‘Mountainhead’: Confirmation Bias About Tech For the Chattering Classes

‘Mountainhead,’ the new feature on HBO/Max from ‘Succession‘ creator Jesse Armstrong, isn’t a movie that exists to entertain mass audiences. Its goal, rather, is to become fodder for podcasts hosted by The Ringer and Vulture, and, somewhere down the food chain, publications like us. It’s premium content for people who think they’re premium but aren’t, for viewers like you, pure protein for the withered imagination of the chattering classes. Any other nutrients it provides are incidental.

The Mountainhead of the title is a 21,000-square-foot Utah estate that a second-rate tech mogul played by Jason Schwartzman owns. While his compatriots are building actual empires and plotting to literally take over the world like Dr. Evil or Gru, Schwartzman is building out a meditation and lifestyle app. Because of that, he’s worth only $550 million. He’s hosting a “poker weekend” for three monumental buddies: An Elon Musk-like elder statesman played by Steve Carell, who’s dying of cancer, and a couple of smarmy younger bucks, played by Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef.

The plot, such as it is, goes that a new generative AI that Smith’s company has carelessly launched is creating global instability and violence. Youssef has designed some mechanism that puts “guardrails” on the AI. As the world crumbles around them, the tech moguls eat cold cuts and a “picking fish” and wonder how they can maneuver themselves toward taking over lesser countries like Argentina, Haiti, or even the United States. “A coup?” Youseff’s character says, incredulously, “like a coup d’etat?”

OK, typing that out, this premise is pretty funny. And no one is better at dissecting the conversational rhythms, neuroses, and intellectual tics of our tech-media ruling class than Armstrong. There are a lot of good quips throughout, and an extended slapstick routine where the guys try to murder one of their own who isn’t entirely down with their scheme for world domination. The problem doesn’t lie with the performances, either, in what’s essentially a four-character play. Carell and Schwartzman perform within their usual range. Smith, who broke out with his interpretation of Chevy Chase in Jason Reitman’s ‘Saturday Night,’ is appropriately douchey as a tech titan who clearly isn’t ready for prime time. Youssef is especially good, bringing a kind of doe-eyed playfulness to his character, a lot like Kieran Culkin did in ‘Succession.’

The problem with Mountainhead is purely political. I listened to too many podcasts about this movie that maybe deserved one episode of one podcast. The pundits universally assume that the tech overlords who rule the world are “idiots” and that the AI they’ve created is coming to destroy us all. Wired Magazine, which once existed to celebrate the Age of Tech, now spends 80 percent of its copy screeching as though the creation of SkyNet is tomorrow, and we need to protect John Connor at all costs.

Mountainhead is pure confirmation bias for these people, for the permanently gaslit members of a fading media class, the kinds of people who were rooting for Gawker to beat Peter Thiel in court. The fact is that generative AI is creating mostly a lot of stupid memes, not fomenting political instability and lynchings in the “Stans”. Most tech overlords actually are smarter than regular people, and are definitely smarter than people who’re podcasting about Mountainhead as a gospel of doom.

The people who want us to become “transhuman” and “multiplanetary” are definitely weird and wacky, and may not in fact have our best interests at heart. But they are moving the world forward, not spending time lamenting about the loss of an analog age. They’re not really a threat. As for these people taking over the world, did you see what just happened when Elon Musk got involved in government? If you want to watch a screwball comedy about tech titans bumbling their way into politics, you don’t need HBO. You just need the news. No generative AI required.