Google's hooli.xyz Easter egg proves Silicon Valley is tech's own Spinal Tap | Television & radio | The Guardian

Silicon Valley, series two, episode 10. Photograph: John P. Johnson/Sky

It is not often that mega-corporations show signs of cuteness or self-deprecation, but one such moment occurred recently when Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, penned his announcement for Alphabet, Google’s new parent company. You would have to be pretty alert and sharp with your cursor to get it; go to the sentence “Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort.” Click on the last four words and they link to Hooli.xyz. Those au fait with the series Silicon Valley, co-created by Mike Judge, will get the reference. Hooli is the Google-like company that looms large in Judge’s satire on the tech world, which has just completed its second series.

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Hooli mercilessly lampoons Google. Its founder presents the global machinations of its company and advanced tech services as if they were for the ultimate spiritual benefit of all humanity, rather than profit-driven. (“We can only achieve greatness if first we achieve goodness.”) It represents an evolutionary moment of self-recognition on the part of the tech world of its absurdities, as well as elevating Silicon Valley to touchstone status. Famous phrases from the series, including “Datageddon”, now have the potential power in the lexicon to match Spinal Tap’s “This goes up to 11” or “Too much perspective.”

It also suggests that for young males, in particular, of this generation, tech is the new rock’n’roll. If you grow up in the 21st century, you don’t measure out your life the way 20th-century boys did, by the transition from glam and prog to punk, post-punk, grunge, Britpop and so on. Rather you do so in terms of smartphones, upgrades, iPads, the new upstarts that came to usurp the old dinosaurs such as Windows 95 and BlackBerry.

The sense of the baton passing from rock to tech is evident in the opening scene of the first episode of Silicon Valley. Kid Rock has been hired by a big tech company for a launch party. He pounds out his stuff, screaming “Someone make some motherfucking noise!” – but there is no moshpit, merely a handful of indifferent, mooching programmers out on the floor. Rock gives up. Moments later, however, a young exec steps up to the stage and, with a rebel yell of “Woooo!” into the mic, arm aloft a la Bono, screams that he loves integrated multi-platform functionality.

This sense of ridiculous, often blundering men whooping rock’n’roll noises is one of a number of comparisons with Spinal Tap. Richard Hendricks, the shy programmer whose Pied Piper app is at the heart of the series, may be some kind of genius, but there is also a haplessness about him. When he snorts that Steve Jobs “was a poser, he didn’t even write code”, there are echoes of Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins fuming the words “this much talent!” after an encounter with a much bigger rock star at a hotel.

Testosterone and swinging dicks abound in both worlds. Spinal Tap’s is a brazenly male-dominated one, of “kicking arse” and armadillos down trousers (as well as cucumbers wrapped in silver foil), of Sex Farms and baseball bats slapped meaningfully into palms, of gloves smelled by fantasy females on all fours and failure to cope well with assertive women. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, was criticised for its lack of female roles. In the first series, the only female coder is an effervescent blonde looking to launch a cupcake startup.

The truth is, however, the tech world is dominated by a mixture of barely physical nerds like Hendricks and blundering macho behemoths like Erlich Bachman, who looks like a selectively shaved ginger ape and considers it an excellent idea in negotiations to compare his counterpart across the table to the “human equivalent of a flaccid penis”. Both, however, are eclipsed by the appalling Pete Monahan, the disbarred lawyer who appears in series two. He introduces himself frankly. “Was I in possession of cocaine, methamphetamines, amyl nitrite at time of my arrest? In large quantities. Did I have consensual intercourse with two women under the age of 18? Repeatedly. Did I violate the Mann Act and transport them across state lines for sexual purposes? Alleged but not proven. And boy, they tried.”

Then there are the grandiose, misconceived or plain daft Big Ideas. In Spinal Tap, these range from Derek Smalls’s Jazz Odyssey, an extended, free-form bass solo performed for an audience who have also come to see a puppet show, to onstage pods, one of which fails to open, leaving Smalls at the mercy of roadies with chainsaws and, most famously of all, the 18in Stonehenge “triptych” they are forced to use as a stage backdrop following a napkin blunder, which is “in danger of being crushed by a dwarf”. In Silicon Valley, these are plentiful too: the NipAlert app, which detects women with erect nipples in the immediate vicinity; the Evel Knievel-style stunt planned for the launch of Homicide, a Monster-type soft drink that the guys realise is mathematically doomed to failure; the app to jerk off 800 penises; or the driverless car that conveys Donald “Jared” Dunn 4,000 miles out of his way with no hope of exiting the vehicle.

Ironically, all these are hard-pressed to compete with the real-life excesses of rock and tech that inspired these fictions; Ozzy Osbourne allegedly sat unsmilingly through Spinal Tap, assuming it was a straight documentary. No surprise, since a year earlier, Black Sabbath had shelved a Stonehenge onstage concept because the models were too big for the building. Or take U2, trapped as if in a metaphor in a giant, mechanical lemon during their 1992 PopMart tour; or Google Glass, the spectacles-type device akin to the sort of things sold in the back pages of 1950s American magazines; or dating apps such as On the Rebound, which alerts you if any of your Facebook friends are breaking up.

Silicon Valley, like Tap, succeeds with a mixture of the broad and knockabout and a more subtle evocation of the nuances of tech world – the sights, the sounds, the smells. Those lower down the tech food chain love it because it tells the truth about their working lives – the aggressive, often litigious thrashing and competitiveness beneath the neo-hippy idealistic surface, of which 21st-century San Francisco, once the place you wore flowers in your hair, is now the overpriced, hyper-capitalist capital. (Gavin Belson, the founder of Hooli, declares to his staff: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place, better than we do.”) At the show’s premiere, one young business development worker described it as a “reflection” of his own life in its depiction of “the absurdity of what we’re all pitching”, while others criticised it only for not going further.

For Google to declare itself in on the joke posed by Silicon Valley, therefore, is a disarming moment similar to when the rock world embraced the devastating satire of Spinal Tap – sportingly absorbing, and therefore neutralising its mockery, demonstrating its indestructability. Yes, we get it: everybody’s laughing, everybody’s happy. Now let’s all carry on.