The sixth and final season of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” which starts Sunday, Oct. 27, begins with Richard Hendricks, the ever-uncomfortable patriarch of the fictional tech company Pied Piper, sitting with a collection of tech world CEOs in front of Congress, testifying about industry regulation. Sweating and awkward to the point that he asks to pace while addressing the politicians, Hendricks launches into one of those sweeping TV speeches, this one targeting the ills of our online overlords — his peers.

“They track our every move, they monitor every moment in our lives, and they exploit our data for profit. You can ask them all the questions you want, but they’re not going to change. They don’t have to. These companies are kings. And they rule over nations far greater than any nation in human history. They won. We lost,” says Hendricks, who is played by Thomas Middleditch.

“We are in the seat of the U.S. government, a government founded by people who were at one point ruled by kings they couldn’t overthrow. So they came here and founded a new world. Version 2.0, 1776. The way we win is by creating a new democratic, decentralized internet. One where the behavior of companies like this will be impossible forever. One where it is the users, not the kings, who have sovereign control of their data.”

His moment is over and Hendricks’ Pied Piper colleagues are shown smiling and cheering on their compatriot. And after hearing that monologue, you kind of want to jump up and cheer as well. Like the best moments of this Peak Era of television, Hendricks’ speech mines the frustrations and insecurities that pollute our actual lives, with this one aiming scorn to the South Bay, where that nest of tech companies is being scrutinized for monetizing our data and distorting the truth of our world.

Once the swell of emotion from Hendricks’ speech recedes and those goosebumps on your nape disappear, the episode glides along and reminds you why this HBO series has become such a smart reflection of the real Silicon Valley: As Hendricks — who’s being hailed as a hero by the media — navigates a mixer, he’s met with laughter as his peers find out that what he said was sincere, not just some well-acted deflection to get the feds off their scent. In an instant, our hero becomes the loser. Again.

That shift is exactly why “Silicon Valley” has been so lauded, and terrifying to real Silicon Valley participants through its first five seasons — the show uses humor to poke fun at the ridiculous aspects of the tech culture (obscene coffee bars at work, tech-bros groupthink, CEOs who consult gurus for business advice), but its satire is so spot-on and cutting that the program can be hard to watch.

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Back in 2013, a year before “Silicon Valley” began, “House of Cards” was Netflix’s new star. The drama, set in the Washington, D.C., political arena and starring Kevin Spacey as a fourth-wall-breaking, power-hungry scoundrel, was one of those shows that began to define the idea of being “binge-worthy.” For a moment, it led dialogues around the cultural zeitgeist as a window into the political realm. (Though, if you talked to D.C. insiders, there was a common comment heard: “House of Cards” was fine, but if you want a more accurate view of the “real” D.C. scene, check out the HBO comedy “Veep.”)

Talk to people in the Bay Area who work or travel in the real tech world and they have similar sentiments about “Silicon Valley.” The 2010 film “The Social Network” or even the AMC series “Halt and Catch Fire” were serious narratives of the evolution of computing culture, but for those living that Silicon Valley life, the comedy “Silicon Valley” rings all too true.

“Or the other response I get is that they’ll say, ‘I can’t watch the show because it makes me relive my trauma at a startup,’” Middleditch says.

Sitting at a table with his co-star Zach Woods (he plays Jared) in the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio, hours before a San Francisco screening on Wednesday, Oct. 16, of the first episode of the new season for an army of real Silicon Valley bigwigs, Middleditch talks about what he’s heard from people who participate in the actual Silicon Valley.

“When it first started, I didn’t know enough about Silicon Valley to compare it to ‘Silicon Valley.’ Like, the first episode, I think, Richard turns down Gavin Belson because he offers him $10 million for Pied Piper. And I remember in the earlier version of the script that was supposed to be $100 million, but the writers toned that down because they didn’t think anyone would turn down $100 million for something. … In those early seasons, we didn’t know how absurd it really was.”

Fortunately Mike Judge did.

The man who mined the dreadful monotony of workplace culture in the cult classic film “Office Space” as well as the homespun wisdom of suburban Texas in the venerable animated series “King of the Hill,” was observing the blooming online landscape when he was searching for a new project to work on. He was thinking of focusing on something about people like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — nerdy, socially awkward, super wealthy folks. Then HBO pitched him on a series about the video gaming world.

“But I thought, ‘I don’t know the gaming world, and that’s something really where if you don’t get that right, you get killed by everybody,’” Judge says.

So the former engineer, who lived in Silicon Valley in the late ’80s, countered with a pitch about the architects of our online world.

“It just seemed perfect for comedy. How huge it was and how it affected everybody, but at the time you didn’t know much about the people who were building it,” Judge says. “Then there had been the movie ‘Primer’ and ‘Social Network’ and I thought we were too late, because they got it right, I had thought. … Thankfully the tech world kept getting weirder and weirder and more absurd and crazy and darker as the show went on. Our timing was pretty good.”

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One of the more poignant moments of “Silicon Valley” came early in the series, when the show depicted startups presenting their wares at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF event. The scene became a cut-up sequence of various designers talking about their arcane creations, with each of them saying their work was going to make the world a better place. It became an early defining moment of how the show was getting it right.

“What’s funny is that this show is about people who lack self-awareness, and we’ve definitely had a couple of times where people will essentially say, ‘That thing you said about so-and-so, I know people just like that.’ And it’s like they’re talking about themselves,” says Alec Berg, an executive producer on “Silicon Valley.”

Then, these same people will literally tell Berg how they’re making the world a better place. “They’re like, ‘No, I know everybody says it, but we definitely are.’”

“That happened time and time again,” Judge says.

It’s no secret that Berg, Judge and the show’s writers have done a lot of research to make this series feel authentic, hiring Silicon Valley veterans, tech journalists and academics as consultants. But the depth of their research might be surprising.

“It’s the most research-heavy thing I’ve ever worked on,” Berg says. “And it’s the first thing that I’ve ever worked on where you can actually be wrong. I’ve worked on things where you can be funny or not funny, but I’ve never worked on something where somebody can point at it and say, ‘Nope.’ … During the course of a season we’ll probably talk to 60 or 70 different people. … Every screen and every whiteboard, somebody has done work and vetted. It’s not random.”

This isn’t “Revenge of the Nerds” or some other goofy comedy that doesn’t care if it’s not accurate, Berg says, the goal with “Silicon Valley” is for the show to be photo-realistic.

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So much about “Silicon Valley,” and the actual Silicon Valley, is built around winning — as enterprising designers, as companies surging toward dominance, as people who want to become billionaires. It’s a win-first mentality that dominates the entire series. (Spoiler alert: There’s a scene in the first three episodes of the final season that gets to the heart of that obsession.)

Hendricks and his longtime rival Belsom are sitting on a park bench, each reflecting on the reality that their companies are trending downward. While commiserating, they realize that if they agree to a simple partnership, they would each find themselves in a position to “win.” Hendricks asks if they’re really going to do this, and Belsom laughs before going into a mini-monologue about why he can’t help his competitor succeed, even if it means watching himself fail.

So, it’s worth wondering, will we see the good guys win?

“Well, that depends on your definition of ‘win,’” Berg says. “That’s part of what this season is about: Should they win or lose? What does that mean?

“I read an article that said something like 49 of 50 people that somebody interviewed after they won the lottery regretted winning the lottery. So did they win or not?”

It’s a tempting tease.

“It ends to me in a very satisfying way,” Middleditch says. “I think they really hit the landing. The tension that they are a hair away of pass/fail, that is there to the greatest degree ever.”

“Silicon Valley”: Comedy. 9 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 27. HBO. www.hbo.com

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