Doomers, Matthew Gasda’s new play, is inspired by the ousting of Sam Altman from OpenAI. But this isn’t just a play about technology. It’s a play about humans and their hubris: the delusions of grandeur that drive our techno-lords, the manic drive and ruthlessness that underpins their visions of global conquest. While Gasda’s first work of public notoriety, Dimes Square, centered on the lives of a group of extremely online edgelords in downtown New York City, Doomers is set in Silicon Valley and populated by another variety of narcissist, only with money and power. Dimes Square described our moment as “the dumbest time in history.” Doomers’ appraisal might be more like: this is the moment before we all just fade into irrelevance. The play successfully captures the ahistoricism, cultural nihilism, and technical wizardry of our generation’s most esteemed “revolutionaries.” But instead of treating them as character binaries—good or evil, rational or mad—it makes sense of their drive in ways familiar, if not equally terrifying and banal. —Sam Venis