It's pretty clear from the off that even if the show isn't going directly for the jugular, it's definitely doing it some damage. The speech by the over-excited developer who just got bought up by Google includes such TechCrunch-friendly phrases as "disrupting digital media" and "making the world a better place by constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility", characters attend a TED talk from a billionaire who insists kids should drop out of college, there's a doctor who tries to get patients to invest in his start-up, and you could make a very dangerous drinking game out of the amount of times the word "app" is spoken. It's clear who the show is targeting and boy does it hit them, and hard. Whilst some of the references can be a little inside baseball at times, for the most part Silicon Valley uses what's become our everyday language. Topics and jargon that were once the sole preserve of the guys who made that friendly paper clip who would tell you how to write letters in Word have become part of our day-to-day conversations. We're living in the middle of a new tech bubble where file sizes, apps, product specs and the like are part of the mainstream lexicon. So it's good we've got a show that not only reflects that, but also points out how ridiculous and temporary it all is.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
