In his 2013 dystopian novel, The Circle, David Eggers offered a brief but vivid description of neoliberal San Francisco: “All was noise and struggle, failure and filth.” The true believers of his fictional tech corporation The Circle felt certain that their corporation offered the antidote. A similar antidote might be found in the 2013 comedy The Internship, directed by Shawn Levy. In it, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play two highly irritating Generation Xers who win internships at Google after finding themselves unemployed during the post-2008 recession. Their irreverent humor and relentless optimism win over a group of Millennial interns and eventually Google itself.
The Internship indicates that the post-neoliberal employee must devote their whole being to their employer. Building on this, it suggests that neoliberalism will be transcended by a new, even more pernicious form of welfare capitalism.
Denounced by the British film critic Mark Kermode as a “witless, self-satisfied, smug” comedy, it cannot be recommended for viewers seeking a chuckle. Analyzing its political unconsciousness, however, renders it one of the most important films for understanding work under neoliberalism and for the projections Silicon Valley corporations have for a post-neoliberal society. Why? Because The Internship indicates that the post-neoliberal employee must devote their whole being to their employer. Building on this, it suggests that neoliberalism will be transcended by a new, even more pernicious form of welfare capitalism.
Living without a life
The film benefited from Google’s cooperation, resulting in a product that pleased many Google employees, including its founder Larry Page who considered it a fine advert for the company. This was in part because the film presents post-neoliberal work as leisure or even pure fun. When promoting The Internship, Owen Wilson mused on his visit to the Google workplace: “you assume that a lot of work gets done, but it wasn’t evident. It just seemed like a nice resort.” This notion that we derive joy from, or experience fun at, work is, according to the sociologist Andrew Ross, “a stock component of the postmodern emotional tool kit.” But one must not merely experience this fun: one must express and embody it too. Interns, as the journalist Madeleine Schwartz points out, must be “enthusiastic, submissive, and obedient…flexible, energetic.” As such, the ideal worker should express gratitude for any and every work opportunity placed before them. They must be a “can do” person with an effervescent attitude and an insatiable appetite for work. Naturally, these learned behaviors become traits that inform their future as a compliant, docile, but fun employee.
Yet this notion of leisure-as-work/work-as-leisure is reliant on discipline. This discipline emerges from the individual’s devotion to their job, coupled with data-driven employment practices. The film includes these activities as part of the interns’ competition that drives its plot. In one example, they must compete against each other to answer as many queries as possible on Google’s telephone hotline, a task that seems fun and challenging but ultimately boils down to numbers. Similarly, the glass walls that organize the fictional Google’s campus do not merely create an airy, open atmosphere; they also facilitate surveillance, to ensure that the workers can be seen to work hard. Google combines its gleaming facades, its primary-colored ball pools, bicycles, and overstocked cafes with enticements that push its employees to remain at work long into the evening. Employees might be able to sleep in Google dorms, but this liberation from rent or mortgage merely enables the destruction of the dividing line between work and not-work, between a public and a private life, perhaps between permanent adolescence and adulthood itself.
Employees might be able to sleep in Google dorms, but this liberation from rent or mortgage merely enables the destruction of the dividing line between work and not-work.
Even highly paid Googlers suffer under its regime. One high-flyer in The Internship, Dana Simms, works until midnight every day, rarely takes breaks, and has never even eaten off-campus: a reflection of the epidemic of overwork in Silicon Valley. As a “ceaselessly productive worker [whose]… persona… transcends needs for sleep, care, relationships, and any other obligation that might distract from work and profit,” Simms donates her whole self to Google. As important, nothing in the film suggests that Google offers meaningful perks like childcare stipends or daycare centers, decent sickness pay or support for workers about to be made unemployed. And as a childless singleton, Simms continues to work at the “edge of burnout,” confusing the joy she gets from work with real fulfillment. Naturally, and fitting with the film’s conservatism, she finds this fulfillment in a romance with Owen Wilson’s Nick. As this suggests, Simms’s experience is highly gendered: a high-flying male colleague of hers does not suffer similarly.
As Simms’s life-without-a-life suggests, Googlers might not have enough time to benefit from the perks on offer. A Google dance tutor in The Internship moonlights as a pole dancer to augment her salary because it does not cover her university tuition fees. Her need to take on two jobs while also studying offers a stunning indictment of Google’s attitude towards female staff, while reflecting the frequency with which young students fund higher education through sex work. Google made over $10 billion profit on revenue of $50 billion in 2012, and a year later sat on nearly $59 billion in cash, equivalents, and securities. Like many tech companies, it employs a tiny workforce, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in profit per employee per year. The low pay given to the dance tutor is a choice, not a necessity, just like the simple fact that it could employ more interns should it decide. And that Google found its employees suffered great declines in well-being during the late 2010s suggests that those dance classes might not be enough to prevent its staff from experiencing anomie.
Corporate Leviathan
Google spends millions of dollars lobbying the US government over employment issues, workplace policies, competition regulation, and tax policy, to protect its status. Naturally, The Internship elides this somewhat uncinematic issue. Careful viewers might notice something interesting, however. The Internship tasks its interns with convincing a local pizza shop owner to sign an advertising contract with Google to boost his shop’s presence in the local economy. Presented as a way to benefit local businesses, this service is facilitated by Google’s dominance of the local search market. The film omits the strong suggestion that this network dominance was underpinned by un-Googley anti-competitive practice.
The film stands as a perfect representation of Google itself: on the surface, a sunny, quirky, primary-colored can-do image overlaying a rapacious corporate behemoth that squeezes everything it can from its employees.
In 2011, the Federal Trade Commission began investigating Google’s monopoly power following complaints from Yelp, which specialized in highly localized online searches, that Google was relegating its results in Google search results. Google boosters quite rightly note that the FTC case did not proceed, but as the business journalist Rana Foroohar observes, it was dismissed amid a flurry of lobbying efforts from Google, including a meeting between the FTC and Larry Page. The Internship took nearly $100m at the box office. It stands as a perfect representation of Google itself: on the surface, a sunny, quirky, primary-colored can-do image overlaying a rapacious corporate behemoth that squeezes everything it can from its employees. Yet Google’s parent company continues to receive thousands of internship and job applications each day.
The outside is so unpleasant because Google is so pleasant. And that makes it doubly important to be that fun, conscientious intern and then the post-neoliberal worker prepared to sacrifice their personal life for the corporate good, lest one be cast out into the wilderness.
Why is this so? Herein lies perhaps The Internship’s most important insight. One of the interns weeps that their lives will be “basically ruined” if they fail to win a contract after their internship concludes. That outside world is too terrifying for her to contemplate. Those outside the Googleplex are doomed to a Hobbesian existence, devoid of meaning and fun, not to mention job security. And of course, this noisy, brutish, dirty, defeated world is intimately related to Silicon Valley’s financial policies. The World Bank notes that “the fight against poverty has stalled,” that economic growth has slumped, and the gig economy continues to metastasize. Meanwhile, Google’s dominance of the search engine marketplace reaps vast profits for its parent company, which now hoards over $100 billion in cash; its fellow Silicon Valley megacorps Apple and Meta hold over $67 billion and a mere $58 billion respectively. These corporations routinely minimize their tax obligations, and as such are fully implicated in the environment observed by Eggers. Of course, the two are symbiotic: the outside is so unpleasant because Google is so pleasant. And that makes it doubly important to be that fun, conscientious intern and then the post-neoliberal worker prepared to sacrifice their personal life for the corporate good, lest one be cast out into the wilderness.
Desiring Dystopia
Finally, if The Internship is so dystopian, how come Google liked it so much? Perhaps Google’s staff could not bear to consider the film’s political unconscious. On the other hand—and this is the much more troubling conclusion—maybe The Internship’s dystopia is precisely the post-neoliberal world that Google wants to see. Beneath this lies a more dystopian question. What happens when the chosen few choose not to leave not because they do not have a better offer from a rival corporation but because nothing but “noise and struggle, failure and filth” outside the Googleplex exists? This, of course, is the logical endpoint of the Ayn Randian ethos that drives much of Silicon Valley.
We might turn here, for example, to Sam Altman’s talk of the “median human” amid his Nietzschean belief that tech leaders such as he “decide what we want, [and] decide we’re going to enforce it,” almost irrespective of the other humans’ response (that Altman is a confessed “prepper,” hoarding items that will benefit him when society collapses into barbarity offers a particularly useful insight into his view of humanity). Let us not forget that Google’s former chairman Eric Schmidt declared Altman a “hero of mine.” For those of us outside the walled gardens of Silicon Valley, this post-neoliberal society seems akin to Hobbes’ state of nature, where the withering of the state leaves us living solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives; inside those walls, meanwhile, workers can have everything they want, provided they work all the time. Here we might turn to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and his challenge to his new employees: the workplace would now be “extremely hardcore.” For those who stayed, “working long hours at high intensity” would become the norm, and “only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” Woe betide those who fail. This post-neoliberal world has talented graduates engage in what Owen Wilson’s intern calls a “mental Hunger Games” for companies that could (but choose not to) employ all of them, while the world outside lies in ruins. So watch The Internship…but don’t expect to laugh.
Joe Street is associate professor in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. He is the author of several books, including Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash, Silicon Valley Cinema (from which this piece is adapted), and Black Revolutionaries: A History of the Black Panther Party.
