Silicon Valley, once a series of sleepy towns on the San Francisco Peninsula filled with hard working tech geeks, has over the past few decades become nothing short of a cultural power center. Nearly every aspect of our lives has been transformed by the industry. Among those to benefit most from this shift have been venture capitalists who have made billions as companies like Uber, Facebook and Tesla have risen and many have used their money and influence toward politics, policy, culture and the future of civilization itself.
In theory, they should be able to take a swing or two at them without worry. HBO’s “Silicon Valley” took aim at these moneymen with abandon for years before ending in 2019. But now comes “The Disruptors,” an independent film written and directed by Adam Frucci that takes on Silicon Valley power players and the world they’ve created.
The movie follows best friends Will (played by actor and comedian Grant O’Brien), a ride share driver, and Glenn (actor and comedian Ally Beardsley), an agoraphobic trans hacker. The duo conspires to scam Bruce Marcus (actor and comedian Marc Evan Jackson) one of Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capitalist billionaires out of millions.
They decide to fake having developed a mind-control technology that could let people operate anything around them their phones, their TVs just by thinking about it. (Not far off from Elon Musk’s Neuralink.) Chaos ensues.
It’s not just spoofing founder worship culture that puts Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs on pedestals; it also critiques the funding model that built this industry up. Jackson’s character skips due diligence on his investments altogether, relying instead on friend of a friend “warm intros” to decide who he’ll give his dollars to next. In real life, such shortcuts have led VCs to pump millions into failed startups like Theranos and WeWork.
Venture capital has loomed large in Frucci’s life. He started writing about tech for Gizmodo Gawker’s tech site in 2006, right as the Silicon Valley hype cycle was hitting its first peak. He saw the birth of social media, the gig economy, the iPhone and more. But it was what he watched venture capitalists do to the media that soured him on Big Tech’s promises and pushed him to write “The Disruptors” at the beginning of the pandemic.
“The Disruptors” is out now on video on-demand platforms. Frucci spoke with The Washington Post about making the film, Silicon Valley and what tech is doing to all our lives.
How did you come up with the idea for the movie? How did it all come together?
The movie was my pandemic project. I moved to L.A. seven years ago to run development for Dropout, CollegeHumor’s streaming service. Grant and Ally, the stars of “The Opening Act,” and I worked on a show called “Total Forgiveness” — an unscripted reality show about the student debt crisis. We were in the middle of working on our second season in January 2020 when IAC laid off 95 percent of its staff, us included. Then we know what happened six weeks later.
Every company I’ve ever worked for has been killed by tech and venture capitalists. My first job out of college was as a Gizmodo editor at Gawker from 2006 to 2010, so my first company was literally murdered by a venture capitalist [Frucci is referring to a lawsuit backed by investor Peter Thiel that ultimately bankrupted Gawker]. Then I launched my own site called Splitsider under the Awl, and you got to see what it’s like trying to run a functioning media business that isn’t going for scale with hundreds of millions of VC dollars; it’s impossible. I had the experience of seeing traffic go up revenue go down month over month and just seeing the insane money being pumped into these websites that don’t exist anymore.
When I went to College Humor we were dealing with YouTube’s capriciousness and Facebook’s capriciousness, but really just that general tech arrogance was something that I felt like I was stewing in for a long time.
What made you want to target venture capitalists?
Venture capitalists are some of the most powerful people on Earth; their choices and their ethos and how they make their investments have way more impact on how everybody lives their day-to-day lives than any politician does. They are essentially who is controlling our society, and they just make it in their image.
I feel like nobody talks about them. These guys are these delicate narcissists out in Northern California, and they’re just like: Not only do we not want to be criticized, but we would like to be celebrated because we are visionary geniuses.
And I find it really frustrating; when you actually see their track record, I don’t see them as visionaries. I see them as followers of each other and one big circle all in their WhatsApp groups you see it happen. They’ll all be investing in blockchain technology, and then the next year they’re all investing in the metaverse. Now it’s all in AI. It’s like: If you’re visionaries, why are you doing the same thing at the same time all the time?
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