Burned-out tech worker who winds up in company-mandated therapy. For those of us who work in tech, this might feel like a tale as old as time.

But Job the Play takes all those icky feelings–the creeping anxieties, the gnawing paranoia about big tech’s grip on our lives (and social media in particular)–into a painfully prescient exploration of trauma.

It's unsettling to watch the dark underbelly of your own industry get teased out and laid bare in real time, on stage, in front of a live Broadway audience. For 80 minutes straight, it says the quiet thing out loud. Again and again and again. And even as you squirm in your seats, you can’t look away.

The result is a slow-burn thriller that stokes a low-key tension throughout your whole body, making you wonder whether you should even be consuming the content being served. By the end, you’re left questioning not just the industry, but your place in it.

It’s always impactful to see a gripping piece of theater, but given the subject matter, it was even more meaningful to experience it with a small collective of techies—from founders to investors to a tech-employee-turned-comedian. Afterward, it sparked an important conversation on ethics, mental health, tech burnout, and the downsides of living in our tech industry bubble. A conversation that more of us should have.

Looking at the Bad Bits

One of the trickiest parts about working in tech is toggling between the extreme level of focus required to ship a product with the broader awareness of how others might use that technology in ways you never imagined.

Every corner of the tech industry has its micro-silos. You get so heads-down in building that you miss the storm happening outside your office. You spend so long curating your social media feed, following peer investors to learn what they care about, that you don’t notice when you become part of the echo chamber. Spend too many years in web3, and you might forget that most people are still highly skeptical of crypto-native business models.

And that’s why it’s important to get outside your silo, and look at things from another perspective. 

Earlier this summer, during a deep AI dive, I immersed myself in both the starburst idealism and the darker sides of this technology by reading several back-to-back dystopian novels about the worrisome potential of AI and tech media. One of them, Annie Bot, follows the story of a life-sized AI custom-designed by her human partner to give him pleasure and manage task around the home. As Annie slowly develops sentience and exposes uncomfortable truths about the humans in her orbit, I found myself, as the reader, questioning:

“Wait a minute, who’s right here? Am I on the side of the human or the AI?”

In Klara and the Sun, another AI-centric story, the protagonist is designed to be a beloved doll companion for a human child. The author masterfully shows how humans can gradually cross lines with their AI creations—subtly at first, then all at once. Both stories left me with visceral reactions to the line-crossing, ethically murky behaviors, something only fiction can draw out in such a powerful way. Stories like these help us confront the things we might otherwise hide from ourselves.

That’s why I think it's so important for people in tech to engage with narratives like these—whether on stage or in book form—from creators who map out how things go from good to bad to just plain ugly. 

This is exactly what Job the Play does: it forces us to confront the uncomfortable truths about what happens on the Internet we all work so hard to build together. By exposing the burnout and trauma in the deepest corners of the dark web, Job makes abstract concerns about ethics and technology painfully real. Despite the somewhat triggering delivery of the material shared, you can’t help but walk away feeling compelled by the invisible challenge it sets before you: Do better. Fix it.