The villain in 2013’s The Internship isn’t a venture capitalized demi-fascist or a malignant piece of AI hellware. His name is Graham Hawtrey and he’s a clean-cut Stanford prick played by Max Minghella as a West Coast knockoff of the Harvard pricks in The Social Network. Hawtrey is arrogant and snobbish, but the real knock on him is that he prioritizes managing up. Spoiler alert: His Machiavellian stratechery comes to naught because Google – well, Movie Google – always rewards iconoclasm (even when it means hiring middle-aged bummers who can’t use Gmail).
The Internship is a ZIRP-era relic[1] – a piece of Riefenstahlinist corporate propaganda from a period when low interest rates allowed ascendent tech firms to prioritize user acquisition over profitability and claim to be democratizing access to technology while assailing the margins of main street. The film pushes the benevolent tech narrative by depicting Google as a communitarian innovation engine and obscuring the company hierarchy by turning the titular internship program into a points-driven tri-wizard tournament. Watching the film in 2025, it’s hard not to feel embarrassed for both Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan, who would have been less morally compromised crashing FLDS child weddings.
The truth is that modern companies – even tech companies with kinder-brutalist branding and “Don’t Be Evil” inscribed in the code of conduct and IPO prospectus – are hierarchical and autocratic. Power is centralized so ranking execs can optimize for shareholder value regardless of whether their strategic decisions rankle the rank and file W2 workers to whom they have limited (if any) obligation. To work for a corporation is to spend 40+ hours a week under autocratic rule. Capitulation to that rule is not a side effect of corporate life—it is the core experience. Obscuring that fact from the well-educated individualists was a priority for business owners for a hundred years before The Internship came out. A bit more than a decade later… not so much.
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