Doomers, the Play. And Human Obsolescence
Last night, we had one of our final rehearsals for Doomers before opening the play this weekend. The experience was electrifying, and for the first time in months of readings and rehearsals, I felt the full weight of what we’re bringing to life on stage. And it’s powerful.
The play is structured in two acts. In the first, Seth, an embattled tech CEO, gathers a war room of loyalists and opponents to strategize regaining control of the AI company that has just ousted him. The second act, running concurrently, focuses on the board members who voted him out, revealing their power plays, moral dilemmas, and personal stakes. If any of this feels familiar, it’s because the play is a loose dramatization of Sam Altman’s tumultuous firing from OpenAI last year. That moment seemed to encapsulate the volatile intersection of human ambition and technological power.
I play Seth, and I’ve been involved in readings since early August. Watching this play evolve through drafts has been fascinating but also disorienting. When you’re inside a project—reading lines, inhabiting a character—it’s easy to lose sight of the larger vision. I’ve been a bit myopic in my work, just focusing on my character and the work that is in my control as an actor. But last night, now that I am more comfortable with where I am at personally with my involvement, I was able to take a broader view of the project. Sitting back and watching the second act unfold, I felt like I was truly hearing the play for the first time. I realized that Doomers isn’t just timely. It is essential.
The questions Doomers asks about AI—about what it means for human existence, for the future of society, for the very concept of being human—are the questions we should all be asking. The play dives headfirst into philosophical waters, grappling with the implications of technologies that are no longer hypothetical but very real. It dramatizes, with terrifying precision, the decisions being made behind closed doors by a handful of individuals who wield immense power yet remain shockingly unprepared to confront the consequences of their actions. These are essentially tech nerds, many of them on the spectrum, who are quite literally on the cusp of totally rearranging our entire social order.
One concept the play implicitly tackles is “planned obsolescence,” a term most of us associate with the irritating cycle of replacing iPhones or laptops. But what happens when this principle is applied not to consumer goods, but to human life as we know it? Because that’s what’s happening. Tech companies aren’t just creating tools. They’re building systems that could render human autonomy, creativity, and labor obsolete.
AI has the potential to upend everything. It can disrupt not just industries but the very fabric of what it means to live a human life. While some leftist accelerationists welcome this as an inevitable evolution in the modes of production—perhaps imagining a communist utopia emerging from the rubble—the reality seems far grimmer. We are more likely to see the rise of high-tech feudalism, where power is consolidated in the hands of a few and the rest of us are left scrambling for relevance.
What Doomers captures so brilliantly is the terrifying absurdity of this moment. The people at the center of this transformation, the tech elite, are not sages or visionaries. They are deeply flawed, often myopic individuals who, despite their intelligence (narrow intelligence—intelligence in the same way calculators are intelligent), are ill-equipped to decide the future of humanity. These are people who excel at optimizing algorithms but struggle to grapple with the messy, chaotic, deeply human questions of ethics, meaning, and community. These are not historians, artists, people touched by poetry or romanticism. In many ways these are people who aspire to be robots. Yet they are the ones holding the reins of a technology that could redefine existence itself.
Watching Doomers, I was struck by the palpable sense of dread it evokes. The tension is magnetic and chilling because it reveals how unstoppable this technological wave feels. Even those who see the dangers are outmatched by the sheer momentum of innovation, profit motives, and ego.
There were moments during last night’s rehearsal when the hair on my arms stood up. The play isn’t just a thought experiment. It’s a visceral experience, a wake-up call. It forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that the future is being written by people who barely understand the consequences of their own actions and who, in many cases, might not care.
Matthew Gasda has written a brilliant and urgent play, one that resonates far beyond its loose connections to Sam Altman or OpenAI. Doomers speaks to the broader cultural reckoning we are hurtling toward, one way or another. This isn’t just a play for theater lovers. It is a play for anyone who feels the creeping unease of living in a world reshaped by technology at breakneck speed.
I hope audiences, especially those in the tech industry, come to see this play and leave shaken. I hope it sparks conversations about what we’re building, who’s making the decisions, and whether we’re prepared to live with the consequences. A reckoning is coming. Doomers doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does what great art should. It demands that we ask the right questions.
