Mountainhead Delivers Only Scapegoats

‘T his is about AI dooming and decelerationist alarmism!” explains Hugo Van Yalk, a.k.a. “Souper,” when his buddy and entrepreneurial peer Jeff asks why he is being threatened with death by three of his supposed friends and billionaire peers.

If that one line sounds like too much Silicon Valley insider jargon, you haven’t run into half of it yet in Mountainhead. The movie tells the story of four tech billionaires gathering together in a mountain retreat while much of the world descends into rioting, populist pogroms, and potential civil war because of a new content-creation tool just released by one of the four, Venis — a combination of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. He’s in luck, however, because the poorest of the billionaires, Jeff, has developed an AI-powered content moderator — “a censor,” denounced by the others — that could fix his broken product and restore the world to order.

Mountainhead — an obvious and deliberate reference to Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead — is the latest from Jesse Armstrong, the creator and primary director of Succession, the fictionalized HBO drama series that was loosely based on a reimagined Murdoch family. As with Succession, Mountainhead is simultaneously in love with and repulsed by right-wing political jargon as well as Silicon Valley precociousness, both of which it deploys with studied precision, though lacking any sense of moderation. “I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market,” one says to the other.

Unfortunately, Mountainhead is both baggy and weightless. A truly plot-driven version of Mountainhead could have been an entertaining, if overwrought, satire about how business is done by today’s billionaires. A character-driven version of this story would have given weight to Randall’s fear of oncoming illness and death and heightened the comedy in the dynamics between an ultra-billionaire who has a broken product and his young mere-millionaire rival who has a fix for it. It would have played up the desperation of the hanger-on who is merely trying to keep the gang together.

But Mountainhead is bile-driven. In Fountainhead, the billionaires are heroes; here they are only villains. The film posits that literally all the world’s problems are the fault of billionaire tech bros, then it moves from making them unwitting accomplices to extremism and murder, to farcically having them plot to murder one of their own, the only one who has a conscience and seems to care about racism or injustice. Its default worldview is painfully earnest: that disinformation is the cause of social strife, and the cure will be enlightened content moderation done by governments and a responsible old media or its former ethics watchdogs redeployed as an artificial intelligence. It’s as if Jesse Armstrong had just time-traveled from the first months after the 2016 election, having taken everything that MSNBC had to say about it as the Gospel truth.

Ramy Youssef, as Jeff, pitches his digital conscience this way: “I’ve got zero-shot learning and the essence of justice in a box. And you’ve got, what, 4chan on [BLEEP] acid? So awesome. I’m selling a filter for nightmares. That’s not the kind of business that slows down.” This is supposed to be a compelling pitch as the foursome continuously check their phones to see news of disorder spreading globally. Instead of just buying Jeff’s product, the other three threaten to kill him — one to save the reputation of his battered tech behemoth; another in hopes that this behemoth can actually digitize human life, and spare him death itself; and the final one because he just admires the other two so much. The reams and reams of dialogue in which this plot is hatched and then executed should have been lifted up by their spot-on references to Valley-speak, and techbrain. Instead, the whole thing drags down. The sale is made, under duress. The friendships are broken.

In the real world, the major tech platforms submitted to government control during a real crisis, Covid. And in trying to distinguish between real information and disinformation, they became the purveyors of unofficial truths, the guardians and promoters of official lies, and the censors and punishers of those who dared dissent. In the real world, liberals incensed and confounded by populists are cancelling elections and jailing their opponents. In the real world, tech products are more likely pacifying the public rather than driving them into the streets with brickbats. In trying to blame the current ills on a handful of people who peddle distraction, this was a scapegoating job. And not a convincing one.