John P. Johnson | HBO
Kumail Nanjiani, T.J. Miller, Thomas Middleditch, Zach Woods and Martin Starr featured in Silicon Valley an HBO original
Comedian Kumail Nanjiani plays the character Dinesh on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” a tongue-in-cheek satire about a scrappy start-up, Pied Piper, taking on a technology giant, Hooli.
But Nanjiani’s real-life view of major technology companies is much darker, based on messages he tweeted this week. Nanjiani doesn’t just play an engineer on television: He was a computer science major at Grinnell College.
Tweet: As a cast member on a show about tech, our job entails visiting tech companies/conferences etc. We meet ppl eager to show off new tech.
Tweet: And we’ll bring up our concerns to them. We are realizing that ZERO consideration seems to be given to the ethical implications of tech.
Tweet: “We’re not making it for that reason but the way ppl choose to use it isn’t our fault. Safeguard will develop.” But tech is moving so fast.
Tweet: Only “Can we do this?” Never “should we do this? We’ve seen that same blasé attitude in how Twitter or Facebook deal w abuse/fake news.
Tweet: You can’t put this stuff back in the box. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. And there are no guardians. It’s terrifying. The end.
Nanjiani made his remarks during an important week for major technology companies. Representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google were grilled this week by congressional committees about social media’s role in promoting Russian propaganda during the 2016 election. And Facebook and Apple both report quarterly earnings this week, highlighting the huge profits gleaned by real-life Silicon Valley.
Tech’s reckoning is a theme that has already been foreshadowed on “Silicon Valley,” too, when the character that runs the fictional technology giant is questioned in a scene by real-life technology journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg.
“I’m getting a little tired of this bias against the leaders of our industry,” the CEO character says in an ill-received salvo. “I’m continually creating jobs and helping people, and I’m tired of getting slapped for it.”
