Georeactor Blog

I have a long-ish section about NYC performances and updates to previous reads, so I want to post this now with a single book. While traveling this month I should be reading up on the 1871 Paris Commune, and Southeast Asia post-WW2.
Also I am gifting Perpetual Motion (a history compiled in the 1970s) to a friend in the sciences.

The Amateurs (Liz Harmer, 2018)

Years ago I read the web comic Power Nap where a pill has replaced sleep and only a few incompatible people still need sleep or dreams. This did some worldbuilding in my head where most people have been uploaded into a simulation. In 2019 I would think about the few survivors being entertaining for the uploaded people to watch like reality TV (namely Terrace House). Then in 2020 Amazon released a digital afterlife series Upload. There was never a solid start or end or plot for my idea.

So this lined me up to read The Amateurs.
After almost everyone steps into mysterious portals from a tech company, we join a group of forty-odd people who formed a community in an emptied-out city (Hamilton, Ontario). Parallels to Severance (the 2018 book), The Circle, and The Twilight Zone.
Later we get to know more about the manic, TED-talking tech CEO who discovered the portals. A large contingent has stayed in a walled Googleplex, and they only gradually understand that the world beyond their party campus has vanished (except they have a latrine system and kitchen duties - I assume some detail was added to explain how the community survives).
We get a peek into what happens beyond the portal, but I couldn't be sure of what was canonically / metaphysically happening there.

There were a few points where the science writing derailed me. First, how is the portal a product that's produced by coders? It was discovered accidentally. I can't follow any framing as a multiverse, a quantum computer, or a neural network.
One character says "I don't know if Darwin can really apply anymore […] It's like trying to use Newton to explain Einstein. […] I'm not even sure that I believe in the genome anymore."

So what is this book really about?
A clear inspiration is the author's nostalgia for their hometown and the creative class after they moved to Silicon Valley. I'd suggest it's also a commentary on social media becoming omnipresent and addictive. I see GoodReads reviews from early 2017, so this book was pre-Cambridge Analytica, post-Oculus but pre-Meta. Can I even remember this era of techlash? There was definitely something about Silicon Valley parents keeping their own kids away from devices, engineers being thoughtful but complicit, being removed from the harms of their product.
I think the author was interested in characters who were betrayed or abandoned and places them into this world, rather than portal equaling cheating, violence, or death.

The author published another novel (Strange Loops) last year.

NYC Theatre and Performance Art

I caught one of the last showings of Polishing Shakespeare at 59e59. Ten years ago, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced a series of translations of Shakespeare into modern English. In the public sphere this spawned arguments about what students and adults gain from reading and watching plays in Shakespearean English. I think the play answers that actors and stage direction can make a message understood, and it's OK if you have to wrinkle your brain or re-experience a play to fully digest it.
More sharply, our playwright was incensed how a tech exec's funding could steamroll the festival and playwrights into agreeing to this. That behind-the-scenes confrontation evolved into this play, three tense and wordy arguments over 90 minutes (rapid fire wordplay a la Bojack Horseman - seriously they have water bottles on stage). The playwright Dykstra portrays the comically bombastic tech exec, but maybe opinions have mellowed over the years - the script makes a few conceits (the obscurity of the history plays) and the cast has discussing Chaucer and 'No Fear Shakespeare' with the original tech exec.
Within the play our playwright is Kate Siahaan-Rigg, representing minority playwrights asked to participate in the project (a little something to unpack).
You might wonder where the Shakespeare project stands today. "Play On Shakespeare" has continued calling their work 'translation' but also 'contemporary modern verse', has radio play style performances, and some are adaptations to 20th-century settings.
P.S. I bet neither side never anticipated Estonia's construction vehicle adaptation of Shakespeare.

John Proctor is the Villain wraps up on Broadway on Sept 7th. Set in a small town in 2018, the MeToo movement comes to an English class reading The Crucible. The play's most convincing argument might be "shouldn't a story about girls making accusations… ask what happened to them?". The concluding speech and final seconds were powerful. I'm glad this is getting college productions and high school field trips already.
The play had runs in DC and Boston before coming to NYC. The celebrity references are good picks for both 2018 and the present (Billie Eilish was less known then but possible). I'm trying to remember where we stood with John Proctor in my school - I'd say this thesis would be subversive but not shocking?
There's some dithering online about how this makes sense as a take on The Crucible but not the historical Salem. That distinction isn't made here. A character shouts Abigail was a real person, the class learns about the church, deaths and abuse in the colony, and research about land disputes. When I read the play in school we spent significantly less time on that.
I was reminded of Spontaneous (2020).

The Museum of the Moving Image showed 2001 in 70mm film. Grainy, loud, higher highs and slower slow points. Opening in the desert makes the Earth look alien, like we are just another planet? I felt strongly against touching the monolith, like no, don't.

After 25+ years, I visited Ellis Island for a 'Hard Hat Tour' of the hospital. Start early and you can visit Liberty Island, too. This takes up most of the day. We had a great guide who could weave a story or be on the verge of tears. The hospital was built in 1909 and my known relatives arrived there in 1902, so that's a research fail on my part. Most of the other visitors on the tour were Irish-American.

An off-Broadway subreddit tipped me off to Arborlogues before it appeared in the New York Times. Attendees pick a time to perform a script and some improv prompts to a tree with no other audience. This struck me as a singular and weird art experience, but I get stressed when thinking of the 'right' personal story on the fly. I decided not to go.

Previous Reads / Notes

Reality check for ICE Block app https://micahflee.com/unfortunately-the-iceblock-app-is-activism-theater/

Analyzing a scene from 1984 https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2018/11/the-thing-that-he-was-about-to-do-was-to-open-a-diary-this-was-not-illegal-nothing-was-illegal-since-there-were-no-longe.html

The Trump administration's press release about objectionable Smithsonian art was generally copied from an article from The Federalist, regardless of whether it's a YouTube video with ~2,500 views, a painting merely referencing farmworkers, etc. It's darkly comical that they include a portrait of Fauci when every other featured exhibit is about race or gender? The 'This Day in Esoteric Political Histoy' podcast pointed out that the National Museum of African American History and Culture got less flak than expected (only a mention of an Ibram X. Kendi event).

Credit to Roland Meyer for a thread on why Gavin Newsom's mimicking of Trump's AI imagery is so objectionable:

The essence of MAGA Slop is the cynical demonstration of unfettered and ruthless power: politics is reduced to a meme, a cruel joke where only brute force matters, and anything that appears weak or vulnerable becomes the target of ridicule and contempt. Mimicking this rhetoric is not progressive.

A devastating jab from William Foege, former director of the CDC who played a major role in ending smallpox:

[Secretary] Kennedy would be less hazardous if he decided to do cardiac surgery. Then he would kill people only one at a time.

Around the time of the Srebrenica anniversary, the Wikipedia article led me to read a Human Rights Watch report around chemical warfare. Doctors in the groups escaping Srebrenica had hallucinations which they attributed to sleep deprivation, but others would become violent. Rumors of poisoned gas or wells were shared with HRW and the ICTY, but seem to have been dropped from modern narratives.

From an article about Emmett Till, Mississippi's segregation-era secret police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_State_Sovereignty_Commission

Japanese military deputized for colonial policing immediately after WWII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Surrendered_Personnel I have a book related to this, which I haven't read.

A belated farewell to the 1871 coworking / community space, which left Chicago's Merchandise Mart this spring and apparently has not lined up a new permanent home.

While searching for information on quinoa, I found a series of Facebook posts which combine photos of goosefoot (in the same Chenopodium genus) with one AI-generated medical diagram. I'm not sure if we're trying to add seed pods to lungs, or just shock the eyes.

While visiting family we watched Heads of State. It benefits a lot from being absurd and silly. It did feel a bit cheap. One weird thing is this past year has given us multiple 'world leader teamup' stories: Netflix's Hostage (British and French leaders), Amazon's G20 (US president), and the artsy Rumours (the G7).

Tron: Ares will feature 3D-printed lightcycles and things which shouldn't work in real-world physics. The whole point of the Tron aesthetic (as I understand it) was a childlike imagining of what goes on inside a computer, circuit boards = a city, etc. Are those stakes so low that we need to leave it behind? Is hardware itself too abstract for the audience?