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Credit: John P. Johnson/HBO

NOT AS MANY SPOILERS THIS TIME BUT STILL

“The Blood Boy” opens in the garage where Hooli was founded, painstakingly reconstructed inside the much larger garage in Gavin Belson’s mansion. Garage fetishism is quite a thing in Silicon Valley (the place)—they carry a ton of symbolism for what the tech world likes to believe about itself. Independence and self-reliance. The spirit of tinkering and invention. Tools and stuff.

Google and Hewlett-Packard have preserved the garages where they were founded as museums/shrines. The garage where Steves Wozniak and Jobs started Apple was landmarked by the city of Los Altos. Many companies looking to recapture their spirit of innovation have created incubators and experimental divisions and actually called them “garages,” complete with roll-up doors.

This era is fading. The founder’s garage is a conceit that makes about as much literal sense as an “elevator pitch” does when hardly any Valley venture capital offices are more than two stories tall. Facebook was founded in a Harvard dorm and graduated to a shared house in Palo Alto before getting proper office space, but they’re probably the last future tech hegemon to do so. Why? Here’s that house on Zillow today:

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Matt Corwine

Note the median home price in that neighborhood—it’s hard to believe any scrappy entrepreneurs can afford to live there. On the show, even the corner of Erlich’s garage where Jared lays his glassy eyes to rest is starting to seem about as realistic as the apartments on Friends. (By the way, did you notice that Jared is now using a Microsoft Surface laptop?) Erlich’s incubator can only exist because he lucked out with a previous startup—and it still seems implausible, since he isn’t exactly what economists call a “rational actor."

Most startups today don’t require a garage: they're conceived in coffeehouses and coworking spaces and gestate in the cloud, a frugal approach to space that’s a little harder to seal up and save for posterity. Maybe in a hundred years there will just be little blue plaques everywhere—“At this espresso counter was founded YumFun, a food-sharing startup that pivoted to build autonomous killer robots.”

Back to the show. Just as the Valley likes to think of itself as an aw-shucks gang of tinkerers in suburban garages, it also fancies itself a sleek meritocracy—not so, says “The Blood Boy”’s subplot on Monica’s palace intrigue at Raviga. When Laurie Bream’s baby shower features a suspicious number of tequila-swigging dudes, Erlich smells a coup in motion and guides Monica to ingratiate herself with the bros to save her job: to “bro down, or go down.” Apparently Laurie’s pregnancy could be spun as a weakness and used as an excuse to push her out—which is dubious, since carrying a child doesn’t seem to affect anything other than her center of gravity. And pointless, since she was aware of the plot all along—Monica shotgunned warm beers and watched sportsing videos with Ed Chen and his lacrosse stick for nothing.

(Speaking of gender, it has been interesting to see Dinesh’s now-incarcerated now-ex-girlfriend Mia played against type - she scans as (mostly) sweet and mousy, while she in fact has a stronger hacking game than Gilfoyle - which is saying a lot. Given that female hackers in TV and film tend to be portrayed as at least a little punky or butch, it’s nice to see the show forego the lazy casting and suggest that the next Guccifer doesn’t need to be either a wiry pale dude or Aeon Flux. And the idea that technical == masculine is [dumb], anyway.)

Another Valley trope evoked in “The Blood Boy” is the quest for life extension that drives the episode’s main plot. It turns out that Gavin Belson is an actual vampire: he gets regular blood transfusions from a healthy young man named Bryce, to preserve his vitality and extend his lifespan. "He’s a picture of health! He looks like a Nazi propaganda poster!” (Bryce also knows Jared as Donald from a past I’m a little frightened to learn about.) This fluid-bonding means that the Pied Piper team needs to listen to Bryce’s ideas and manage his moods as if he were Gavin himself, to keep both of their cortisol levels within a healthy range. After annoying Richard (and triggering Jared’s lingering rage) by speaking out of turn and questioning Pied Piper’s rollout plans, Bryce is eventually exposed as a Ho Ho-chomping stoner. This deception sends Gavin’s cholesterol through the roof - “at this rate, I’ll be dead by the age of 120." Bryce is also deeply resentful of the nerd-centric Valley’s attitude towards attractive people: “To people like you I’m just a beautiful bag of blood.” Not true Bryce, we also value your behavioral data.

Hacking your biochemistry and treating death as a high-severity bug in humanity’s kernel is up there with terraforming other planets as a go-to aspiration for stewards of massive tech fortunes. MIT researcher Pattie Maes once collected all the tech-world predictions of when humans will achieve immortality, and figured out that immortality tended to arrive just before the predictor was expected to die. The predictors were not amused. In the end, I suspect this line of research will prove out what Maciej Ceglowski says about the coder’s mindset:


I could be dead wrong about this, but at least I won’t be around to hear you to say “I told you so."

Side note: I’ve always found it funny when anyone who believes in a future of immortality and material abundance also buys things with Bitcoin, an inherently deflationary currency. If every Bitcoin that could exist will eventually exist, and the cost of all material goods will approach zero, and the economy will grow forever because nobody dies anymore, why would you spend a single Bitcoin today? Your great-great-grandchildren might be able to buy their own Death Star with it, if money is still a thing at that point. I am aware that this scenario is debatable, but it’s fun to think about.

Matt Corwine is a writer, tech worker and expat Seattlite in Brooklyn. This is his third tech bubble.