Theatrical play has quietly become part of Silicon Valley’s culture. AI companies increasingly hire improv artists to train models and run motivational sessions for staff. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has joined tech figures like Palmer Luckey and Bryan Johnson for public games of Mafia, a role-playing exercise, streamed on YouTube. And at Vibecamp, a Maryland festival popular with several tech subcultures, offerings have included clowning workshops, contact-improv sessions, and an immersive theatre piece performed by a group calling themselves the Oracles, delivering personalised prophecies inside a tent.
Role-playing has long been associated with the tech world’s nerdier corners, think of Dungeons & Dragons and its place in pop culture depictions of computer enthusiasts. But Silicon Valley’s embrace of improv and theatre runs deeper than nostalgia. It reflects a broader, longstanding philosophical habit within the industry: treating reality, play, perception, and performance as fundamentally interchangeable. In that worldview, reality isn’t a fixed set of facts but something malleable, shaped as much by perception as by the material world, and for those who see themselves as disruptors of convention, learning to manipulate the arbitrary rules of everyday life becomes almost a professional requirement.
That worldview helps explain the cult status achieved by Keith Johnstone’s 1979 acting guide Impro within tech circles. At Palantir, the company co-founded by Peter Thiel, the book has reportedly been recommended reading for new hires. It has also been cited approvingly by figures including Anduril’s Trae Stephens, productivity writer Tiago Forte, and influential tech bloggers Venkatesh Rao and Scott Alexander.
The book functions as both a theatrical guide and, in effect, a theory of social relations. Its central argument is that people are constantly, if unconsciously, engaged in status games, shifting between playing “high” and “low” depending on social context. Many of its exercises train actors to read and manipulate these cues to project dominance or deference, while others push performers to question conventions typically taken for granted, including one disorienting exercise involving deliberately mislabeling ordinary objects while moving through a room. Underlying the whole approach is the idea that reality is something actors can actively shape if they embrace spontaneity over caution, a philosophy Johnstone frames starkly around the difference between those who default to “yes” and those who default to “no.”
According to Qiaochu Yuan, a coach and commentator widely read in Silicon Valley circles, books like Impro appeal to tech workers because they offer a way to treat social relationships as measurable, almost transactional status exchanges, rather than as organic and inherently unpredictable. Yuan says he first encountered the book around 2016 through connections at the Bay Area’s Center for Applied Rationality, a hub for the broader rationalist movement centred on logical reasoning and overcoming cognitive bias.
