GriffJon.com = Dr. Ludd

Dr. Ludd
or why I learned to stop worrying
and love the information superhighway.

by Jon Camfield

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
--Blake, Auguries of Innocence l.1

The stage is bare except for two chairs at desks, and is a large, square pylon wide enough for someone to hide behind between the desks and slightly behind them. At the desks sit Foo and Bar,facing the audience, pantomiming typing as they speak. The stage is dark.
Narrow spotlights come up on Foo and Bar simultaneously. They should be in clothes that are all one color, only different shades, but not necesarily both the same color. (Black and white? Green and black or amber and black?)
Foo and Bar's dialog should go very fast, but with short pauses between each line.
[Foo]: How much longer until we can read them?
[Bar]: An hour.
[Foo]: I wonder what we will be able to learn from her personal correspondance -- I can't wait.
[Bar]: They've waited this long already. It's like in the history books, when founding fathers wrote out, by hand, mountains of correspondance which waited to be discovered by history.
[Foo]: True, true. Consider how lucky we are to have anything at all -- so much of the information about the founders is lost, so few saved their e-mail, and then there were so many problems... (short pause)
[Bar]: Thirty megs, they say. All text.
[Foo]: Only thirty?
[Bar]: It's an old format, 30 megs is quite a bit of information, evidentally.
[Foo]: Thimblefull in an ocean. My hard drive has 1.5 Terras free.
[Bar]: Now...
[Foo]: Well, I'm gonna BBL.
Spotlight on Foo fades, then also on Bar. Announcers enter-- Hal stands in front of the pylon, Founder behind (or offstage, speaking into a mic?). Spotlight fades up on Hal, Bar, then Foo:
[Foo]: Re.
[Bar]: Back so soon?
[Foo]: I waited. There are tons of expert predictions on what we'll see downloaded. Whole new side of her -- all the background dealings, hidden agendas, politicking, the important originations of everything today, only evident now as such -- hindsight and all.
[Bar]: What an amazing time it is. To think, all her communications, every bit of her e-mail, encoded and saved on disk, that now only we can decode and read.
[Foo]: That's the jingle: "The world on a silicon chip" (pause) estimate's down to fifteen minutes now, BTW.
[Bar]: That it's taken this long for computing to advance to the point where we can break the encoding... a time capsule...
[Foo]: (As if reading from another source, perhaps looking away from the audience) She was the first of the cyberpioneers. Successful lobbyist for a Net free of any government, first elected president of the United Nets. Opened pirate BBSes in China during the harshest government censorship. True capitalism and true democracy, all virtual. Known by reputation and name by millions, by face only by her cat. I hear that it was almost a week after she died that she was discovered. And then her homepage lasted almost three months more.
[Bar]: We must be reading the same webpage. Everything auto-paid by her bank account, maintained by loyal programs. Her death on-line lagged behind her physical death. And still people claim to see her ghost in dark data corners and computer chips. I heard that her site had more hits in those three months after she died than in the previous year.
[Foo]: Heh. I must've been half of those hits...
[Bar]: And we have her private life, on disk. Like diaries of famous statesmen, a virtual Federalist Papers, or Nixon's tapes.
[Foo]: Whose?
[Bar]: And ... (short pause) ...Now! we have all her e-mail.
[Foo]: Already downloading, friend.
Spotlight comes up on 'Hal'
[Hal]: (In a near-flat, computer-tone) The decoding of the e-mail letters has now been completed. This NetChannel will be bringing you the full text of the letters momentarily read by a computer approximation...pause
[Founder]: (similar tone, but female. Could be reading from the script!): April 8, 2002. 12:09, GMT. To: Doe@email dot net. Re: meeting. No, sorry, only the pizza guy and my cat see me face to face. On-line? I'm on the Undernet chatnet usually in the 15 hundered of GMT. see you there? (These next lines of Foo and Bar occur concurrently with the Founder's lines)
[Foo]: Query: pizza guy?
[Bar]: First I've heard. For sure long dead by now.
[Founder]:
April 8, 2002. 14:45, GMT To: Epistol@email dot net. Re: Artifacts
Yes, I do get snail-mail, usually only xmas cards now, though. My bank pays my bills automatically, and I check everything else out on-line. Life is good, and my postman loves his workload.

April 8, 2002. 18:12, GMT To: Aims@bell dot net Re: Netiquette
I miss the old days where there was something called netiquette. I have started a movement based out of my homepage to bring back some amount of that code of geek honor, but I'm afraid I don't update it often, too busy with other things, you know..

April 9, 2002. 16:57, GMT To: GA5324@compuserve dot com. Re: Hello
Yah, I did get your letter. I am very busy, though, so it can take me a while to reply. Write back please. I do enjoy getting e-mails, they are so much faster.

April 9, 2002. 13:23, GMT. To: JohnQ@AOL dot com. Re: crash
Terrible news on your petition data. Hope you can recover it. e-mail me the results?

[Foo]: Isn't this great?
[Bar]: Not exactly of the social import I was hoping for.
[Foo]: But still... I'm sure there must be something... what is 'netiquette?
[Founder]:
April 9, 2002. 15:36, GMT. To:Tex@nyc dot net. Re: Free offer
I never respond positively to spam mail. Please remove me from your mailing list or I will do everything in my power to make your life a living hell.

April 10, 2002. 22:11, GMT. To: columnist024@news dot net. Re: question
My greatest fear and hope is to become a saint. I have this theory that one cannot reach peace until everyone has forgotten about you. But I also want to not be forgotton, to change something.

April 12, 2002. 13:23, GMT. To: Griffjon@mail.utexas.edu Re: writing
You still haven't answered my original question, though: what's the point of all of this?
[Bar]: Indeed -- what's the point? I'm redirecting the rest into a file. There's sure to be a lot of summaries and opinions to read. Want to deathmatch me in Wolf: Full Sensory?
[Foo]: Sure. This can wait.
Spotlights fade quickly. Blackout. Exuent.

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