It’s generally a fool’s errand to try to conjure the terminally online. The internet is atomized and algorithmic, diffuse and contradictory, not to mention timestamped to hell and immediately out of date; for as much as it has inflected all of our lives, most people are not on Twitter. Most art attempting to convey internet brain poisoning falls short of its target, failing to capture the depth, the speed, the overwhelm. The few that do it well, from Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This to Bo Burnham’s Inside, live and die by shrewd impersonations of how life in the scroll warps one’s thinking.
Job, a new play from Max Wolf Friedlich that transferred to Broadway after a buzzy off-Broadway run, is largely of the latter rarefied group. As the title indicates, it’s about the complications of a white-collar job, though marketing for the play, a tense two-hander, featuring stars Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon beset by thumbtacks and a stapler oversells corporate drudgery. Lemmon’s Jane works an office job, but of an elevated breed – she’s a well-compensated tech employee in the Bay Area who sincerely believes in the purpose of her work (and enjoys the campus gym). She has found devout purpose and nerve-shredding brain rot through, we come to learn, the deeply unenviable and largely hidden work of content moderation – or, in the parlance of her unnamed but archetypical giant tech company, “user care”.
