We Need to Talk About Tech Boys
Do you know those people who seem to totally miss the mark?
Note to readers: I am aware that the term “tech boys” usually refers to those people so prevalent in Silicon Valley and Seattle who work for Big Tech, have no moral qualms about how their employers serve the military and surveillance state, and who utterly destroy entire cities (and now, with the work-from-home model, other surrounding communities) by gentrifying neighborhoods and outmaneuvering local home buyers by putting in all-cash offers well above asking price. These creatures are worthy of disdain and the ire of class warfare. But, since I don’t think I’ve ever actually met one of these people (what do they look like?), this article is about a different kind of tech boi who I actually am familiar with.
For those who don’t know, prior to the pandemic, I spent my entire working life in the technical side of the live entertainment industry. This was primarily as a lighting designer for theatre — for which I got a fancy degree — and as a scenic carpenter, welder, and rigger. But more generally, I worked as a jack-of-all-trades event technician. These are the people who set up and run the sound and lighting equipment for all the live shows you see. They handle costume and makeup changes for performers. They repair the props. They build the sets. They fly the scenery. They call the cues. They ride the tour bus from city to city. Some are unionized and some are not. Often, they’re just scraping by.
Over the years, I have grown troubled by certain aspects of theatre which often go without mention, even, or perhaps especially, by those who make their primary living from it. I have written before about my ambivalence towards the theatre industry in this regard:
You see, theatre people love the smell of their own shit. The small community often suffers from the blinders that it puts on itself, operating under the delusion that it is engaged in a noble endeavor of uplifting humanity through its unique art form. While it pays lip-service to these lofty goals, the theatre industry consistently falls far short of them. Let me break it all down for you.
A lot of people get drawn into theatre for its artistic promise and for the kind of unregimented work that it lets you do. It gives you opportunities to be creative and to think on your feet. Every show comes with its own unique set of challenges and no day is ever exactly the same. You can tour across the country and even around the world, meeting many interesting people. My best experiences in the theatre have come, not from the content of any particular show, but from the people I was working with – their backgrounds, perspectives, and stories.
Theatre has its own culture and there is a sense of camaraderie between people who have worked in the industry for a long time. Theatre professionals form impermanent but strong relationships based on a deep understanding of the nature of the work. People who have never met before will commiserate over the various idiosyncrasies of a particular venue that they’ve both worked at, complaining about the awkward greenroom location for a theatre in Denver, or the antiquated fly-loft equipment at a place in Los Angeles, or the shitty attitude of a Technical Director at a concert hall in Chicago. Working in theatre becomes its own weird lifestyle where everyone knows each other but not for long. For me, it’s the people that make it all worth it. And it’s sad to see the good ones go. But that’s where my love for theatre starts to wane.
Good theatre, good art in general, can be transformative. It can speak to people from all walks of life. It can enliven and inform and entertain. It can express humanity in all its forms so that people can see beyond themselves. It can provide a language that people can carry with them. And it should have something important to say that relates to people’s lived experience and to the time in which a piece is produced, with the exceptional works securing their relevance far into the future. You know, all the great artsy-fartsy stuff that makes all the hard work worth it.
But here’s the thing: Theatre doesn’t do any of this. Only on its best days does the world of theatre have anything worth saying to people. And 364 out of 365 days in the year are bad days for theatre. We, as practitioners of theatre, are chiefly producing theatre for other theatre people. The fact that you probably have an idea in your head of what a “theatre person” is is part of the problem! Where is the populist theater? The theater for the people? We’re not producing shows that critique structural societal ills. We’re producing vapid entertainment for old, rich, white retirees in diapers who happen to be season subscribers and who put the theatre company in their wills. The business of theatre, whether it is for-profit or non-profit, is overly reliant upon “money maker” shows at the expense of having the wherewithal to produce work with any substance to it.
In spite of the too common commercialism of the shows we produce, the art itself of making theatre could be a great, nonhierarchical setting to labor in. There could be ample opportunity for creative collaboration with individuals from all sorts of backgrounds. The work environment could be equitable and compassionate; a setting for mutual solidarity and teamwork built towards realizing a shared artistic goal. But theatre is rarely like this. There is just as much hierarchy found in theatre as there is in any rigid corporate structure. The people in positions of power – producers, directors, managers, professors, seasoned designers – are very often not a diverse set of people, neither racially, politically, nor, crucially, socioeconomically. All too often, ridiculous cliques and rivalries form between the “talent” – actors, singers, performers – and the technicians. I once heard that an actress broke up with a scenic carpenter and told her friend, “He’s just a carpenter.” Good lord. People are expected to stay in their lane, or else. So much for a free and rewarding artistic work environment.
All of this wouldn’t matter so much if theatre paid well. But it doesn’t. If you’re starting out, expect to see a lot of unpaid internships and three-month long summer contracts that only pay $1,000 total for working more than fulltime every week. Whether you’re a freelance designer, a performer, or a gigging technician, you’ve got to piece different jobs together and always be working on getting another show coming down the pipe just to make ends meet. It’s all about the hustle. I have seen many job postings asking for skilled carpenters and electricians that pay only the FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE OF $7.25 AN HOUR. Are you kidding me? Get the fuck on outta here with that bullshit. The litany of low-paying internships and small contract rates for budding designers, technicians, and performers effectively walls-off the entire industry from anyone with bills to pay who’s not getting help from mommy and daddy. Unpaid internships have a distorting effect on the entire entertainment economy, driving down wages across the board, particularly among nonunionized positions. The entire concept of an unpaid internship needs to be abolished. Interns perform labor just like the rest of us, so they must be paid.
The shitty pay wouldn’t matter so much if the working conditions were great. But they’re not. Long hours, physically taxing labor, constant travel, late nights, frayed relationships, dangerous equipment, and having to deal with people who are treating their production of The Music Man like it’s the second coming of Aeschylus in order to justify the crew staying one more hour after the 12 hours that have already been put in that day all make it not worth the little and inconsistent pay.
As Josh Loar writes in Current Affairs about the industry:
“From Hollywood to the music industry, theatre to video games, the people who make your entertainment do physically grueling work for exceedingly long hours, and the rate of burnout is high. The usual response to any complaints about working conditions is that our industry is “glamorous,” and that the sheer excitement of working in entertainment must surely offset any negative impacts. This mindset keeps us working such long hours that we can’t be present for birthdays, weddings, funerals, and other major life events—because the show must go on, right?”
As I mentioned before, theatre suffers from an intense and cloying commercialism. It relegates certain kinds of shows to obscurity. If you want to keep making money then it is wise not to give stage time to certain kinds of critiques. Best to just keep the people happy with a sharp but comforting musical. Simply put, regardless of whether it is for-profit or nonprofit, theatre is largely a business, attended by all of the constraints that go with running a business. It relies upon pricey tickets, the support of rich donors, and on producing mass-appeal spectacle. The playwright Karen Malpede, in Chris Hedges’ book Death of the Liberal Class, explains what happens when theatre becomes dependent on profit:
“Without government support for funding innovation and the non-commercial, the theatre began to institutionalize and to censor itself. The growing network of regional theatres became ever more reliant upon planning subscription seasons which would not offend any of their local donors, and the institutional theatres began to function more and more as social clubs for the wealthy and philanthropic.”
Theatre is largely run by and for milquetoast liberal interests, not everyday people. Theatre does not produce shows which engender political activism, civil disobedience, or a distrust of U.S. exceptionalism. Theatre does not provide a language with which to dismantle U.S. imperialism and all of its attendant evils. It does not cultivate a wherewithal to defy the totalitarian corporate stranglehold on our government. It does not give us a capacity to speak out against the bloated military industrial complex and the expansive carceral state – where the former deprives funding from our education system and the latter imprisons the resulting ill-educated and impoverished people of our country. Theatre does not serve as a tool for radical organizing around class interests.
But theatre could do these things if it had the moral fortitude to do so. Producing good, entertaining art and producing politically literate art are not mutually exclusive. Radical theatre thrived during the New Deal era when artists were paid by the government through the Works Progress Administration, and during the anti-war movement of the 1960’s. Since then, with public theatre largely defunded, the industry has given way to spectacle and to empty, heartwarming liberal platitudes devoid of any language deemed too offensive or threatening to the current socioeconomic order.
The theatre industry should give financial support to emerging, transgressive voices. It should lobby for public funding in order to spread non-commercial work to as many people as possible. It should step outside of its bubble in order to forge relationships with forgotten, underrepresented, and invisible sectors of our population. Theatre should be an instigator for radical grassroots organizing. Theatre should be led by strong, bottom-up labor unions. Theatre can do these things. If it doesn’t, it will wither away, losing its social utility as it retreats into itself, speaking only to dwindling liberal echo chambers; or worse, it will continue to serve chiefly as a tool for powerful interests and an opiate for the masses.
Theatre would be an amazing realm in which to work if it lived up to its potential. If the shows we produced had strong social utility and messages which spoke truth to power, if the shows reached audiences who most needed to see them, if the pay was consistently commensurate with the labor, and if snobby assholes stopped looking down on people for not valuing their dubious artistic output, then I’d start to get a kick out of it. Theatre needs to get its house in order. Otherwise what’s the point of all the hassle and hunger?
Now, that’s a lot of problems with theatre that I explicated there. And since the pandemic, with burned out theatre workers leaving the industry in droves and not returning, companies have made some moves here and there to improve their working conditions, but for the most part not much has changed.
The contradiction between art and business and trying to find meaning inside the purgatory between those two things is a problem which has assaulted the psyches of every creative person for thousands of years. Each one of us faces that problem in our own way. You know what doesn’t make that problem any easier to solve? Tech boys. It’s the tech boys that I want to address here.
The amount of times I have had to listen to pasty white boys who’ve spent too much time inside theaters spout technical jargon at me and clumsily demonstrate their overweening hardware fetishes is enough to make even the most even-keeled human react violently to the mere sight of a neckbeard. As my eyes glaze over when they debate the merits of this lighting manufacturer over that lighting manufacturer, the finer points of this software update over that software update, I think, my god, why am I here? And isn’t all of this squirmy shoptalk missing the whole fucking point? There is no way I am suffering through getting paid less than $30,000 a year to produce dubious art while at the same time having to tolerate dorks whose chief interest is in the computer buttons that they push rather than what those buttons can accomplish in terms of storytelling.
Now, I am not knocking the event technician as a profession. I admire the preponderance of the get-it-done attitude; the ability (and necessity) to think on your feet and problem solve under the immense pressures of time, money, and clashing personalities; I am drawn to the kind of rough-around-the-edges, alternative, cynical, outcast types who make up much of the profession – perhaps a partial vestige of theatre’s deep roots in the sailor profession and certainly due to its reputation of being relatively welcoming to the LGBTQ community compared to the wider society; and I recognize that many in the industry are deeply talented, knowledgeable, and interesting people. I have seen road-hardened technicians who have beautiful singing voices, are impressive dancers, are wicked musicians, and can gab with the best of them. I have met event technicians who are also EMTs, biomedical engineers, landscapers, pilots, and architects. I am not disparaging my own kind with a broad stroke. Rather, what I am responding to is a certain strain amongst technicians that prioritizes technical know-how – which is often used as little more than efforts at one-upmanship – to the detriment of what attracts so many people to this art form in the first place: a sense of wonder borne of good storytelling that can only be done in a live setting.
My first rule when curating a creative team: no tech boys. Don’t talk to me about which lighting console you prefer or how this one rental company is really dropping the ball these days. That is putting your ass before the horse, or whatever. Tell me about the kind of stories that you are interested in telling. To be able to articulate that vision, to understand what is really worthy of all this time and effort we put into our work, that is what is important. Without that understanding, without, in other words, having any moral sense, your whole life will be wasted on just so much fluff, sound and fury, killing time by engaging in shallow tech drivel that is spoken by so many in countless shops, warehouses, green rooms, tech booths, and corporate tradeshows. Technology is morally neutral, at best, if not actively harmful to our innate human faculties. Human beings who fawn over their precious technology have ventured into a vast wasteland.
Now, my detestation for the undue focus on the technical aspects of the performing arts is not at the same time arguing for a reverse fetishization of the “art” itself. A person arguing about the most efficient keystroke syntax for a particular light board is just as insufferable as a director giving speeches to the entire cast and crew about how this production of Hello Dolly! is going to change the way the audience thinks about their place in society. Go jerk off on somebody else, please. I’m not getting paid to take a cumshot. (That clip from South Park where the director is taking an elementary school play far too seriously is, sadly and hilariously, often not an exaggeration of the actual reality of working in theatre.)
In this way, the tech bois’ tool fetishization makes perfect sense. When so much of the work that we do is spent on cloying, moneymaker shows, corporate bombast for the millionaire winos, and the 11th revival of some Broadway standby that’s generating plenty of royalties for someone but certainly not for us, it follows that some of us will adopt a jaded if not outright cynical view of the shows to which we give our labor. It’s a defense mechanism. To keep your profession at an arm’s length, as it were, and instead find some small meaning and scintillating drama in the technical minutiae of our jobs, seems preferable to actually facing the bottomless pit of our artistic output. “Yeah the shows suck, the pay isn’t great, the hours are long, but at least you get to play with cool toys! And you meet a lot of interesting professors!”
Fuck that nonsense. I call that behavior an escapism which merely perpetuates the shitty shows we are tasked with. If all this profession has to offer its workers is setting up stages for the benefit of the donor class, then I wash my hands of it. But I do think it can be something more, something substantial, with real stakes and a story worth telling, while at the same time providing for the livelihoods of the artists.
Don’t work for snobs. Don’t work for shit money. For god’s sake join or form a goddamn union, and be ready and willing to strike. And, chiefly, demand better stories. All the rest is air. The things we fetishize are mere tools in accomplishing the fraught and immensely rewarding feat of storytelling. So get out there and make me feel something, tech boys. Besides boredom, that is.
THANK YOU