Review: Data, How Big Tech is Plotting to Enslave You

By clicking this link, you have made this review part of your permanent record. There’s no use navigating away now. It’s too late, so we might as well be in this together. Because the truth about the Internet is that everything you see, everywhere you go, and every word you type can be reduced to a data point—to be bought and sold and used against you in ways you cannot yet even fathom. That terrifying fact powers Matthew Libby’s extraordinary new drama Data, now making its off-Broadway debut at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

It’s set at the grandly named Bay area software firm Athena Technologies, where 26-year-old Jonah (Brandon Flynn) mentors the newest member of the user experience team, 22-year-old Maneesh (Karan Brar). The play opens on the two young men playing Ping-Pong, just one of the many amenities Athena provides for its young employees to smooth the transition from their university campuses.

But when Maneesh’s old classmate Riley (Sophia Lillis) runs into them on the way to the nitro cold brew tap, she’s surprised to see him working in UX. She works in data analytics, essentially the varsity team, charged with solving the most difficult engineering problems and ensconced behind a wall of NDAs. She distinctly recalls Maneesh’s honors thesis, a breakthrough predictive algorithm for rare events. He used it to accurately divine the performance of baseball players, but it could easily be applied to a sensitive new project Athena is working on for a powerful client. She immediately alerts her supervisor, Alex (Justin H. Min), about this untapped potential. The timing is great, since one of his engineers just resigned in protest.

“Thanks for responding so quickly to my email, bud,” Alex says to Maneesh over his standing desk, in a tone suggestive of Don Corleone after multiple rounds of HR-mandated sensitivity training. Min expertly deploys the sharpened blade of his diction, sheathing it in professional-class niceties until he can get close enough to stab and twist. Maneesh doesn’t stand a chance.

Brar tenderly embodies the shy younger son of immigrant parents, quietly brilliant but overshadowed by the memory of a beloved older brother. He cannot answer when Alex asks him what he wants to be, signaling to the older man that he is free to autopopulate that response for him, as authority has throughout Maneesh’s young life. We instantly know that Alex’s offer to join the analytics team (and bring his proprietary algorithm with him) is one that Maneesh cannot refuse.

I won’t reveal the project they’re working on, but if your social media feed is like mine, it will make your blood boil. In his off-Broadway debut, Libby shrewdly presents a techno-thriller that is both topical and all too plausible. I suspect that a version of this story is happening in real life, right now.

Libby has written all four of his characters with depth and painfully recognizable humanity. That includes Jonah, ostensibly the tech bro comic relief (Enver Chakartash costumes him in shorts and hooded sweatshirts, which he naturally wears like a stupid cape). But he’s actually a pivotal figure in the dramatic action. Flynn undergirds his Taco Tuesday goofiness with the genuine terror of a kid who would do anything not to be picked last at kickball.

But it’s Lillis who delivers the most haunting performance, giving voice to so many Americans as she contemplates the middle-class existence she has finally clawed her family into, and how the work that pays for it is helping to usher in an age of techno-feudalism. “The only meaning, of my whole entire life,” she confesses, anxiety seeping from her pores, “is that I come here every day … and I make the world a worse place.” But she knows that the moment she stops riding this dragon, it will devour her.

Vitally, Tyne Rafaeli directs this office drama like a spy thriller, full of white-knuckle intrigue. Marsha Ginsberg’s set is a beige box, aping the sleek and soulless aesthetic so favored by Silicon Valley while providing for speedy scenic transitions. Amith Chandrashaker’s transformative lighting does a lot of work in this regard, with several scenes depicting late night work sessions illuminated only by screens, making us wonder what could be lurking in the darkness. Sound designer and composer Daniel Kluger maintains the intensity with aggressive electronic music between scenes, with an edge of horror creeping in under the dialogue during particularly fraught moments.

Fear is the primary motivation for everyone in Data—fear of failure, fear of rejection, and the perfectly reasonable fear of poverty in a time when our capital-owning overlords are openly plotting to replace the bulk of the American workforce with AI. They can sleep easy knowing that we’re at one another’s throats, fighting over the scraps they toss us. But what if we stopped fighting for just 100 minutes and looked at the big picture, as Libby clearly has? An early contender for the best new play of 2026, Data is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand the dystopia the AI revolution is leading to, and why it is succeeding.