EGN NEWS DESK
In a top-floor atrium in downtown San Francisco on Thursday night, tech staff from Google, Slack, X and Mozilla mingled subsequent to a pair of cardboard cutouts of Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.
Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook founder, chatted as others sipped from cannily named cocktails just like 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 Facebook, was additionally noticed.
“Do you assume they’ll let me take house one of many freaky sandworm popcorn buckets?” somebody within the crowd tittered. The suggestively designed buckets had turn into a sensation throughout social media.
The techies have been all there to rejoice Silicon Valley’s latest obsession: “Dune: Part 2,” the most recent film tailored from the Frank Herbert-authored science-fiction saga, which helped encourage lots of them to turn into curious about expertise. The movie, which follows the 2021 installment “Dune,” offered an estimated $81.5 million in tickets within the United States and Canada over the weekend, the largest opening for a Hollywood movie since “Barbie.”
The invitation-only personal screening on the IMAX theater in downtown San Francisco was hosted by two former tech executives turned podcasters of “Escape Hatch,” a weekly present centered on sci-fi and fantasy movies. And it was not the one sport on the town.
Across Silicon Valley — from enterprise capital corporations to tech govt circles — individuals had booked their very own personal screenings of the film, directed by Denis Villeneuve. On Thursday, the enterprise agency 50 Years invited founders, associates and buyers to “come gas your creativeness with stellar science fiction” in a theater takeover.
Founders Fund, a enterprise capital agency cocreated by Peter Thiel, rented out the Alamo Drafthouse theater in San Francisco’s Mission District for the movie’s opening evening on Friday, with an open bar and free meals. Some individuals flew in from throughout the nation to attend.
“If you’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 expertise journalist, wrote in a post on X final month.
Even as tech corporations have reduce jobs and perks in current months, the custom of the sci-fi film premier stays alive and properly. Films like “Star Wars,” “Dune” and “Ready Player One” have been the very issues that helped stir techies’ curiosity within the area of laptop science. No longer content material with solely watching the long run unfold onscreen, staff at corporations like Meta, Google and Palantir have began plucking instantly from their favourite motion pictures to construct the merchandise of tomorrow.
In Google’s early days, the corporate routinely purchased out total theaters to see the most recent 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. and A. with the movie’s antagonist, Jared Leto. Venture capital corporations have repeated the apply for different futuristic movies and collection, together with “The Martian,” “Arrival” and HBO’s “Westworld.”
But “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two” maintain a particular place in Silicon Valley hearts and minds due to the collection’ expansiveness. It doesn’t harm that “Dune” was born in San Francisco, the place Mr. Herbert lived within the late Nineteen Fifties as he researched what grew to become the collection of sci-fi novels.
“It is among the authentic world-building workouts in style fiction, and we’re all about world-building right here,” mentioned Jason Goldman, a former Twitter govt who joined Matt Herrero, a techie pal, to create the “Escape Hatch” podcast throughout the pandemic lockdowns.
The “Dune: Part Two” viewing occasions additionally acted as a sort of protected 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 have been idealists with utopian goals,” mentioned Tom Coates, a tech veteran, on the “Escape Hatch” cocktail party. “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.’ But I feel it’s attention-grabbing that we’re not all right here tonight to look at the Ayn Rand filmography.”
Mr. Goldman mentioned a part of Silicon Valley Valley’s enchantment with “Dune” may very well be because of characters like Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, a messianic determine who leads a downtrodden tribal group into rising up and defeating their evil overlords.
“What individuals need, what they’re all the time attempting to recreate, is that charismatic chief with the flexibility to see into the long run,” Mr. Goldman mentioned. “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. Mr. Herbert was deeply skeptical of man’s technological progress, a perspective that framed his collection.
“It’s all primarily based on a world through which synthetic intelligence has been worn out totally,” mentioned Cal Henderson, the co-founder and chief technical officer of Slack, who attended the Thursday party.
(That morning, Elon Musk had sued OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, over claims that the corporate had put business pursuits earlier than the way forward for humanity. “Meta doesn’t even start to explain it,” one other individual on the party mentioned.)
Still, attendees have been decided to have enjoyable. One introduced Mr. Herrero and Mr. Goldman with a shiny, custom-printed “Dune: Part Two” poster, with the hosts’ faces photoshopped over these of the movie’s celebrities. Tables have 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 two hours and 46 minutes, ended, the group headed right into a V.I.P. room to file a dwell version of the podcast on what they’d simply seen. The geeking out continued previous midnight.
Shortly afterward, Mr. Goldman purchased tickets to a Monday matinee of “Dune: Part Two.”
“I can’t wait to see it once more,” he mentioned.
