You can’t escape the bastards. They’ve inserted their insidious fingers into so many aspects of life that it is almost impossible to earn a living without being smeared by their grimy greed.
You can run an open-source Linux operating system on your computer, have no social media accounts, and use one of the many alternative browsers to Google, but you’re making a billionaire richer the moment you buy something online. Oh, and best you don’t use a phone, never watch anything on YouTube, and forget about Spotify. That’s just the surface level. To wipe yourself clean you’d have to go completely analogue and off-grid, only use cash, and not have an ID card thanks to its embedded biometrics. Or you need to be a master level hacker so you can operate through the digital backdoor and run through the dark alleys. Either way, your chances of remaining sane are not good.
We are forced to stand in single file in a switchback aisle packed to shoulder height with candy all the way just so we can reach the checkout and pay for our avocado after being told by an automated voice: “Please proceed to counter number four.” Sometimes they do away with the “please”.
This is the physical, IRL version of our internet. And the middle-aged, ultimately boring white men who force us into the virtual candy-stocked aisles are, thanks to our wired-in dopamine requirements, are raking in unimaginable amounts of money and with it, the power to exert even more control over our lives.
Possibly the most frightening aspect of this is that we’ve not only let it happen, we’ve actively encouraged it. If, in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s – depending where in the world you lived – when the egalitarian promise of the internet glowed like freedom’s beacon, it suddenly glitched 40 years forward, we would, I believe, have recoiled as if our keyboard had instantly become red hot. But we have been frogs in a slowly warming pot.
Andrew Buckland’s latest play, The Fool’s Guide, which features techbros as the malevolent driving force, is probably the most superbly performed modern day cautionary tale you’re likely to witness by a solo storyteller.
Like all good fools, Buckland got us thinking, after we’d stopped laughing.
There are two main characters, being Milton O’Nnaire, and his son Billy O’Nnaire. Behind them are a malevolent chorus of techbros all called Chad, and the story revolves around a livestream of Billy’s life from infant to young adult. The livestream is called Clickbait Billy. We come in at the point where Milton is on a life-and-death mission to rescue Billy from the Chads. Spoiler alert: there is another character called Death.
Additional but no less essential characters are Billy’s number one fangirl and Miguel the non-binary robotic vacuum cleaner, who is a stroke of brilliance.
The story is rollicking and could seem ridiculously far-fetched until one thinks back and compares the altruism of those early internet days to the swamp of slop we now wade through in search of the trees of knowledge and/or the kaching! when our gig-economy invoice is paid. Add AI and the Internet of Things to our species’ seemingly insatiable penchant for reality TV and voila! Clickbait Billy is possible.
While Buckland’s version of life is, when one comes to think of it, rather disturbing, his version of death (Death the character is a bit John Cleeseish) and the afterlife is soft, ominous, and forgiving as a bank of mist over the ocean.
While there are one or two contenders who were once young Padawans under him who could now wrest the position if they were able to disengage from the comedy-slash-commercial circuit (they can’t because it’s a gig economy now, remember) Buckland remains the master of physical comedic storytelling.
He’s the O.G. and still punching hard.
The Fool’s Guide has played at KKNK, the Suideroosterfees, and the National Arts Festival. It is at the Baxter from 4 – 15 August.