Reviewed by: It’s a Question of Trust: Halt and Catch Fire’s Third-Season Review Elinor Carmi (bio) It’s a Question of Trust: Halt and Catch Fire’s Third-Season Review Fiction is perhaps one of the greatest technologies, allowing us to go back in time and imagine alternative versions of history. In this way, AMC’s-three year-old television series Halt and Catch Fire (HCF)1 reimagines the computing industry’s history in order to make sense of things that happen in it today. In the process, it blurs the lines between fiction and reality, illustrating Katherine Hayles’s argument that fictional texts are not “merely passive conduits” and that they “actively shape what the technologies mean and what the scientific theories signify in cultural contexts.”2 HCF looks at the past with critical eyes by making references to contemporary issues; it reverse engineers the computing industry. Starting in 1980s Texas, the show focuses on four protagonists: Joe MacMillan is the “Steve Jobs” egomaniac-visionary who would do anything to sell his ideas. He persuades Gordon Clark (the “Steve Wozniak”–style shy-software genius) to reverse engineer IBM’s BIOS in order to create a new personal computer. The series also imagines what would happen if this powerful duo had a female counterpart: Donna Clark, a brilliant hardware designer (who is Gordon’s wife), and Cameron Howe, a software wizard who hates authority. This refreshing take upgrades the program by showing, without falling into the usual clichés, how women have been struggling to fit into this highly masculine field. The show highlights the complex process of conceiving technologies, which starts by thinking what it could be in the future and then having to sell it to your partners, your employees, the stock holders of the company, and, most important, the people. The first season was about its protagonists’ efforts to persuade people that the personal computer is something that every household should have. The second season highlighted the industry’s gender politics by following Clark and Howe as they started Mutiny, a company that sells computer games and bulletin board systems. Now in its third season, HCF shows how Mutiny develops online transaction systems and starts to gravitate toward the idea of a World Wide Web. Like the second season, this one emphasizes how different players—venture capitalists, board members, regulators, technology journalists, hackers, and other competitors—struggle to determine whether the timing, design, and price for computing technologies are ripe. The move from Texas to Silicon Valley in the third season highlights the increased competition, capital, stress, and gender discrimination that its two female leads experience. For example, when Clark and Howe have to persuade venture capital guys to invest in Mutiny, the women receive subtle invitations to close the deal between the sheets. Later on, when trying to “go public” on their initial public offering, they are asked about shopping for shoes. This shows that the process of persuasion in the computing industry is not only about the technologies themselves but also requires engagement with a built-in gendered bias that unfortunately persists. The third season also highlights the role that trust and security play in its characters’ professional ambitions and personal lives. Opening the third season, Joe MacMillan pitches his new antivirus company by asking, “What should [End Page 10] the price of security really be? How much should we pay to feel safe? Freedom from fear is a right not a commodity.” Mastering the art of selling ideas, he signals what will be at the heart of this season. Whether between business, romantic, or sexual partners, between subscribers and the technologies and services they use, or between parents and their kids, this season emphasizes how difficult it is to trust people and how these social insecurities are coded into the machines and programs people develop and use. With the AIDS epidemic looming in the background, the third season portrays the complexities of people’s social networks. It shows how 1980s cultural conditions influence technological developments, such as computer viruses. It also shows the beginning of Silicon Valley’s trend of solving social problems and vulnerabilities by offering a technological solution. A...