This essay examines the production and reception of a selection of computer source code briefly visible onscreen in “Founder Friendly,” an episode of the HBO satire series Silicon Valley. This text, made legible by the affordances of streaming high definition television, invited fans to engage in interrupted viewing, close reading, and tele-participation practices, in which they froze playback, examined, compiled, and ran the source code, and shared their interpretations and results. Yet the creation of such authentic and generative objects was enabled by a close collaboration and alignment of interests between the production team and technology industry insiders. In this case, the satire’s pursuit of high-definition verisimilitude led to the replication of some of the very practices and logics it critiqued.

这篇文章探讨了在 HBO 讽刺剧《硅谷》的一集“Founder Friendly”中简短地显示在屏幕上的一系列计算机源代码的制作和接收。这段文字，由于流媒体高清电视的提供而变得清晰，邀请粉丝参与中断观看、近距离阅读和远程参与实践，他们在其中冻结回放、检查、编译和运行源代码，并分享他们的解释和结果。然而，制作团队和技术行业内部人士之间的密切合作和利益一致，促成了这种真实和可生成的对象的创建。在这种情况下，讽刺作品对高清逼真度的追求导致了它所批评的一些实践和逻辑的复制。