By Shainna Alipon
Imagine a world where everyone obsessively stares at their devices. People watch the rich elite live their lives and sell products, not caring about anything else. In the background, a totalitarian government looms all while everyone's ability to connect and feel degrades. This may feel vaguely familiar—after all, opening a credit card to buy viral items on TikTok can lead to ICE having your address. But the catch is that musical composer Jonathan Larson wrote this 41 years ago as the concept of his unproduced musical Superbia.
Larson was a short-lived musical composer, writing the famed Rent and passing away just before it opened on Broadway in 1996. His next-famous musical was Tick, Tick, Boom, which enjoyed a small resurgence of popularity with Netflix’s 2021 movie adaptation. In the five years since, plus the 30 years since his death and Rent’s Broadway debut, Larson and his works have been talked about countless times in books and articles, and not always positively. “Rent is cringe” is an opinion as standard as “Nickelback sucks.” Feeling that way is understandable. You can identify our main characters, especially Mark and Roger, as privileged, ungrateful kids cosplaying being poor for the sake of art. They should just get a job! And Benny, their friend and landlord, was actually generous for letting them stay in their spacious New York loft for a whole year rent-free. Mark and Roger pouting about Benny asking for rent feels ridiculous now when you look at how much their place would cost in the present day.
One thing that aged well, however, is a backbone of anti-tech and the dangers of media that permeate all of Larson’s work. It speaks to our modern world that is beginning to turn away from social media and growing increasingly wary of Big Tech surveillance and proliferating data centers.
Rent
Larson's most famous musical was not crafted with the intention of being anti-tech, but the ideologies and politics behind his first musical, Superbia—more on that later—bleed through to Rent.
For the uninitiated, Rent is an adaptation of Giacomo Puccini's 1896 opera La Bohème, and shows a queer, artist friend group navigate New York City through the 1990s AIDS crisis. Weaved into this messy bunch's stories is a subplot about a patch of land next to Mark and Roger's apartment, also owned by Benny. In the song "You'll See," Benny tells of his plans to turn the lot into Cyberarts, a "state of the art, digital, virtual interactive studio" the three apparently dreamed of when they were roommates. His roadblock now is that homeless people occupy the lot. Maureen, Mark's promiscuous bisexual ex-girlfriend, is hosting a protest to prevent Benny from displacing them.
What exactly this digital studio is seems vague. J. Collis, author of Boho Days: The Wider Works of Jonathan Larson, said that tech was truly rapidly changing during this time. With the rise of online services like AOL, terms like "cyberspace" became a buzzword for growing interconnectivity.
"Much as how people attached 'blockchain' or 'crypto' to mundane things (or 'smart' and 'AI' now) to woo investors, Benny is doing the same thing here," Collis said during a video interview with Typebar Magazine. "He's taking the group's dream of being working artists and filtering it through corporate buzzword lingo."
Larson, along with his dramaturge, wrote detailed backstories for each character in one of his first major rewrites of Rent. Prior to the beginning of the musical, Mark and Benny went to university together for film and lived in the loft the musical begins with, but Benny's life took a different turn when he married the daughter of the building owner. Despite that, Benny misses his old friends and still wants to come back to entertainment. He may see Cyberarts as the path back to both, but Mark and Roger think he's out of touch and their artistic values no longer align.
In Boho Days, Collis notes, "Benny was not based on anybody in Larson’s life, but rather a personification of what Larson hated about New York’s ongoing gentrification."
Gentrification, a bug that refuses to stop biting even today. Instead of filling land with a vaguely exciting arts establishment, companies are building data centers to support the work of their AI programs. According to generative AI defenders, this may as well be the next exciting arts establishment. If you think that’s an outlandish claim, remember that Charlie Puth is currently shilling dubious AI music lessons.
Being an active user of the internet these days means being bombarded with AI-generated pictures and videos, or being drowned by the discourse from it. It started flooding our feeds in 2023, earning the moniker "AI slop." Just two years later, Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 word of the year. Entire Youtube channels now exist to point out different AI-generated videos online. The hottest semi-recent AI meme to infiltrate the web was Fruit Love Island, where anthropomorphic fruit played out storylines based on hit reality TV show Love Island. And we haven't even touched the use of AI in ads and music, and how AI art interacts with the rest of the art world—including a new museum in Los Angeles dedicated exclusively to computer-generated art.
The price of this "revolutionary" art is a boom in the construction of data centers. Large warehouses full of servers eat up as much power and water as an entire city, according to a deep dive by Business Insider. The Business Insider video explores residents in a city in Virginia, who complain about the constant drone of Google data centers in their backyards starting to affect people's ability to sleep and stay sane. In Arizona, residents expressed concern about the gallons of water the servers need for cooling—water that is already scarce from the drought-ridden Colorado River and is split between many states in the American southwest. Whether residents are already paying the price for electricity with higher power bills is unclear, but it is definitely a concern. Two in three Americans in a recent Reuters poll oppose the construction of data centers for this reason. Increasing opposition led to residents in Mississippi suing Elon Musk for nuisance-level noise from a data center and accompanying power plant in their community.
While this does not fit the traditional definition of gentrification, where low-income residents are priced out of their neighborhoods under the guise of improvement, this is still a form of gentrification. Resources and land are taken from citizens, yet they are the ones who have to pay despite not benefitting from it at all.
In addition to art, AI warps our perception of news and reality itself. President Trump posted low-quality security footage of the White House Correspondents' dinner on the same night a shooting disrupted the event, and users on Twitter, eager for info, "enhanced" the video with AI. The video was shared with no context and caused confusion when the actual, high-quality security footage was released five days later. The AI video looked nothing like the real thing, creating false details.
This solidifies Rent's underlying message: the digital world isn't reality. We can see this in Maureen's protest performance "Over the Moon." She speaks about meeting a cow in Cyberland—a riff on Cyberarts—where she is forbidden from producing milk and where:
They closed everything real down
Like barns and troughs and... performance spaces
And replaced it all with lies and rules and
Virtual life
Another person resisting the digital takeover is Tom Collins, a philosophy professor and Mark and Roger's roommate. In "Santa Fe," Collins sings of a dream to get away from the suffering in New York and to open up a restaurant in Santa Fe. Though he scoffs at his students who would rather be watching TV than paying attention in his lectures. Today it’s easy enough to replace TV with TikTok or YouTube. Being a social media influencer is the dream job for most youth these days. However, this song speaks to the truth within the social media space: having a following is not enough. Even sponsorships and brand deals won’t ensure a lifelong, steady income. The smartest of those in social media recognize the ever-changing landscape of their field and know that their following is not guaranteed forever, either. Many influencers start businesses selling their own products—even TikTok-famous pool cleaners are getting in on it—or writing books and offering online courses, hoping to turn their digital following into something more concrete.
Ironically, the downward trend of the job market and the economy makes it so that becoming an influencer is perhaps the only viable opportunity right now, even if people don't want it to be. A recent New York Times article interviewed young people in New York, both natives and transplants, on the troubles of surviving and trying to make a living in the city. Many of them have found stability in being a social media influencer, even as they're actively searching for jobs with their degrees in business or engineering.
The digital world isn't reality, but sometimes it's the only thing that feels real. It makes the opening line of Rent, "How do you document real life when real life's getting more like fiction each day?" resonate in a different way.
Superbia
This musical, despite receiving praise from Larson's mentor Stephen Sondheim, never got produced. Larson began developing Superbia in 1987, right after graduating college at Adelphi University. It was born from a failed attempt to write a musical adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, a book that resonated with Larson.
The initial draft takes place in 2064. The protagonist is Josh, an "Out” living on Outland, and is the last man to have true feelings and emotions. He finds an old music box which he believes will restore human emotion. He goes to show his family, but they push Josh away, instead preferring to watch their Media Transmitters (MT). He runs off and meets another woman, Elizabeth, who he persuades to try the music box out. Elizabeth is an "In" from the upper classes of the Incity, where they spend their lives on camera selling breakable junk to the Outs. She becomes smitten with Josh and his music box and sneaks him into Incity. Josh's goal is to play the music box on an MT livestream to restore humanity. However, he gets increasingly drawn into the Incity lifestyle after another In woman gets him high and has sex with him—all of it being livestreamed on an MT. It's up to Elizabeth to bring Josh back to his senses, where he then confronts the overlord Master Babble Articulator (MBA) to save humanity.
"Superbia effectively predicted the rise of reality TV as a genuine force of entertainment," Collis said in his interview with Typebar.
Larson aimed to criticize the Reagan era of broadcast TV deregulation, when ratings and data were prioritized for profit instead of creative works. With television being the new universal cultural touchstone, overtaking movies as a whole (outside of blockbusters), Larson was becoming concerned.
"He sees that TV isn't very inspiring as a whole and that everything is becoming about the stock price and the value and the profit," Collis said, "and he says, 'What happens if we take that to extremes?'"
Which wasn't an extreme after all, as Superbia even predicted influencers who sell random nonsense. Ever since TikTok's jump in popularity, the app has also become a platform for product advertising with videos on hauls, Amazon finds, restocking ASMR, and the ability to buy items without ever leaving the app with TikTok Shop—ridden with dropshipped garbage and endless spam, by the way. Its annoying ubiquitousness gave rise to the anti-consumption movement. Whether it's been successful in reducing companies' profits and the popularity of such content, or if it's just another kind of social media trend, is questionable.
In Larson's eight or nine years working on Superbia, the story went through drastic changes, with the ending changing the most. Superbia’s antagonist is the MBA, a human-like computer program. The MBA controls every aspect of people's lives, including programming who people fall in love with and what Ins do on their never-ending livestreams. The ending was first drafted as positive, leading to the defeat of the MBA. However, doubt filled Larson after years of rejection. The show began to take a darker turn, where Josh does not become the hero of the story and Elizabeth kills herself trying to get Josh to reawaken to his human emotions. When he finally does, he just has to watch humanity fall at the hands of the MBA. In one version, the MBA announces Delimbination, "the planned removal of mankind’s arms, legs, and torsos in exchange for climate controlled cubicles and a 36” colour MT for each head," as stated in Boho Days. In another, the MBA, so caught up in its pursuit of profits, eliminates all of humanity to explore space with an army of clones as it determines itself the higher species. This event is promoted to the Ins and Outs as "the media event of the century." Collis describes it best in his book:
"Humanity is expected to accept its destruction with an almost comical blasé as the MT blares the news:
The countdown continues for the Final Act Event which occurs tomorrow night
29-60s remain before you’re vaporized in the hot, white light
In other news…"
This is reminiscent of the use of memes and AI as "slopaganda" in the Iran war, both from the White House and the Iranian government. A video from The Wall Street Journal analyzing the White House's social media strategy shows that the majority of Americans are against the war, but views on the White House's TikTok have jumped 60% since the war began. Communications experts the WSJ spoke to drew parallels to the first Gulf War nicknamed "The Video Game War," with footage of drone strikes being broadcast on TV. But now the government has a TikTok account and it's using memes and AI-generated videos to create narratives of the USA being the hero.
In addition to the White House's constant use of AI-generated images to further the Trump administration agenda as a whole, Iran's own AI meme war found success online. They're crafted with the perfect tone that connects with the language of internet Gen Z'ers. The effectiveness of Iran's anti-Trump and anti-America memes as comedic propaganda for jaded liberals online is terrifying. It feels dystopian for both sides to dunk on each other in this way, as if they are the Wendy's Twitter delivering sick burns—something on its own that would be horrifying for Larson but now completely normalized.
Larson's Actual Views on Tech
It's important to note that Larson's relationship to technology was complicated. He saw its potential and was an early adopter of technology, drafting most of Rent on Microsoft Word in the early 90s, using computers like we would for standard personal use, and creating a fascinating floppy disc archive for digital historians. He used digital music software to quickly arrange and rearrange his orchestrations. Despite this, he was wary of surveillance.
"He did not get online," Collis said when speaking to Typebar Magazine, confident because of his years speaking to people around Larson for his book. "His friends tried to convince him to try AOL, but he had a vibe that his data wouldn't be safe."
The biggest difference was that the fear of surveillance was from the government, not tech corporations as it is today. Even then, Collis said that Larson's friends called him a bit paranoid, "not in a serious way but in a way that nowadays would be very normal." It may have been overkill to be paranoid about the internet and social media back then, with only the bare minimum info displayed to the world, but something that Larson saw would be used against consumers with years of information compiled for each individual.
Data privacy concerns have plagued social media since its inception. Facebook, as early as 2006, dealt with concerns about the introduction of the news feed, which broadcasts recent activity to friends. This seems miniscule now, especially with the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal that harvested users' data to aid the Trump presidential campaign. The same sort of technology is used in the hyperpersonalized algorithms to serve engaging content to users' feeds on TikTok and Instagram Reels, only possible due to immense amounts of data taken from user activity all the way to tracking your activity off the app.
Come to Your Senses
One of Larson's handwritten notes holds the withstanding thematic message of Superbia during its lengthy development: "Come to your senses! Media desensitizes people - Without your senses you are not an individual."
Larson died well before social media, reality TV, and even Fox News—which launched in October 1996 and that Larson "thankfully" never saw, according to Collis. Yet Larson's attachment to 1984 and his prophetic insight into the future created musicals that politically resonate even today.
"Larson would be very disappointed that Rent is still relevant," said Collis to Typebar.
This includes gentrification, treatment of LGBTQ+ people by the government and the general public, and tech and media. The bridge of "What You Own" contains the lines:
"I escape and ape content
I don't own emotion, I rent"
It states a familiar feeling for many of us chronically online. Any moment of boredom, sadness, or exhaustion leads to the endless scroll with the thought that it will help somehow—only to come out of that hours later feeling more drained and foggy than before. It's led to social media addiction, a new form of addiction that most Gen Z and young Millennials are intimately familiar with. Thousands of lawsuits are suing Meta and Youtube for purposely designing their platforms for addiction and harming young people's mental health, some of which are reaching landmark decisions with juries siding against the companies. Youngsters are pushing movements to get off social media, like a video trend that encourages users to follow an exercise to break the scrolling streak. The popularity of physical media is rising along with tech that only serves one purpose. There's even a trend for an "analog" bag that gets users to put their favorite non-screen hobbies in a bag that they can access at any time (whether this is just another trend towards overconsumption is another discussion).
Larson has long known that corporations dehumanize art, and thus culture. He could have never foreseen that the TV culture he despised would turn into the medically-acknowledged harms of social media that we see today. We're only just now recognizing and taking action against social media. Of Larson's political beliefs, this is just one of many things we need to rally against.
"He was way too much of an optimist," said Collis.
But perhaps being positive and having hope are our most powerful tools to fight the systems we must change. Human emotion is the only way, as Superbia points. Or as Rent says, we'll measure it in five-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-six-hundred minutes of love.
Shainna Alipon (she/they) is a freelance multimedia journalist from Las Vegas. They love writing about pop culture, especially feminine people and ideas in nerd spaces. You can find more of their works on their website or find them on Instagram (@scarilyse) attending random anime events.