tech bro” in Batman v. Superman.

Mark, Erica, and Brian discuss the HBO Max series Made for Love starring Cristin Milioti, as well as the shows Devs and Silicon Valley and Jed Rothestein’s documentary WeWork. How does this trope work in comedy vs. serious media, how does it relate to real-life tech moguls, and how does it relate to toxic masculinity?

To learn more, read what we read:

• “HBO’s New Series Found a Better Way to Satirize Silicon Valley” by Matthew Dessem
• “Made for Love’s Billy Magnussen Is Deconstructing Douchebags and Other Toxic Tech Men” by Jackson McHenry
• “‘Made for Love’ and the Rise of the Tech-Bro Billionaire Villain” by Kayleigh Donaldson
• “Why Made For Love Changed Byron Gogol (& The Book’s Dolphin Lust Storyline) For HBO Max” by Shannon Carlin
• “10 Movies and TV Shows You Can Watch to Understand Why Tech is One of the Most Powerful Industries in History” by Katie Canales
• “9 Entertaining Movies and Shows Based on Silicon Valley, on Netflix, Disney + Hotstar and Amazon Prime Video” by Deepali Singh
• “Hollywood’s Best and Worst Depictions of Silicon Valley” by Chandra Steele (from back in 2014!)
• “How All Our Tech Heroes Turned into Tech Villains” by Sam Blum (we didn’t actually read this, but I swiped the image below from there; the image is by Alicia Tatone)

This episode includes bonus discussion you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network and is curated by openculture.com.