What is this all for?
Moving fast and breaking all kinds of things
Last night, I saw the off-Broadway play “Data”, about the tech industry and its discontents. If you live in New York, go see it! It’s playing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through March 29. Here’s the spoiler-free premise: Maneesh, a recent college graduate and computer whiz kid working in UX at a Palantir-like tech company called Athena, gets a promotion, which is when he learns for the first time that the mysterious thing the company works on is actually quite evil—and what’s more, he got the promotion because they need his particular talents to do it. We follow Maneesh through his moral quandaries and various attempts to distance himself from the work until he realizes there’s only one option available to him. The first two acts were stronger than the third act; I’m not convinced they stuck the landing. What it does get really right is how alienating these tech companies sound, how difficult it is to bridge the comprehension gap between the rhetoric of their boosters and the skeptical public. Alex, the CEO of Athena, sidesteps concerns about the morality of the product he’s building by exclaiming that they should feel honored to be in the room building something meaningful, that they are earning a seat at the table. An unspoken qualifier: for what?
It circles around something central to the culture that the left doesn’t always fully understand: it’s not all about the money. What these companies are selling is a chance to be a part of something big, to feel like you’ve done something important with your life, that you’re not going to spend the rest of your days answering emails and making PowerPoints about KPIs or something. Tech giants are just as nameless and faceless as every other Fortune 500 company, and the work rank-and-file employees do day-to-day is just as siloed and abstracted from its socially malignant purpose, but these facts have, until recent years, mostly receded into the background of the public imagination. They had the advantage of decades of branding in keeping with the Bay Area’s historic counterculture, the hippies, the antiwar movement, the drugs, the free love, “move fast and break things”, founder culture, wearing hoodies to work, the exponential growth of AI, so on and so forth. It’s a nominally egalitarian culture. Half the unicorns in the Valley were founded by college dropouts. Anybody can learn to code.
This is a genuine innovation in the historical relationship between boss and worker. What people really want in their lives is to find meaning, something that makes the work and drudgery of every day life feel worth it, and having a job where you get to shape the world sounds like it could be the solution to that eternal problem. Comparably lucrative industries like finance or consulting do not promise anything of the sort. That’s what the money is for. In tech they want you to buy into a vision of the world that you get to create. Tech oligarchs, in their grandiose rhetoric, are actually completely correct about the scale of their project; they have already remade the world in their image. Unfortunately for our young protagonist, a full recognition of what the scope of that vision is does not produce the satisfaction he and so many other young tech workers were promised. “Every day,” Riley, Maneesh’s coworker and former classmate says, “I get up and I make the world A WORSE PLACE!”
This is an Indian-American immigrant story, but it feels generative and not, as can sometimes be the case, a flimsy imitation of politics1. None of the usual bullshit about how your ancestors’ wildest dreams were for you to have an apartment in the West Village and make a million dollars building ads that spy on people or whatever. It really doesn’t pull its punches. You feel for Maneesh but he is obviously a very scared young man who knows very little about himself or the world. His naivety is palpable and frustrating, and you desperately want him to read a book, go outside and feel the fresh air, stop marinating in his own neuroses and trust his own convictions. He has some qualms about his overbearing Indian parents—who among us—but it’s not everything. He knows, and the audience knows, that his identity crisis is real and worthy of sympathy but is just as much his own creation as what his family circumstances have bequeathed him.
There is a really central question that gets explored between the perspectives of Maneesh and CEO Alex, who uses his own immigration struggles as a rhetorical cudgel to justify profiting off the deportation machine. To live as an immigrant in this country exposes you to all manner of indignities. For a certain sector of Asian Americans, whose outsized professional success puts them in a rarefied strata of society, there is an existential choice to be made: do you allow those experiences to connect you to other people from all walks of life, or do you use them as a weapon to separate yourself from them? There are all kinds of rhetorical ways to avoid this central question; Substack is full of wistful mango diaspora slop of this kind that could be interesting if there was even a little emotional honesty displayed.
I’ve known young men like Maneesh my whole life. A month ago, I went to a tech worker organizing meetup and came away with the overwhelming feeling that everybody was waiting to get laid off. Organizing big tech companies is hard because surveillance is their bread and butter, and they’re not worried about consequences for retaliation because they’re some of the biggest companies in America and we don’t really have an NLRB anymore. A former Google contractor told me they once fired someone for handing out flyers across the street from the New York office. In 2024 they fired 28 people for staging a silent protest in the cafeteria.
At the theatre, I noticed a lot of glasses and Patagonia vests in the crowd. I’m well aware that I also look like the stereotype of a tech worker, so maybe it’s wrong of me to assume. But I wish I had stuck around after the show and talked to some of them. Instead, I walked off into the Manhattan night, troubled by what I had just seen. What’s going to happen to us? Do rank-and-file tech workers even know? Are we running out of time for them to find courage within themselves? I could have been one of those people, if not for a few lucky breaks in my life. What would I have done?
I found out later the playwright is white, but that’s the beauty of FICTION and the human imagination baby!!!