ABSTRACT
In the second season of the hit HBO television series Silicon Valley (2014-), the technology startup Pied Piper is looking for content to stream live (Berg). The team has built a powerful video compression engine, which will allow the company to broadcast video live in heretofore-unseen levels of quality. After a sequence of missteps, Pied Piper is forced to take the suggestion of Jared, their belabored business manager, and train the camera on the egg of a condor that is about to hatch. The image never changes (an incubating egg is static content indeed) and after the mother condor stops visiting the nest, Jared eventually alerts the habitat’s caretaker to go and check on the status of the condor eggs. What was a routine event quickly turns dramatic as the human caretaker slips into the remote ravine where the condor nest is located. In front of the camera’s watchful eye, the man is trapped, injured, and waiting for rescue in increasingly dire conditions. Hundreds of thousands tune in as the images go viral-the feed functioning perfectly to broadcast what it was never meant to see. As more tune in, the servers need to handle more and more traffic, and the technology becomes the center of the spectacle. The team scrambles to add servers to handle capacity and allow the technological infrastructure to handle the traffic, and the normally invisible mechanism that keeps the content available to viewers around the world is made visible. Silicon Valley is parodying the viewer that would sign on to look at video of an unhatched egg, but also pointing to the live nature of the camera, as what was deadly boring turns into a life and death situation. A rescuer turns the camera off, and viewers leave the feed as it goes black. The human subject was rescued, the technology handled the traffic, and the team moves on to their next challenge, but viewers are never updated on the state of the eggs. The animal live feed returns to the boring entity it was before, and leaves us to wonder: who is watching animals live and why? While Silicon Valley treats the Condor cam as
a darkly absurdist gag, the scenario highlights much of what fascinates about the technology: 24/7 liveness, technological capacity and incapacity, the mundane and the unpredictable, and the complexity of early twenty-first-century viewing practices.
