JOB - A theatrical review

A Broadway play about Content Moderation

And now for something different - I’m going to be reviewing a 2-person play I saw last week titled JOB.

This post will contain spoilers for the plot of JOB, but the play has already ended its theatrical run so it’s not like a real spoiler. I want to recap the plot of the play and talk about the topics, themes, and why the whole thing works so well. This isn’t the usual Infinite Scroll post, but I think by the end of it you’ll see why I was so fascinated by this production.

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JOB opens in media res to a young Gen-Z woman pointing a gun at an older man in a therapist’s office in San Francisco, as the man holds up his hands and shouts “Woah, Woah, Woooooooaah!” at her.

The woman appears to be in a funk, and then snaps out it and begins frantically apologizing to the man. As she tries to convince him she’s not going to hurt him, we learn that the man, Loyd, is a therapist and the young woman, Jane, is a patient seeking a ‘clean bill of health’ recommendation to be able to return to her job. So, you know, holding a gun to his head is not quite the start Jane was looking for.

The play then develops into an intense, thrilling bottle-episode style narrative that is part therapy session and part hostage situation. It’s unclear exactly how sane Jane is, but we’re locked in as she attempts to navigate a therapy session that started with her nearly murdering her therapist. As the scene develops, we learn that Jane’s overriding concern is getting back to work. She desperately wants to return to her job at a big tech company, and is willing to say or do anything to get back despite her obvious psychological problems.

Jane, it turns out, had a breakdown at work that culminated in ‘The Video’. The Video showed her screaming and wailing incoherently on her desk at work, and went viral all over the internet. She was put on paid leave but not fired, as the company feared a lawsuit. After months of dithering and delaying, the company agrees to let her back if she’s given a clean bill of health from a psychiatrist. The only problem is that Jane is clearly anxious, jittery, out-of-sorts. She describes being paranoid, obsessive, having panic attacks, and maybe even PTSD. She’s clearly *not* well, as evidenced by pulling a gun on her therapist. As the play progresses, Loyd attempts to give Jane the therapy she clearly needs while navigating the reality that she’s unstable, won’t let him leave, and has a gun.

We also see her unwellness in dramatic moments - certain things that Loyd says will trigger Jane. The play makes a dramatic light and sound show of these moments - Loyd mentions that he’s into certain crafts and the word ‘crafts’ causes the lights to dim, loud noises to play in the theater, and Jane to disappear into some sort of flashback before snapping back to reality. This happens several times - for instance when Loyd mentions his alma mater (Cal Berkeley) or his family (one 12-year old son, one recently deceased daughter).

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As the play progresses, it becomes more and more clear that the narrative centers around social media. Jane works on some sort of social media platform, and she and Loyd frequently spar about the nature of social media. Loyd is an old hippie who thinks phones and social media can be harmful, but Jane is unapologetic that “people just want to denigrate what young women are good at. I love my phone and I’m not ashamed of it”. Jane believes that people villainize tech and social media because in the battle for the soul of San Francisco, it’s hippies vs techies and the techies are winning. Loyd counters with the obvious truth that Jane is a mess - even she admits that her panic attacks and anxiety started when she moved to the Bay area and started working in tech.

As they debate Jane’s mental fitness, it’s eventually revealed what precisely her job was. Jane worked in content moderation. She describes how, on her first day, she watched a video of a prisoner in a warzone being tied to two cars that drove in opposite directions, pulling the man apart. She describes seeing the worst of the worst - Nazi content, gore of every kind, and CSAM videos of children. She knows that this impacts her life, but it also gives her life meaning. Jane describes how, for the first time, when she was able to remove a disturbing video from the internet she felt as though she had a purpose. She says she can ‘extract the darkness and carry it with me’ so that nobody else has to see these videos, nobody else has to suffer. Loyd tries to convince her that her suffering matters as well, but Jane counters that ‘it’s a privilege to suffer like I do’. She views removing this content from the internet as a sort of holy mission.

In fact, after Jane tells Loyd that when she was placed on paid leave she couldn’t bear to stop. She began researching child exploitation websites and playing detective independently. She figured out how to identify locations GeoGuessr-style off accents and tiny details. She learned how to take background snippets from videos like the corner of a diploma and figure out what school the diploma is from. She’s tracked one particular predator for months, a predator that has a large fanbase and releases CSAM videos with his son every week. He never shows his face, never reveals too much. But she’s immersed herself in his world, and feels like she knows him. She’s obsessed with this predator.

This predator who left few distinguishing clues but did have distinctive crafts visible on his furniture.

This predator whose diploma, upon close inspection, matches a Cal Berkeley diploma.

This predator who used to make horrible videos with both a daughter and a son, but recently announced his daughter passed away so there would only be videos with his son.

And as she’s telling Loyd this, she takes the gun back out of her purse and wonders out loud why her unconscious mind disassociated and nearly killed him upon first meeting him.

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JOB is a roller coaster of an experience. You’re never quite sure whether Jane is paranoid and delusional or whether Loyd really is the predator she’s been seeking this entire time. It’s brilliantly executed, it’s tense and taut, and the final twist about Loyd’s potential identity is exquisite to experience in person. This play would make an absolutely killer episode of Black Mirror.

It also appeals to me for obvious reasons - the entirety of the narrative centers around social media. We talk about the nature of content moderation here. We talk about the harms that can come from social media and smartphone usage. We talk about the incredible number of ways that social media can make us insane. Of course I was going to like this play! The characters engage in high-level abstract discussions about whether or not social media is the real cause of society’s woes, but they also remind us there are real, physical people behind all the systems we use every day. That video that goes viral with the person acting crazy or stupid? That was a real person, maybe having the worst day of their life, and now they’ll literally never be able to escape that moment. They might be stuck living it again and again, just like our protagonist is now defined by The Video. And that fun site you use to share pictures, or chat, or watch videos? There are real people out there having to watch videos of 12 year olds getting beheaded or worse so that you don’t have to see it. JOB takes the abstract and grounds it into something deeply personal and traumatic and in-your-face. It also reflects a lot of social media’s quirks in its own format - it alternates between being very funny, being cringe, and being quietly sinister, just like your timeline.

These are the obvious reason I enjoyed this show so much - it’s a smart and well executed script and it’s on a topic I care deeply about. But there’s an additional reason JOB is so good, and I’m not sure playwright Max Wolf Friedlich even realized what he was doing. JOB has, at its core, a deeply conservative philosophy.

On the surface this isn’t apparent. Loyd is a Bay Area hippie psychotherapist and Jane is a Bay Area Gen Z female tech worker. They ooze progressiveness - there are funny asides where the characters agree that ‘everyone is kind of racist’ and that ‘all my friends are socialists of course’. There are nods to supporting Bernie Sanders.

And yet for all this outward signaling, Jane’s worldview is profoundly conservative. She is suspicious of therapy. She wants to suppress or ignore her symptoms and just go back to work. She is proud of the corporation she works for and desperate to return. These are not classic left-leaning traits. And when she talks about the importance of her job, she takes on the persona of a warrior. She wants to “extract the darkness and carry it with me”, to be the shield that safeguards civilization from the depraved content she willingly views. She describes herself as the ‘front line’ and uses martial language to emphasize how important her mission is.

In describing these videos Jane says there is evil in the world that cannot be fixed, it can only be destroyed. And even when forced to leave her job, she didn’t stop. She began doing independent, vigilante research. Jane is willing to kill. This is not a progressive view of the world. This is a fundamentally conservative message - there are bad people out there who hurt children, but you can trust righteous vigilantes to safeguard society, hunt them down and eliminate them. And that’s part of what makes the production so compelling.

Everyone knows that liberals and progressives dominate our cultural industries. It’s uncommon to see authentic conservative worldviews represented in elite arts culture. This is true of music, film, books, television and more, but I would argue it’s especially true of live theater. It is hard to overstate how absurdly left-leaning the Broadway community is. Being a vaguely centrist liberal who still likes Hillary Clinton might put you in the top 1% most right-leaning workers in that industry. So while I’m not a conservative myself, it’s a genuinely new and enthralling experience to watch facially progressive characters grapple with questions of conservative philosophy. Is the world fundamentally evil? Should we rehabilitate that evil, should we work through bureaucratic systems, or is it right to take matters into our own hands for the most heinous crimes? Is standing as a shield between the depraved and the innocent a morally righteous calling - even if it means sacrificing your own sanity?

This is ultimately what makes JOB so compelling. I’d love to see more scripts and more shows that deal with the impact social media has had on our society. But I’d also love to see more shows that grapple with thorny political, moral and philosophical questions from multiple angles - including conservative angles. Too often these topics are presented with an obvious answer. A question is asked and then a clear narrative solution is given that leaves little room for interpretation. JOB closes ambiguously - it’s unclear whether Jane’s suspicion is correct or not, and it’s unclear whether she ends up shooting him. More writers should have the courage to present big questions and then let the audience ponder the answers on their own.