How Parks and Recreation Took Aim at Silicon Valley

In its final season, Parks and Recreation jumped forward to 2017, setting the stage for more than a few digs at the influence of tech culture on America's communities.
GryzzlBox
NBC

Parks and Recreation has come to an end. After a seventh season that jumped forward in time to the year 2017, setting up innumerable jokes about a potential future where Elton John owns Chick-fil-A and the Cubs finally win the World Series, the NBC comedy wrapped up by looking forward as much as it looked back. Since its final season was essentially a story about the future, it is perhaps fitting so much of it revolved around a critique of tech culture, and how the sheer financial weight of companies like Facebook and Google bend the world around them in damaging ways that often contradict the sleek optimism of their products.

When we returned to Pawnee at the beginning of the seventh season, Gryzzl—the vowel-deficient Internet company Ben (Adam Scott) courted for free Wi-Fi (think Google Fiber)—had set up a corporate office in the small Indiana town. And although throughout the season Gryzzl lavished Pawnee's citizens with wireless Internet, smartphones, and holographic tablets, their presence also came with a price. The influx of tech cash sent real estate prices through the roof and threatened to strip out all the charm that made Leslie Knope call Pawnee "the greatest town in America."

The flood of Gryzzl money also sets up the central conflict of the season, where Leslie (Amy Poehler) wants to turn 25 square miles of forest in the southern Indiana foothills into a national park—the same site where Gryzzl wants to build their new Midwest headquarters, offering a $90 million bid that she has no way to match.

"Leslie, I have always liked you," says the Newport heiress who owns the land, when Leslie proposes that she donate it to the National Park Service. "But I also like money, and money pays for my lifestyle. ... You see the bind that I'm in."

Over the course of the season, Leslie remarks on how the character of the town has morphed since the arrival of Gryzzl, with juice bars, yoga studios, and pet hotels popping up across Pawnee. "Everything has changed. This town is going to be unrecognizable in 10 years," she says wistfully. One episode revolves entirely around trying to save their perennial waffle hangout J.J.'s Diner; thanks to the surging housing market, the property has been bought out by a perfume magnate who plans to flip it for profit.

If that sounds reminiscent of the housing crisis that's currently plaguing San Francisco—and displacing large numbers of long-time residents—it should. Rental prices in the tech hub city are currently in the highest the nation, with the median price of a one-bedroom apartment hovering at more than $3,400 a month. Meanwhile, local establishments like the Lexington Club (the J.J.'s Diner of lesbian bars) are getting sold to new owners.

Screenshot: WIRED

Although it's rarely framed in these terms, Parks and Rec has often been a show about real estate, and how the use of a town's land and public spaces can shape a community. Indeed, the major conflict of the first six seasons revolved around Leslie's quest to turn an empty lot into a small local park called Pawnee Commons, a seemingly minor achievement—but one that meant the world to her. Although her ambitions might be large, Leslie has always thought local.

But Pawnee Commons, unfortunately, also becomes a victim of tech-fueled gentrification, and a symbol of how it so often paves over the past to create the future, displacing and erasing both the history and people that once defined the community in the process. At the start of the season, Leslie and Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) are embroiled in a bitter feud, which we learn is based partly on his new construction company's decision to build a huge condominium that now towers over the tiny park that Leslie labored for so long to create. To add insult to injury, he even bulldozed the old house where Ann (Rashida Jones) used to live in the process, tearing down a building full of some of Leslie's most cherished memories.

Parks and Rec also took aim at the often oblivious nature of tech culture itself, and how its pseudo-casual veneer can mask deeper problems. When Ron arrives at Gryzzl's temporary headquarters to discuss the bid for the Newport land, he's greeted by Roscoe, the "vice president of cool shizz" and a mural on the wall proudly proclaims the company's slogan: "Wouldn't it be tight if everyone was chill to each other?"

It's a motto that would fit in effortlessly at plenty of tech companies, where sunny optimism supersedes and even erases the negative impact of their products on individuals, communities, and culture at large. There's a blissful, willful ignorance that permeates this yearning for frictionless chill, a desire to remain untouched by the downer realities of the ungrateful or less fortunate.

"There's nothing scary about Gryzzl," says Roscoe brightly, soon after admitting that they are actively data-mining all the communications of their consumers. "We just want to learn everything about everyone, and track them wherever they go and anticipate what they're about to do."

Screenshot: WIRED

Ron initially responds to the data-mining with his usual libertarian indifference, refusing to pass judgment on the workings of a private business, but also engages in the sort of digital victim-blaming that is too often used to justify the worst and most disturbing elements of online culture, from harassment to privacy violations: "Frankly, if people are foolish enough to carry around a doodad that lets Gryzzl track their every move, this is what they get."

At a faux trial, Roscoe insists that people should simply decline to use their services if they don't like their policies, prompting Ben to target both their privacy-eroding agenda, and their claims that users can disengage from their products with ease.

"We kind of [have to use them]. The Internet is no longer optional, it's a necessity for everyone," he says. "And I think you do know that data-mining isn't 'chill,' because you snuck it into the 27th update of a 500-page user agreement. A person shouldn't have to have an advanced law degree to avoid being taken advantage of by a multi-billion-dollar company. You should be up front about what you're doing and allow people to opt out."

Public opinion finally turns when Gryzzl starts using information from people's private texts to select gifts for them and deliver them to their home by drone, a dystopian blend of Google's e-mail-scanning contextual ads and Amazon's proposed Prime Air service. Both Ron and the larger Pawnee community finally agree that they've gone too far, and Gryzzl is forced into a tactical retreat.

It's a scene that reflects a disturbing tendency of tech companies like Facebook and Uber: their willingness to progressively erode the privacy of their customers, stopping only when their new initiatives are egregiously creepy enough to spark a wave of bad PR. "We did not believe that we did anything to invade people's privacy," insists Roscoe during a penitent television interview after the backlash, where he also announces a remunerative free concert by Beyoncé and U2.

In the end, the Gryzzl problem gets solved when Leslie shifts the company's interest away from the land in the Indiana foothills to a low-income neighborhood in Pawnee where "no respectable people live." The only resident we see is a seemingly homeless man, and we're left to assume that nothing of value will be displaced, only "revitalized." It's a bit of a pat solution, and one that seems far too similar to the indifferent attitude it set out to criticize. But with only a handful of episodes remaining Parks and Rec had to move on, shifting focus to Donna's wedding, Ben's congressional campaign, and closure for all the characters we've grown to love over the last seven years.

Although Parks and Rec might not have any meaningful answers to the problems of Silicon Valley, it was still worthwhile to see Leslie Knope take them on—bringing her earnest civic-mindedness to a situation that is too often drowning in cynicism.

"When we worked here together, we fought scratched and clawed to make people's lives a tiny bit better," Leslie told her former coworkers in the final moments of the series. "That's what public service about. Small, incremental change every day. ... What makes work worth doing is doing it with people that you love."