Jesse Armstrong, creator of the hit streaming series Succession, is out with a new creative project on his favorite subject: the super rich.
Mountainhead, his new HBO movie, satirizes four ultra-wealthy tech bros who pivot from catching up and razzing each other during a poker weekend to planning world domination and government coups.
So far, reviews have been mixed, with some lamenting the lack of character development, and others praising what the film gets right about the dangers of Silicon Valley ideology, and the careless attitude of business elites about the consequences of their technology. But critics have all agreed that Mountainhead stands out for its deliciously funny lines using the vernacular of the tech crowd.
Armstrong told the Atlantic that he watched YouTube interviews with tech giants and spent hours consuming the venture capitalist-favorite All In podcast to get the vocabulary right. “I was just swimming in the culture and language of these people for long enough that I got a good voice in my head,” he said.
Here’s a quick guide to the Mountainhead lexicon and what it reveals about the current zeitgeist.
“Ayn Bland”: One Mountainhead character disses the host’s interior design aesthetic as “Ayn Bland.” Like the movie’s title, the joke refers to Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead, a bible for technocrats for its fundamental lesson: Disruption matters more than the consequences of breaking things.
Chunky: Numbers are not big, inflated, or frothy for these characters. They’re chunky. See an example here in a story touching on Musk’s offer to buy OpenAI for $100 billion: “Even in the rarified world of tech bros that feels chunky,” the author writes.
p(doom): An inside joke among the AI-literate, p(doom) is the probability of an AI-induced societal collapse..
Decel: Short for deceleration, this is an insult in “techno-optimist” Silicon Valley circles. It’s used to describe people who are opposed to scaled technological advancements or accelerationism.
Disrupting the blood: Not a real phrase, but a plausible one. This is a Mountainhead-ism for murdering someone.
First principles: A method of reasoning that reduces problems to their essence, to rethink scenarios and find new solutions. “First principle thinking is the idea that everything you do is underpinned by a foundational belief, or first principles,” Reid Hoffman once explained. “Instead of blindly following directions or sticking to a process, a first principle thinker will constantly ask, ‘What’s best for the company?’ and, ‘Couldn’t we do it this other way instead?’” In Mountainhead, the characters shout, “First principles!” at each other to invite debate and to suggest revisiting a plan.
Post-human: The possibility that humans will one day be able to upload their consciousness to a digital cloud and thereby become immortal is a trope of futuristic novels and movies. But it’s also the non-fictional mission of startups like Nectome, which reportedly has a waiting list of willing clients.
Same-page it: Tech bros tend to verbify idiomatic concepts, like “getting everyone on the same page.” Another example from this genre would be “Don’t doom-loop it!”
7-star: For Mountainhead’s bros, fleeing to a 7-star resort in Asia is an option should the world collapse. To be clear, this is an unofficial category, used to label hotels that make 5-star hotels look like Motel 6s.
