Headline, September 23 2026/ ''' TECH ELITE TEAM '''

''' TECH ELITE TEAM '''

THE '70s ACTING BOOK THAT EXPLAINS the tech elite. It can be very useful to see reality as malleable. '' Welcome to !WOW! - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world.''

THEATRICAL PLAY IS HAVING a moment in Silicon Valley. Artificial Intelligence companies regularly hire improv artists to help train the models and give motivational sessions to their employees.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, joined tech notables like Palmer Luckey and Bryan Johnson for an evening at Mafia, a role playing game, on YouTube.

And earlier this summer, while reporting an article about Vibecamp - a Maryland festival popular with several tech-world subcultures, I came across clowning workshops, a '' contact improv '' session and an immersive theater production by a group billing themselves as the oracles, who channeled bespoke prophecies for those who entered their tent.

Role-playing has long been part of the nerd stereotype - just think of the popularity of games like Dungeons & Dragons in pop culture depictions of computer geeks.

But Silicon Valley's embrace of improvisation and theater is also part of its much bigger and more longstanding philosophical tendency to treat reality, play, perception and performance as essentially interchangeable.

In that worldview, reality isn't a set of fixed facts, but something malleable, existing as much in people's perceptions as in the material world.

For those who see themselves as cosmic innovators, learning to understand and disrupt the arbitrary conventions of ordinary life is part of the job requirement.

Consider the popularity of Keith Johnston's 1979 acting guide, '' Impro, '' which has taken on a cult status in tech circles. At Palantir, the data analysis and software company co-founded by Peter Thiel, the book has been recommended reading for new hires.

It's also been cited by tech founders like Anduril's Trae Stephens, the productivity guru Tiago Forte and influential tech-world bloggers like Venkatesh Rao and Scott Alexander.

'' Impro'' is both a guide to theatrical play and a guide to social relations. Central to Mr. Johnstone's argument is that human beings are unconsciously playing status games at all times, playing ''low'' and ''high'' to each other depending on their context.

The book includes exercises for aspiring actors, many of which involve challenging actors to pay attention to one another's social cues in order to play higher or lower status. [ ''He who looks away first is the more dominant,'' the author warns.]

Other exercises focus on challenging actors to rethink norms we take for granted : One particularly dizzying game requires actors to walk around the room, pointing to objects and intentionally calling them by the wrong name.

A guiding idea behind the book is that actors should see reality as something they can shape if they accept spontaneity and creativity, rather than succumbing to a safe set of norms.

'' There are people who prefer to say ' Yes, ' and there are people who prefer to say ' No.' Those who say 'Yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say 'No' are rewarded by the safety they attain,'' Mr. Johnstone writes.

According to Qiaochu Yuan, a coach and X personality whose work is widely read in Silicon Valley circles, tech workers are often drawn to books like ''Impro'' because they help readers think about and codify social relationships as measurable status transactions, instead of thinking about them as organic -and therefore mysterious - phenomena.

The Honour and Serving of the latest global operational research on Tech, Silicon Valley. Elites and Past, continues. !WOW! thanks Tara Isabella Burton, who is the author of '' Self Made : Creating Our Identities From da Vinci to the Kardashians '' and a director of the Can Beauty Save The World project.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

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