HBO’s Silicon Valley is a world of seesaws. Swift, meteoric rises and abrupt, catastrophic falls govern the lives of the entire Pied Piper team. One day they’re titans of the tech industry; the next, their ideas are rightly referred to as “toxic assets.
” And with millions in funding and an ever-moving finish line, that unpredictability leads to constant backstabbing and double-crossing. To make it in the Valley, you have to keep your friends NDA’ed and your enemies out of your incubator—otherwise, you’re hosed.That zero-sum dynamic applies to rivalries within Pied Piper as well as without. But in the cases of frenemies Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) and Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and the hostile partnership of Erlich (T. J. Miller) and Jian-Yang (Jimmy O. Yang), that antagonism takes on racial overtones that reinforce pernicious stereotypes about Asians in tech and other industries. And over the show’s three and a half seasons, the writers’ reliance on those tropes has only become more obvious.
Silicon Valley grapples with the difficulty of translating genius into profit—but only its white characters get the privilege of suffering that dilemma. Richard (Thomas Middleditch) is the show’s tortured artist, consumed by the thought of inventing the next internet. Bemused nihilist Gilfoyle is the only coder who can equal Richard’s skill, imagination, and purity of intent. Loyal Jared (Zach Woods) has come through for his team time and again by looking at the larger picture when the rest could only focus on the details.
And Erlich, who last season conjured up a $6 million bidding war over lunch, continues to turn stems and seeds into medicinal-grade sativa. (Entrepreneurially speaking.)Meanwhile, Pakistani immigrant Dinesh spectacularly screwed up both a CEO position and a relationship—the entire point of his character is that he’ll never…
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