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in observation. He visited holding pens, and interviewed prosecutors and ex-convicts. “I don’t think the unaided imagination of the writer—and I don’t care who the writer is—can come up with what is obtainable through research and reporting,” he said. Dave Eggers, in the 2013 novel “The Circle,” addressed his moment—the South Bay in an age of high-tech fever—using a purely fictional approach. “I’ve never visited any tech campus, and I don’t know anything in particular about how any given company is run,” he told the Times Magazine. “I really didn’t want to.” Whereas Wolfe’s book was marked by a superfluity of hyperspecific detail—brass bibelots in a Wall Street office, “the condition of the mint” in a vodka cocktail—Eggers could only guess at the kind of event a tech employee might organize for his peers (a brunch for people interested in Portugal?), which resulted in a dystopian cautionary tale that felt more like a fever dream than a prophecy. Eggers clearly thought that he could use his imagination to critique the Internet. The Internet disagreed. According to Felix Salmon, “Eggers strays so far away from verisimilitude that his book barely even feels like satire”; Jessica Winter wrote that “Eggers has written a nearly 500-page satire of the tech world while appearing to have little interest in the actual tech world.”

In 2014, Judge attended Code, a conference organized by Swisher. The following year, a version of the conference appeared on “Silicon Valley.” Swisher, playing herself, interviewed Gavin Belson, the C.E.O. of Hooli. Belson, the show’s main antagonist, is a composite character—he shares attributes with Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and others. In the interview scene with Swisher, he defends tech billionaires against charges of élitism. “Look at history,” he says. “Do you know who else vilified a tiny minority of financiers and progressive thinkers called the Jews?” This was satire as near-stenography. In 2014, the Wall Street Journal published a letter by Tom Perkins, a billionaire venture capitalist: “Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’” If anything, Belson’s outburst looked tasteful by comparison.

Sometimes, transposing a real event into fiction is all that’s necessary to convert a news headline to an effective joke. It can also happen the other way around: the writers of “Silicon Valley,” like all the best satirists, occasionally try to stretch the truth and end up anticipating it instead. In the pilot, a sexist programmer invents an app called NipAlert, directing users to the nearest “woman with erect nipples.” “When I read that, I thought, Does that seem real or is it just a silly joke?” Berg said. Between when the pilot was filme

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