‘Super Pumped’ shows how enthusiastic technicians can degenerate into jerks

Imagine you’re applying for a job at an ambitious tech startup, and the owner of the place asks you if you’re a jerk. It is a pertinent question, and certainly more original than “Where do you see yourself in five years?” But the nasty lies in the right answer that Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) expects from his interviewees in the mini-series Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

In the series, based on a journalistic book by New York Timestech reporter Mike Isaac, the rise of the world’s most famous ride sharingservice examined. On the surface, the series is a solid business drama, in which you are not spared the troubles in the boardroom. But it quickly fades away Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber into something completely different: it becomes a deconstruction of Gordon-Levitt’s main character, who in just a few years grows from an enthusiastic technician with a revolutionary idea to an arrogant first-class bastard.

And the series seeks the answer to an important question: was Travis Kalanick already an asshole before he founded Ubercab (as the company was originally called) in 2009 and received his large sum of money from venture capital fund Benchmark Capital in 2011, or did he become one because of the money that started pouring in not long after and the magical technology he has in his toes?

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber was already released on the American Showtime in 2022: the series is only now arriving with us via the publishing deal between Paramount, the parent group of that pay channel, and Streamz. Two years ago, she landed at a time when the moral decline of such tech founders was a trend in TV fiction from across the pond. It was also released on Hulu (Disney+ in our country). The Dropout, about how founder Elizabeth Holmes became increasingly entangled in the web of lies she had spun around her DNA company Theranos. And it came to Apple TV+ WeCrashedin which the billion-dollar ambitions of WeWork founder Adam Neumann were slightly adjusted downwards.

Now that I have seen this one series from that older list with some delay, I am once again struck by the timelessness of these types of stories. Of course, Kalanick had to do it in 2017, five years before the publication of Super pumped, left his company amid public dismay over his cynical view of the role of technology in society. But these kinds of stories about criminal hubris, about how power corrupts a person, are by definition timeless: undoubtedly The Social Network (2010) is still relevant today when you look back at it. Or The Godfather Part II (1974).

There is no doubt that people like Kalanick are innovating and improving things. I also no longer take taxis in places where Uber drives. It is cheaper, more seamless and clearer: for example, the price is already fixed before you take the ride. But series like Super pumped remind us once again that this kind of ‘disruptive’ technology gives the people behind it undue power. For example, one of them must be completely convinced that hate speech simply falls under the banner of free speech and have a social medium with 300 million subscribers in their hands.

Seven episodes, available in full on Streamz.