“Dune: Part Two” gives sci-fi-obsessed Silicon Valley a reason to party
SAN FRANCISCO — In a top-floor atrium in downtown San Francisco final Thursday night, tech employees from Google, Slack, X (previously Twitter) and Mozilla mingled subsequent to a pair of cardboard cutouts of Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.
Dustin Moskovitz, a Fb founder, chatted as others sipped from cannily named cocktails such because the Fremen Mirage (gin, coconut Campari, candy vermouth) and the Arrakis Palms (vanilla pear purée, gin, Fever-Tree tonic). Tim O’Reilly, a tech trade veteran, dropped by. Alex Stamos, the previous head of safety at Fb, was additionally noticed.
“Do you suppose they’ll let me take residence one of many freaky sandworm popcorn buckets?” somebody within the crowd tittered. The suggestively designed buckets had grow to be a sensation throughout social media.
The techies had been all there to have a good time Silicon Valley’s latest obsession: “Dune: Half Two,” the newest film tailored from the Frank Herbert-authored science-fiction saga, which helped encourage lots of them to grow to be all in favour of know-how. The movie, which follows the 2021 installment “Dune,” offered an estimated $81.5 million in tickets in the US and Canada over the weekend, the most important opening for a Hollywood movie since “Barbie.”
The invitation-only non-public screening on the IMAX theater in downtown San Francisco was hosted by two tech executives turned podcasters of “Escape Hatch,” a weekly present centered on sci-fi and fantasy movies. And it was not the one recreation on the town.
Throughout Silicon Valley — from enterprise capital corporations to tech govt circles — folks had booked their very own non-public screenings of the film, directed by Denis Villeneuve. On Thursday, the enterprise agency 50 Years invited founders, buddies and traders to “come gas your creativeness with stellar science fiction” in a theater takeover.
Founders Fund, a enterprise capital agency co-created by Peter Thiel, rented out the Alamo Drafthouse theater in San Francisco’s Mission District for the movie’s opening night time on Friday, with an open bar and free meals. Some folks flew in from throughout the nation to attend.
“If you happen to’re a VC agency and also you’re not internet hosting a non-public Dune II screening, are you even a VC agency?” Ashlee Vance, a longtime know-how journalist, wrote in a put up on X final month.
Whilst tech firms have minimize jobs and perks in latest months, the custom of the sci-fi film premiere stays alive and properly. Movies similar to “Star Wars,” “Dune” and “Prepared Participant One” had been the very issues that helped stir techies’ curiosity within the area of pc science. Not content material with solely watching the long run unfold onscreen, workers at firms similar to Meta, Google and Palantir have began plucking instantly from their favourite films to construct the merchandise of tomorrow.
In Google’s early days, the corporate routinely purchased out whole theaters to see the newest superhero flick. When “Blade Runner 2049” debuted in 2017, the boutique tech funding banking agency Code Advisors rented out the Alamo Drafthouse for a non-public screening and had a Q&A with the movie’s antagonist, Jared Leto. Enterprise capital corporations have repeated the follow for different futuristic movies and sequence, together with “The Martian,” “Arrival” and HBO’s “Westworld.”
However “Dune” and “Dune: Half Two” maintain a particular place in Silicon Valley hearts and minds due to the sequence’ expansiveness. It doesn’t damage that “Dune” was born in San Francisco, the place Herbert lived within the late Fifties as he researched what grew to become the sequence of sci-fi novels.
“It is likely one of the authentic world-building workout routines in style fiction, and we’re all about world-building right here,” stated Jason Goldman, a former Twitter govt who joined Matt Herrero, a techie good friend, to create the “Escape Hatch” podcast throughout the pandemic lockdowns.
The “Dune: Half Two” viewing occasions additionally acted as a type of secure area for techies to step away — nevertheless briefly — from the tech tradition wars that rage on- and offline.
“Twenty years in the past, most individuals coming into tech had been idealists with utopian goals,” stated Tom Coates, a tech veteran, on the “Escape Hatch” cocktail occasion. “That’s clearly not true anymore — now for a lot of it’s rather more only a job, and one which has attracted a sure kind of ‘tech bro.’ However I feel it’s fascinating that we’re not all right here tonight to look at the Ayn Rand filmography.”
Goldman stated a part of Silicon Valley’s enchantment with “Dune” may very well be because of characters similar to Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, a messianic determine who leads a downtrodden tribal group into rising up and defeating its evil overlords.
“What folks need, what they’re all the time attempting to recreate, is that charismatic chief with the flexibility to see into the long run,” Goldman stated. “The hero worship of Steve Jobs is correct up there with the fanatical reward of Paul Atreides.”
What was not clear was what number of of Silicon Valley’s tech elite had absorbed the finer factors of the supply materials. Herbert was deeply skeptical of man’s technological progress, a perspective that framed his sequence.
“It’s all primarily based on a world through which synthetic intelligence has been worn out completely,” stated Cal Henderson, a co-founder and chief technical officer of Slack, who attended the Thursday occasion.
(That morning, Elon Musk had sued OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, over claims that the corporate had put industrial pursuits earlier than the way forward for humanity. “Meta doesn’t even start to explain it,” one other individual on the occasion stated.)
Nonetheless, attendees had been decided to have enjoyable. One offered Herrero and Goldman with a shiny, custom-printed “Dune: Half Two” poster, with the hosts’ faces photoshopped over these of the movie’s celebrities. Tables had been stacked with trays of Nebula Nebulae parfaits (spiced chocolate and vanilla mousse) and platters of Atreides Delicacies (rice noodles, harissa, sesame oil).
After the film, which ran 2 hours, 46 minutes, ended, the group headed right into a VIP room to file a reside version of the podcast on what that they had simply seen. The geeking out continued previous midnight.
Shortly afterward, Goldman purchased tickets to a Monday matinee of “Dune: Half Two.”
“I can’t wait to see it once more,” he stated.
This text initially appeared in The New York Instances.
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