The TV Shows That Predicted Now 2: "Mr Show" Careless Tech Naifs
- 2 minutes read - 406 wordsIn the second season episode of Mr. Show, “If You’re Going to Write a Comedy Scene, You’re Going to Have Some Rat Feces in There,” we are introduced to idealistic, blissfully happy, tech naïf “Gregory Sniper” as played by David Cross.
Where ideas can hang out and do whatever
Aired during the dot-com bubble’s IPO mania, the episode’s conceit is that Sniper has bought a controlling interest of Mr. Show with his tech fortune. Invading a sketch already in progress, Sniper rides a banana-seated recumbent(ish) bicycle on stage and demands the actors take a break for tofu-based ice cream. Because who doesn’t like breaks? And who doesn’t love tofu-based dessert products? And well, gosh, it’s not like you were doing anything important before I butted in and gave you all such a Nice Thing ™
It is a pitch-perfect portrayal of the hubris, naivité, tone-deafness, and political correctness of mid-90’s dot-com culture.
At the time, Sniper and folks like him didn’t register as being the shape of
things to come. Coming from the Roosevelt-to-Reagan segment of history that had
brought down National Socialism and the Berlin Wall by virtue of grits, guts,
and intelligence, we assumed big things would be done by big-brained, grown-ass
men people. We assumed that man-children bringing man-children ethics and
behavior into the most powerful offices would only ever be a cultural
aberration.
But it would be hard to regard it so today:
On Saturday night, sitting president of the United States of America Donald Trump shared an extraordinarily bizarre AI-generated video of himself piloting a fighter jet labelled “KING TRUMP” while strafing droves of peaceful protestors with multiple barrages of — we swear we are not making this up — liquid diarrhea.
Is there any doubt that in our modern era, Greg would be pushing AI (“But what could go wrong? Don’t be a doomer! Tofutti break!”). Sarah Wynn-Williams, in her memoir Careless People, recognized Zuckerberg and his lieutenants as Snipers: the same hubris, the same tone-deafness, the same breezy certainty that their Nice Things™ were wanted (Metaverse anyone? No? 🦗 🦗 🦗 No? No). She borrowed her title from Fitzgerald:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby