Work with me for a second: Brian Raftery’s piece on the side gigs of the stars of the television show Silicon Valley and Brendan Koerner’s take on how jihadist group ISIS uses social media are in some ways the same story.
Both explain how a small group of radicals, cut off from the mainstream, has leveraged the power of digital connectivity. A terrifying band of killers and a pack of edgy comedians both interpreted the obstacles to their goals as a sort of censorship—whether in the form of military efforts to end their gruesome atrocities or the admittedly more prosaic difficulties in getting a prestigious, high-paying gig—and routed around it.
Tech-bro posturing aside, the real Silicon Valley has more ambivalence about technology’s increasingly dominant place in our lives than you might expect. The innovators and engineers who power our future know that not every possible outcome is a good one; Koerner’s story about ISIS is from one of the darker timelines, a world where the invisible infrastructure of the modern age drives every revolution, no matter who its victims might be.
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Scott Dadich is the editor in chief of WIRED.
All the more ironic, then, that Silicon Valley is such a deft skewering of startup culture, technological obsession, and the clash of digital versus “real” life. I suppose I could take that a little personally, considering that this magazine has dedicated itself to journalism about all those things. That’s why we put the show’s actors on the cover—and on a cover on the cover. It’s everything their characters would hope for, and it’s everything the show makes fun of them for wanting … which is exactly what made us think of putting them there. Who’s funny now?
So I don’t have any problem with the intersecting through lines of Koerner’s and Raftery’s stories. They’re inversions, two seemingly unrelated worlds that turn out to reflect each other, however distortedly. We couldn’t have predicted these particular outcomes of everyone getting the Internet, going on social media, and building doppelgängers who live in virtual space but have more influence than flesh and blood ever could. ISIS figured out—at around the same time that multiple-gigging comedians did—that social media lets them trade anonymity and security for reach, for penetration into a world already full of signals. That isn’t just their story. It’s ours too. And yours, I bet.
Cover photographs by Art Streiber
