Model Collapse

On Jesse Armstrong's 'Mountainhead'

Pablo Picasso, Man Holding a Sheep, Flutist, and Heads, 1967, Colored crayons and pencils, with smudging, on wove paper

A peculiar development is on hand. The people in power, the people who make the news and shape history, no longer want to wait for someone to play them, years later, in a movie; they want to play themselves, now, live on TV, with dramatic flair. They imagine how they should be perceived by the audience and they deliver to us that perceived character. Our Defense Secretary imagines what a Defense Secretary should be like and plays that version on TV. Our Attorney General plays her version of Attorney General. Trump, of course, plays Trump. They all decided to cut out the middleman — the historian, the biographer, the screenwriter, the actor — and deliver their own unfiltered biopics straight to the consumer. This M.O. doesn’t require much effort to conceive and execute, it’s a good tool to build your personal brand, and, as a fortuitous side effect, it has defanged the whole satire genre. How do you mock power when it acts like a bad-dream Monty Python skit?

On top of that, things are moving fast. Jesse Armstrong, the writer and director of HBO’s Mountainhead — a satire about four tech oligarchs whose whims and products make the world burn — must’ve watched with dismay at how the timeline made his artistic efforts obsolete before he even wrote down “EXT. SNOWY MOUNTAINSIDE.” Armstrong wrote the screenplay for an almost two-hour movie in January, started shooting in March, made edits in April, and released it in May. During that time, just to take a cursory look at world events: the US President threatened Canada and Greenland with invasion; a US ally was mocked and humiliated by the President and the Vice President on live TV; markets plunged, then recovered based on a presidential tweet; a rogue billionaire and his team of twenty-year-olds wrecked crucial government agencies; and the US credit rating got downgraded. The day before the movie was released, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and an inspiration behind some of the characters, stopped by the Oval Office high on ketamine, with a shiner on his right eye, apparently given to him by our Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (a southpaw!), in an altercation over DOGE failings. And less than a week later, Musk had an acrimonious, shit-hurling falling-out with the man he spent a quarter of a billion dollars on making President just months earlier. I mean, what can a fiction writer even do here?

In Mountainhead, four tech bros arrive at a sprawling modernist chalet in snow-covered Utah mountains for some R&R: a poker game, an “intellectual salon” with “no deals, no meals, no high heels” (that is no shop talk, no household help, no women) as distractions.

There’s Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the owner of a social media platform and the richest man in the world. The platform, called Traam, has just released a new feature that allows users to create high-quality deepfakes. Within hours of its release, it is unleashing planetary-wide chaos. Venis’ general attitude to seeing the world burn on his phone screen is a shrug and a cackle. “Nothing is fucking serious, and everything is funny and cool.” He wishes, however, that he could “get off this rock” someday.

Jeff, played by Ramy Youssef, owns an AI company. Its main technology has the capacity to fact-check the news and thus curb spreading political and economic turmoil. Venis is interested in buying Jeff’s AI company so that he could mitigate the deadly consequences of his recent innovation without admitting error and taking responsibility. Jeff’s AI has another potential: Venis and Randall (Steve Carell) believe that it can usher, within five to ten years, a transhumanist future.

Randall is the graybeard of the group. We’re never quite told what he does, but it is clear that he’s some kind of a hedge fund/VC guy, a “dark-money Gandalf.” He knows everything about credit ratings and bond markets and strategic reserves, he throws around words like de minimis (finance guys do that), and his worldview, unlike that of the other three, has solid philosophical underpinnings. It is Hegelian dialectic that, in his interpretation, is transformed into the triad “Fuck! What? Cool!” “Fuck!” — that’s people’s initial reaction to an innovation; “What?” — a subsequent reevaluation; and “Cool!” — an eventual acceptance. Randall also has an incurable cancer, and is particularly interested in continuing his existence in digital form.

The poorest of them all is Soups (Jason Schwartzman), the owner of a meditation app. His net worth is a mere five hundred million, a soup-kitchen-level poverty in the realm of billionaires (thus the nickname, Soups). Jesse Armstrong has a talent for exploring the pecking order of the rich, and I was reminded of a Succession episode where a character described an income of five million dollars as a nightmare: “Can’t retire, not worth it to work.” Here Armstrong turbocharges the same sensibility applied to a different fractal space. The numbers are different, but the dynamic is the same. Soups can’t crack the b-nut — that is, raise a billion dollars for his app — and it gnaws him.

The oligarchs arrive at the compound, owned by Soups, with their full entourage: assistants, lawyers, doctors, nannies. The help is sent away, and one expects the men to welcome their brief liberation from the constraints of wealth, and switch into a relaxed, jovial mode. When they’re all finally in the same room together, however, we don’t observe old friends genuinely happy to see each other. What we see instead is pantomimed brohood. The yells of delight are contrived, the hugs awkward. They all seem to act out the kind of a bro connection they think they should have, the kind they imagine regular people have, or they themselves might have had in their younger, poorer days — the chummy pranks, the boozy, laid back poker game with takeout Chinese food, the pool-shooting and chilling in a man cave. But by this point in their structured, overmanaged lives, they’ve lost that instinctual capacity for simple fun, while the imperative to appear to have fun has twisted them into ridiculous contortions.

The actors’ comedic chops come in handy here. Their task is to portray characters who are acting like they’re normal, but at the same time let the underlying fakery work its way through several emotional layers — a layer of bravado over a layer of insecurity over a layer of existential despair — and the result is almost Chekhovian. Jesse Armstrong must’ve met some billionaires in his life, and I have no reason to doubt his depiction of the type. Are they really so wooden and so excruciatingly boring? If so, I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for us, rubes, too — we’re all NPCs in their worldwide video game. But, hey, unlike the tech bros, who plan to live forever, at least we get to exit this game eventually.

Jeff, the guy with AI, is the only one who is still mostly grounded in and has emotional connection to the physical realm. His main concern is not world domination, but his girlfriend, who went to some kind of sex party, or, as she describes it, “a party where people have sex,” in Mexico. He’s worried about her, and he puts some of his security detail on her itinerary to make sure she is okay, and obsessively checks his phone for her texts. Poor guy.

The rest of the group’s relationship with objective reality is patchy. These men are in all seriousness preparing themselves for a digital transcendence. They appear to be done with the tangible world, with fleshy, earthly, carbon-based entities and activities. On a walk through the woods, Venis and Randall wonder if the other eight billion people actually exist out there, and conclude that they don’t. Back at the compound, food is abundant, there are lavish spreads of catered snacks in every room, but the characters never touch them. Venis has a baby son, whom the nanny procures on schedule for some father-son time. It’s a sad scene. Venis awkwardly holds the baby in outstretched arms, then puts him down to crawl on a frozen concrete driveway. You can almost tell what goes on in his mind at this moment: he is torn between two conflicting sentiments. On one hand, this is his son and he knows that he’s supposed to care for him; on the other hand he can’t display too much affection because that perfectly natural human impulse would violate his “nothing is serious and everything is funny and cool” ethos.

Soups, the owner of the wellness app, laments, on the verge of tears, that no matter how much he meditates, no matter how many self-help books and podcasts he reads and listens to, he can’t hit the billion-dollar mark. Lol! Before the movie is over, Soups will have gotten some education about what one must really do to raise a billion dollars.

At times this disconnect reaches a surreal form: when Randall tries to boil an egg, he doesn’t put water in the pot. Jeff points it out, and then they discover that there’s no water in the faucet. The problem is not resolved in any way, and we move on. I thought Armstrong might’ve considered venturing out more in the direction of the surreal, of madness. The setting, an isolated snowy mountain lodge, the people who have lost all bearings with the world outside, all beg for claustrophobia-induced cinematic psychosis. A little bit of Buñuel, a little bit of The Shining. But then the script would have to be an hour longer, and it would’ve taken the story away from Armstrong’s focus on unlimited power in the hands of the few, and he ultimately decided against it.

Still, a madness is there. It is not a madness induced by isolation; it is a madness brought about by intellectual and epistemic decay. The tech bros are, of course, not stupid, but they’re captured by unfalsifiable concepts. They must know that Mars is uninhabitable no matter how strongly and sincerely they wish to occupy it. They must know that AI consciousness can never be attained because consciousness is a non-computable state. And yet they’re in thrall of their own TED-talky “you can do it if you wish it badly enough” bullshit. Do they think that their sheer will and loads of money will overcome those non-trivial constraints?

They never get to play poker. There’s gossip and scheming, and the movie culminates in a haphazard attempted-murder scene. (Spoilers ahead.)

Randall, Venis, and Soups conspire to kill Jeff, because Jeff refuses to sell his AI company to Venis. Each of the conspirators has his own motivation: Venis needs Jeff’s AI to help manage the deepfake chaos; Randall needs AI in the hands of Venis, because Venis thinks it can go transhuman (and thus facilitate Randall’s future non-carbon existence); Soups counts on finally raising his first billion out of the deal.

At first, they contemplate dispatching one of their security guys to do the job. They decide against it, in part, because doing it themselves is “the Nietzschean thing to do,” and then go about killing Jeff with the nonchalance and hijinks of five-year-olds playing hide-and-seek.

And here’s what happens when extremely online people try to do a manual task: Newtonian physics gets in the way. The Übermenschen reign over the realm of zeros and ones, but they struggle in the world of space, time, and causality. They get too entangled in logistics, they run through multiple scenarios, but can’t execute. Their unfamiliarity with anything tangible, anything analog, is what prevents them from realizing their devious plans. Their minds are sharp, but their hand-eye coordination is poor and their mastery of kinetics is abysmal. The three of them fail to overpower Jeff on multiple attempts. Finally, they manage to corner Jeff in a sauna, where, under the threat of burning him alive, they wrestle a capitulation. Jeff signs NDAs and a letter of intent, selling his company to Venis and Randall. As part of the deal, Soups gets two billion dollars for his meditation app.

I think that Armstrong meant for the scene to be somewhat comical. I didn’t find it funny at all. Their flippant, Joker-like glee, their chants of “Khashoggi! Khashoggi!” with which they chase their friend around the house point at the existence of some previously unseen levels of psychosis. It was quite chilling.

The morning-after scene was also bizarre. After the previous night’s near-death ordeal, Jeff casually walks into the kitchen, where his would-be killers are having breakfast, and engages in small talk. Sure, he has plans to sue them and get his company back, but wouldn’t he want to first GTFO? This doesn’t seem like normal behavior. Maybe it was an attempt by Armstrong to hammer home his Succession-era main takeaway one more time: These are not serious people. The country is run by men with a maladjusted perception of reality who either plan on living forever in cyberspace or are currently living in a movie. They’re acting out a public persona, but there’s no substance underneath the mask. And perhaps, this is an out for us. With their epistemic closure, with their alienation from the empirical world, with their reliance on mere appearances, the players’ cache of references is limited and quickly depleted. They all risk being stuck in a self-referential loop where they will imitate an imitation. Their act will soon become a derivative of a derivative, like an AI model trained on its own slop before it collapses on itself.

We, the NPCs, just have to wait it all out in the analog world.

Katya Grishakova is the author of The Hermit (Heresy/Skyhorse 2025), a novel about a Manhattan bond trader who goes through existential crisis. She writes at her Substack The Center Holds.