‘The Audacity’ creator and its star remind you online privacy is a myth

The catalyst for Jonathan Glatzer to create “The Audacity,” AMC’s dark satire of Silicon Valley that takes aim at the desperation that plagues it, began as a father witnessing his teenage son’s relationship with tech.

Like many parents raising children in a tech-dominated culture, Glatzer, early on, tried to help his son understand the unseen trail his online activities leave behind with every swipe, tap, post or video viewed — and the digital reputation that can be shaped and set from that. Glatzer succeeded, almost too well.

“I found myself being in one of those equivocating positions of saying, ‘Well, it’s not good and yes, they are watching and creating a data footprint about everything that you do and watch, and your various proclivities and inclinations, but it’s not so bad,’” says Glatzer, whose previous credits incude “Succession” and “Better Call Saul.” “It’s just negotiating the middle ground, negotiating the thing you can live with in a world where it’s really difficult to live without tech. And he didn’t buy it. I really did see, through his eyes, this dilemma of: How do you live in this world and maintain the growth and evolution of your own voice and be an individual?”

Such questions and dilemmas fuel the tension of the series, primarily through Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the narcissistic and morally unhinged CEO of a data-mining startup called Hypergnosis who is desperately trying to get his company acquired by the Apple-esque Cupertino, and willing to go to deceitful lengths to do it. He confides those tactics to his therapist, JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg), who has her own scheme going, trading stocks on the information shared by her powerful or connected clientele during sessions. When Duncan discovers this, he proposes a threat in the form of deal: If she’ll help him, he won’t expose her.

Like a pinball hurled into the the modern tech bubble, Duncan has spent the season trying to stay in the game without getting stuck or free-falling into oblivion too quickly. After he’s ousted from his data-scraping firm, he pivots to create a new unethical startup called P.I.N.A.T.A. (Privacy Is Not a Thing Anymore) with a subscription service concept: customers pay a $29.99 monthly fee to ensure their data is kept private — and if they’re willing to pay an extra $300 for the platinum tier, they can have full access to everyone else’s personal details.

As the series nears its Season 1 finale, streaming Sunday on AMC+ and airing on AMC May 31, the stakes are high for Duncan’s quest for tech notoriety as he seeks to double down on exploiting user data to scale his algorithms by expanding into DNA.

Over separate video calls, The Times caught up with Glatzer and Magnussen to discuss what intrigues them about the machinations of Silicon Valley and how their relationship with tech has changed. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Heading into the finale, Duncan is faced with the ethics of this tech deal involving his startup P.I.N.A.T.A. What intrigued you about his dilemma?

Glatzer: This has happened to us a lot in society. It happened in a big way with Sam Altman [CEO of OpenAI], where he seems like a nice guy, he’s maybe got his s— together, not for profit. That’s a good idea. Then things start to get more corrupted, and money plays a huge role … as it always has throughout human history. What Duncan comes to is this notion of, what’s the opposite of ethical data? Because that’s what his old firm is now touting. It’s like, wait, why not go full goblin mode? Duncan is saying: “Privacy is not a thing anymore.”

He gets very enthusiastic about what if we look at that hypocrisy and just bulldoze over it. There are no laws stopping us from doing that. If there are meant to be laws, then Congress should pass them. What he does in the finale is really put it to Silicon Valley and says: You already do everything that I’m saying — you know when a woman, one of your users, is going through a menstrual cycle; you know when to sell her stilettos or when to sell her sweatpants. Wouldn’t it be amazing to add to that genetic data? How great would it be to be able to market to somebody who is prone to baldness, alcoholism, cancer, autism, schizophrenia? This is just the ultimate expression of data marketplace with zero rules.

But from Duncan’s perspective, it’s like, “Look, let’s offer the same thing as a third party to anybody who wants it and is willing to pay us a nominal subscription fee. Let’s offer access to the same data that we get, see what happens.” Maybe people wise up and start to get VPNs and stop accepting cookies and all the rest of it, and maybe there’s even a bigger uprising that’s like, “We don’t like our personal lives being mined and exploited.” But in the meantime, until that day comes, he’s going to exploit it and make some money.

Magnussen: It’s a very interesting character study of what you’re willing to sacrifice. I don’t blame him as much as the culture of Silicon Valley behind him, more than anything. And that’s why I think I empathize with Duncan a lot, is that the culture that he’s been brought up in within Silicon Valley is that tarnishing, gritty, fight your way tooth and nail to the top.

There’s the moment where Zach Galifianakis’ character, Bardolph, talks about the internal negotiation that many innovators face: Do we want to save the world or control it? Heal or conquer? “Both have their charms,” he says, “But most of us go Dr. Evil.” How did your conversations with people in tech help you understand where the ambition and attempts to bring about useful advances gives way to that?

Glatzer: I don’t think anybody that I spoke with in Silicon Valley or in that world — very few of them had that honesty in terms of self-knowledge. To make my characters more interesting than that, I wanted them to have moments of self-awareness that would stick like a splinter in their brains and not let them off the hook. In [Episode] 108, Duncan is not let off the hook. There’s a cost for Duncan doing all this. And for Bardolph having this power, having the money of Midas, and [he] has spent several decades never really being told no, never having a come-to-Jesus moment, like he does with Ruffage [Rob Corddry], I think that there’s something about him hearing that unfiltered, unvarnished rage at who he is and his choices along the way would have rattled him deeply and he doesn’t react well to that.

I think that’s an important aspect to our show — we try to always make sure that there is a price to pay, even if it is metaphorical, even if it’s sometimes not metaphorical at all, it’s quite real, but that there’s a consequence to living an unexamined life. All of us on God’s green earth are forced to reckon with out own bulls— from time to time. And several characters in the final episode are forced into that uncomfortable corner, and they all react quite different.

Billy, how do you feel about this idea of what Duncan is facing?

Magnussen: The show is good for the audience in the sense that it’s exposing the humanity behind these people in the way they think. That power is more important than humanity. That’s the scary part about the show. It’s quite interesting to show that mirror up to society. These dilemmas that these people in the industry are going through, I wonder if you and I, if we were in that same position, how we would do it. Would we become greedy? I would love to say no. I would want to spare people a little more, but at the same time, we look at this industry, the film industry, television, I think politics — to have these politicians going into these positions where they’re going to do good for people and then you realize, “Wait, who’s in your pocket?” That recognition or exposure with our show is a very exciting thing to be talking about.

It’s funny about social media and the internet, and this thing that we’ve been working on, that’s been a part of our lives and forced down our throats to be a part of and, for some, creates our value as a human on this platform that we can just delete. There’s no place called Instagram, but the fact that we put so much value and power into that — why are we all playing that game? It’s our choice to really respond and acknowledge this s— and maybe take action in our personal lives.

Is it easier to find the empathy and humanity in playing a character desperate to attain the power than someone already holding it, like an Elon Musk or a Jeff Bezos?

Magnussen: What I think when you become that powerful, you don’t get auto-corrected by the people around you. As a human to human, you go: “You really are lost because you had no one around you to ground you or just wake you, like slap you around a little bit and be like, “Wake up!” I just wish they asked themselves: Should I do this? I know I can do this, but should I do this? There’s a 15% chance AI will destroy us, but we’ll still sign the agreement. I don’t know if I empathize with them.

How has the show changed your relationship with tech? Have you deleted apps? Are you reading the terms and conditions any more closely?

Magnussen: Plenty of apps [have been deleted]. Don’t accept cookies is a real big thing. It’s not a knock on technology. It’s just about being more aware of the privacy that’s being taken away from you. Also, invest my own personal time in people, not programs, because I do think technology is a beautiful way to start a revolution, to communicate with people, to educate yourself. I’m just so sad the money people make off causing us to fight more than love more. They’re ramming AI down our throat right now. You know what, show me it cures cancer before I say yes to it. Show me that. Let’s keep working on it before we throw it in there, but also the environmental factor of all these data centers and stuff — holy cow. It’s our choice as consumers too. We do have power. I do think tech companies have pushed us away from feeling like we have power.

Glatzer: I definitely have become much more suspicious of data collection. I don’t want to not engage with the world that everyone else is engaging with, but I’m not going to do it at the cost of being a widget to them, to being a target of an algorithm. I think people should try turning it off for a day and see what happens — and it’s almost impossible, I realize that.

My house burnt down in the Altadena fires. It was ironically days after I wrote the episode in which there’s a wildfire, in which Duncan and Lily’s house burns down. I will say, after I lost all of my physical possessions, I was very grateful to have my photographs and other things on the cloud. That was a gift. I understand how tech can help. I understand how tech has helped in medical procedures. Hasn’t cured cancer, like they said it would and many other things, [like] climate change, they’re making it so much worse.

I also hear stories about people in Silicon Valley who work in tech who stop wearing sunscreen because they believe AI is going to cure skin cancer, they’ve started smoking cigarettes because they believe AI is going to cure lung cancer. Color me skeptical, but I’m not sure that inhaling toxins into your lungs is something that AI can really cover. That those people are working in tech is frightening to me.

I was curious if you were doing this video call from the app or your browser.

Glatzer: Browser. The app is embedded in your computer and is much more capable of tracking your behavior. You’re letting the Trojan horse into the house.

I want to talk about how you wanted to explore AI in the series. Jonathan, with Alexander, the AI created by Martin (Simon Helberg), there are limitations to its abilities, yet there is potential for good. It’s unclear, though, whether that will always be the case. What interested you in that thread?

Glatzer: I always feel like the message of “2001: A Space Odyssey” is sympathy for HAL when he’s singing “Daisy [Bell”] at the end. It’s so sad and his conflict was that human beings with conflicting directives confuse him. For me, I don’t hate AI. I don’t know what that even means, particularly. It’s still zeroes and ones. What I am critical of are the people who fail to see the inevitable dehumanization of tech’s 7 billion or so users, whether that be the insecurity of one’s job being replaced by a bot. There was a picture taken near my office in New York, a banner or ad that had a perfectly constructed human face that was clearly not a human and it said, “Stop hiring humans.” [Glatzer pulls up the image of the advertisement on his phone.]

I just feel like I’d like to talk to that person for a little while, perhaps I need to hog-tie them in order to have a conversation that I truly want to have with them. But the person who came up with that ad campaign or approved it, somewhere along the line, there was a human being behind that. There was a person who said, “Yeah, let’s go with that,” and that person has this, unfortunately, very common ability to separate themselves from their own humanity or root against it. “Stop hiring humans” says the quiet part out loud.

Do you find yourself more interested in the headlines out of the tech industry these days or the figures, Billy?

Magnussen: I’m really interested in the fact that it’s a small group of people that affects 7.5 billion people. I want to know them. Who are these jokes? And why are we giving them so much power?

The season finale is upon us. What do you want to tease about Duncan’s big speech at Code Watch? And what are you interested in exploring in Season 2?

Glatzer: I love that it was coming out of his mouth, these truths about how this world operates, and the bracing honesty with which he speaks to the Silicon Valley community. It’s coming from Duncan Park, who is somebody who’s arguably failed up, who was one of those data merchants himself. It’s not Nixon going to China, but there’s some analogy there that it basically rings more true for me coming from him. And it’s probably because we’re so bifurcated as a society where a liberal person spouting views is tuned out, but a conservative person who’s coming over and now shares some liberal views is platformed. But it’s the fact that he does upend, or seems to be poised to upend the profit center of Silicon Valley.

And Billy, tell me about the slide. It’s always entertaining to watch Duncan go down that thing.

Magnussen: That slide is great. Everyone on set was scared, they’re like “Can we go down the slide?” Everyone wants to go down [it]. I just kept going down. I don’t care. It’s a slide, that’s what you’re meant to do! You’re supposed to slide! On one side, there’s no staircase down and you’d have to walk almost half a football field to get down the stairs and everybody would be like, “F— it, I’m just doing the slide.”