Summary
The Audacity cleverly brings a lot of subplots together in “Sandbox”, and the show benefits from the tighter focus.
One thing I’ve always wondered about The Audacity is how Duncan managed to achieve any success at all. And for what it’s worth, I think we’re supposed to have been wondering that. He’s such a ridiculous figure in so many ways that the question is unavoidable, even on the sliding scale of Silicon Valley, but in Episode 6, “Sandbox”, the answer finally became clear, to Duncan and me both. He’s a bad guy. And in Palo Alto, that’s all that counts.
It was obvious Duncan was bad, of course, but it wasn’t always obvious how bad. He has had glimmers of humanity, of doing the wrong thing for the right reason or not doing the worst thing because his conscience couldn’t take it. But recent events with Carl, Lili, and Anushka have pushed him to a point where he’s ready to embrace his true, morally empty self. And all of a sudden, in quite a compelling way, he’s dangerous.
It was having Hypergnosis swiped from beneath his feet that did it. Sure, there are other things at play, but Carl turning on him after Duncan invested so much – financially and emotionally – into their partnership, and Anushka betraying him by becoming the new CEO, was the clear turning point. Duncan’s now openly out for himself, and even with everyone close to him having sold him down the river, he still has one key advantage. Silicon Valley is as immoral as he is.
This is a lesson that Anushka learns the hard way. She must have been expecting a more grandiose introduction to Hypergnosis than a pitch for a pivot into ethical privacy protections that goes down like a lead balloon, even among the members of the company who seem to look at Duncan with a degree of understandable scorn. It isn’t so much a moral issue as a practical one. Ethical approaches don’t make money, and no business survives without doing so. Hypergnosis is designed from the ground up to harvest personal data to sell on to the highest bidder. That’s the explicit function of Gnodin. Even Harper thinks Anushka’s approach is backwards and pointless, and the market agrees. That’s Duncan’s in.
In this way, The Audacity Episode 6 essentially draws a line in the sand. On one side, you’ve got Duncan, promising a treasure trove of personal data to unscrupulous buyers who can use it to monitor their potential customer base with a Big Brother-style all-seeing eye. On the other hand, you’ve got Anushka and, curiously, Carl, whose romanticisation of war and soldiers compels him to take seriously an idea that has been nixed consistently throughout the entire season – using Tom and his VA data. While Duncan wants to violate everyone’s rights to create a subscription service to guarantee privacy, Anushka wants to use Gnodin to identify traumatised veterans and use Xander – Martin’s AI chatbot, in case you’ve forgotten – to therapize them.
This all comes to fruition in a ridiculous – but admittedly quite funny – boardroom sequence in which Duncan goes bonkers and tosses Tom over a table while Carl inexplicably screams, “Did you just insult a man who has seen combat?!”. It works because it’s ludicrous enough to feel like a genuine crystallisation of the show’s core conflict. Its warring factions have finally chosen their sides, and the battle is well and truly on. Whoever wins, it’s still quite likely that the world loses.
But Duncan isn’t alone. His willingness to embrace his darkest impulses also allows him to gain some real leverage over JoAnne. She has been trying to raise funds through her therapy sessions to afford a down payment on the rental home that she, Gary, and Orson currently live in, but an all-cash bidder swoops in to scoop the property from under her feet. That buyer turns out to be Duncan, who wastes no time in suggesting that if JoAnne wants to stay there, she’s going to have to play ball with his scheming. What neither of them knows is that a newly Manosphere-obsessed Orson is privy to that scheming, thanks to his secret surveillance room downstairs, and now that he has adopted misogyny as his core personality trait, what he might do with the kompromat is anyone’s guess.
