Midway through my watch of the new tech-satire series “The Audacity,” I received an e-mail from Google that I had received many times before. My personal data had been found online, it said. This time, it was my phone number; previously, it had been more private information. The most I could do, it seemed, was ask Google to remove the offending pages from its search results, one by one, over months, then years. I wish I could say I was more bothered. These days, violations of digital privacy are a routine calamity that we’ve by and large given up on addressing. There are only so many things we can be outraged about at once, and surveillance capitalism—the business model summed up by “if you’re not paying, you’re the product”—seldom makes the cut.

“The Audacity” wants to shake us out of that stupor. The opening episode of the AMC dramedy introduces an algorithm that’s a gift to stalkers everywhere. Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the C.E.O. of a data-mining startup called Hypergnosis, has just found out that his wife, Lili (Lucy Punch), slept with another man the previous night. Never mind that Duncan and Lili are in an open marriage, and that he is more likely to confide in his former mistress than in his wife. He asks one of the company’s engineers, a pink-haired, nonbinary coder named Harper (Jess McLeod), to use their latest project—a program they describe as “God’s eye”—to identify his new rival based on a few scant details. Within moments, Duncan learns not only the man’s name but his current location, his salary, and his penchants for herring, wheat beer, and anal sex. The tech is terrifying, but it’s treated matter-of-factly, played for barked laughs. The vibes are less “Black Mirror” than “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”—less the near-future than the now.

Marketing for “The Audacity” has focussed on Duncan as the latest prestige-TV gazillionaire to hate on, but the show is, in fact, a panoramic lambasting of Silicon Valley’s particular form of trickle-down rot. Duncan’s daughter attends a private high school that so reliably sends its students to Stanford that even its principal isn’t above committing a bit of fraud to insure her own daughter’s place there. His financially strapped therapist, JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), tells herself that, if she keeps her C-suite clients “sane enough” for them to make ungodly amounts of money, she should be entitled to some of it—a line of reasoning that lets her justify the insider trading she commits based on their in-session disclosures of imminent mergers and acquisitions. The one-per-centers have warped society so thoroughly with their endless advantages that the ten-per-centers feel that they need to break the rules to have a chance at keeping up.

Sometime in the past two decades, the M.B.A.s took over the industry from the nerds, and it became more imperative to scale and extract than to innovate. “The Audacity” reflects this shift; its primary characters aren’t the socially inept weenies of “Silicon Valley,” awestruck at their proximity to Scrooge McDuckian wealth, but middle-aged businesspeople who already have more money than they know what to do with. Duncan lives with the knowledge that his entrée into the upper echelons of the tech world was paved by the co-founder of his first startup, the real genius of the two; his eventual partner at Hypergnosis is Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis), a legendary venture capitalist said to have “invented the future”—a nice way of saying he helped to make spam ubiquitous. By definition, these guys are a duller lot than their predecessors—more Tim Cook than Steve Jobs—and the series’ creator, Jonathan Glatzer, a former “Succession” writer, doesn’t have much insight into what makes them tick, beyond above-average avarice and shamelessness. After Duncan uses ayahuasca to cope with a business setback, he pleads his greatest wish to a hallucination of his father: “Help me stay rich.”

But it’s the focus on data harvesting that gives “The Audacity” its strange verve, born of a conviction that it can make this perpetually overlooked issue an object of emotional investment. Its satirical aim feels spot-on. A couple of weeks after the series premièred, reports emerged that Meta contractors had viewed intimate videos recorded by its smart glasses—a real-world development that eerily mirrored a plot point in which Hypergnosis employees are found to be watching footage of customers in self-driving cars pleasuring themselves on their commutes. In the show, as in life, such unsavory impulses extend not just to the staff but to the user base. They’re more often enabled by the company than constrained.

That Harper’s algorithm—christened Gnodin—has altruistic potential is swiftly deemed beside the point. Like a lot of splashy new tech, from cryptocurrency to deepfakes, it’s mostly a boon to criminals and malefactors. (Duncan, after cyber-stalking his wife’s lover, next turns his all-seeing eye on his therapist—and promptly uses JoAnne’s suspicious trades as blackmail material.) A chance to do good arrives in the form of Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry), a Veterans Affairs rep seeking a tech firm that’ll upload and streamline the agency’s antiquated files. Although Harper argues that Gnodin could be used to aid vets in crisis, Duncan is only convinced to get into business with Tom after a board member points out that the V.A. data sets could be sold off to sell life insurance, pharmaceuticals, even commemorative coins. That capitalist enterprises rarely bother with unprofitable activities is not a novel observation, but the show engagingly illustrates how easy it is for them to raze institutions, and how disinterested they are in cleaning up the wreckage. As Carl puts it, despairingly, “We’ve broken and disrupted everything, and now there’s nothing else to break.” The would-be moral enforcers aren’t much better. Anushka (Meaghan Rath), the chief ethicist at a tech conglomerate and the mouthpiece of the writers’ noblest sentiments (“human dignity requires privacy”), is the most obvious one to fall.

What would it take for people to care about their own privacy—to insist on their own dignity? And what would it take for corporations to curb their own industry? These are questions “The Audacity” poses to its viewers, as its antihero’s sweaty desperation impels him to devise ever-darker use cases for Gnodin. Duncan’s panicked antics don’t help his control of the narrative. Despite repelling everyone around him with his need to be admired, Duncan, the show argues, has a crucial role to play in the world: not as the success story he hopes to be but as a cautionary tale. ♦