Could Theatre Be the Play-Full Technology That Helps Us Challenge Big Tech?
A speech by Clare Duffy, Founder of Civic Digits, at the More Than Games event.
At the 2025 More Than Games gathering, Civic Digits’ founder Clare explored a question at the heart of our work: can theatre – one of humanity’s oldest technologies – help us understand and challenge the power of today’s data-driven tech? Below is the full text of her talk.
We are living through immense technological change.
Have you noticed?!
Capitalist tech
By which I mean
data driven tech that makes money out of our privacy
Out of our tenderest
Unseen
Unknowable parts
Tech that proves
we do live in a biased and unjust society
And then exploits that fact
often enforces it
nurtures and grows it
Capitalist tech is designed to addict,
to isolate and polarise
Because it makes money
More money
Much quicker
Than tech which is regulated
Than tech designed with human rights
And the needs of human bodies
As its focus
Theatre brings together
bodies in a room
sweating and mingling
hormones and memories
cultural and personal
sharing in the minutest and most broad of ways
our reactions
our thought.
Thoughts that can’t be shared by text or emoji
Without a body
because they are complex
multi layered
It’s obvious, but its so easy to forget when we’re online
That the way someone sits when they say something
changes what words mean
The way we breathe
Changes what the words
What the text
What the data
means
…
What if we could create a tech that can account for that?
That can be part of that?
Maybe theatre could be the place
and could give us some space
to actually think about the immense technological change we’re living through
That we’re being pushed through
And what the deuce we are going to do about it.
Civic Digits is trying to build tech for plays that do that.
Because we love the magic of tech
Love the potential of technology
Because even if we wanted to
Which we don’t
We can’t un-invent social media functionality
We can’t un-invent large language models
But maybe we can find a way of playing with them that doesn’t drain our nervous systems, or the earth’s resources and that doesn’t systemically put people at disadvantage or risk because of who they are born to be in our imperfect world.
Maybe we can use the ancient tech of theatre to re-examine what we have not paid enough attention to in the capitalist tech?