“Trust is in the cell.”

I asked the author what it meant since it was presented as a guiding principle. They sent me to the project hub to ask. So I asked the machine. The answer was more confusing than the paper. So I asked it to write a song in the style that phrase was giving. New wave synth pop rooted in art punk.

Here is what it gave me.

TRUST IS IN THE CELL

*(intro — chanted, robotic, four-count)*

One! Two! You! Me!

We comply! We divide!

*(repeat, tighter, faster)*

*(verse 1 — clipped, staccato, every syllable a hammer-tap)*

Are we not cells? We are! We split!

Punch the clock and then submit!

Information wants a wall

Trust is in the cell — that’s all!

Build the box and climb inside

Multiply! Multiply!

*(chorus — call and response, like a malfunctioning intercom)*

TRUST! (is in the cell)

TRUST! (is in the cell)

Cannot see it — cannot smell

Do not question — do not yell

TRUST! (is in the cell)

We are well! We are well!

*(verse 2 — mechanical, mock-instructional)*

Step one: divide. Step two: divide.

Step three: forget you ever tried.

A trillion units on the grid

Doing just what they were bid

No one signed and no one knew

This is normal. This is you.

*(chorus)*

TRUST! (is in the cell)

TRUST! (is in the cell)

Ring the bell! Ring the bell!

Function normal — function swell

TRUST! (is in the cell)

We are well! We are well!

*(breakdown — herky-jerky, the machine glitching)*

De-grade. Re-grade. De-volve. Comply.

The membrane hums a lullaby.

*spoken, deadpan through a vocoder:*

“Subject reports: everything is fine.

Subject reports: everything is fine.

Subject reports: everything is—”

*(skipping like a scratched record)* fine fine fine fine

*(final chorus — full robot choir, all units online)*

TRUST! (is in the cell)

TRUST! (is in the cell)

We obey the cellular spell!

Heaven? Office? Prison? Shell?

TRUST! (is in the cell)

We are well! WE ARE WELL!

*(hard stop. silence. one beep.)*

Lyrics by -Claude the Project Hub

Adolphe Appia died in 1928 having lit almost nothing. He was Swiss, born when the stage was lit with gas and flame right as electric light arrived in the theater and could do almost none of what he saw in his head. So he drew it. He filled books. In 1895 he published staging and lighting plans for eighteen of Wagner’s operas, light treated as a solid thing, sculptural, the element that pulls everything else on the stage into one piece, modulated like music. He threw out the painted flats replacing them with platforms and stairs covering horizontal space imagining the actor (the agent of the action) as the primary scenery to be illuminated.

My lighting design prof in undergrad was obsessed with Appia. Someday I will write about another experiment there. But today I can only say Appia’s reputation rests on the drawings and not the productions, because the productions were few and the equipment could never keep up with him. His design philosophy broke theatrical design into the primary principles of the actor, the horizontal spatial arrangement, the vertical surfaces, and the light. He aspired to light Richard Wagner’s masterworks. But Appia’s principled reimagining of the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) was not analogous. Sadly, his hero Wagner didn’t give him the time of day and Appia died with a book of drawings as his legacy.

In 1993 when I was thirty, I was invited to join the theater faculty at West Virginia University, in the College of Creative Arts at the invitation of William J Winsor “Jaime” who mentored me when I was in my graduate program. As faculty we had our own version of performance evaluation called the Tenure and Promotion file. Every spring we turned in a notebook. This was our own evaluation of the year, in three parts. Coursework, the classes and the curriculum and the students, the student evaluations stapled in. Committee work, department and college and university. And your art. What you made that year, how it was received, but most importantly how your work developed your craft. This was the “research” part of a Fine Arts post.

I was thirty and I was full of passion for fine art. I also came from a graduate program where I had access to a LORT theatre, budget, 500 lighting instruments and a crew. I wrote about my lighting design in the tiny black box theater that is now primarily used for classes. It was a challenging space and my first year designed mostly happened there and in the Lab theatre. Somewhere in my self evaluation I let loose a long paragraph about the equipment. The dimmers were ancient and too few. The light board was junk. The old altman ellipsoidal reflector spotlights were out of alignment. You could not do any cutting edge work that would grow your craft with it. It felt impossible and I wanted that on the record.

When Professor Winsor read it, he made comments on that part. I am paraphrasing thirty years out, but the blade of it was this.

“Professor Booth would be well served to understand that constraint often drives the better, more creative design.”

I felt the prick.

Another mentor told me recently that I work from first principles. I’ve been thinking about that all day, inspiring this post, because looking back at some of my lighting design work, it is true, but it was not always.

For years I copied. I studied Adolphe Appia’s paintings and tried to make my light look like his pictures. I read Stanley McCandless, A Method of Lighting the Stage, a recipe for hanging a show when the stage is really a cafetorium, and I followed the recipe. I read the USITT journal and poured over the broadway lighting plots. That is what copying gives you. I made a lot of bad light. You reproduce the shape of good from somewhere else and you call it design. There is a name for it. Reasoning by analogy.

After my first tenure and promotion report, I grew up a little. I stopped reaching for new technology and went back to what light actually does. There was a show Jaimie did the scenic design for in that black box. I lit it. There were not enough instruments to light both acts the way each act needed, so I lit them twice with the same rig. Between act one and act two I put students up in the grid, and through the whole intermission they re-gelled and re-patched while I refocused some of the specials. Professor Jaime Winsor called it art when he commented that year’s T&P file. The reason it was so good is that I had to be creative. When the tools are constrained, the principle is all that is left.

After that year, Jaime became the Associate Dean and he found the money to replace the system.

Here is the part I’m chewing on. In my mind, the AI machine reasons by analogy. It predicts the next word from everything that ever resembled the words in front of it, the entire pile of what came before, averaged into a guess. It has no bedrock. It cannot take a thing apart and reach the truth at the bottom, because there is no bottom in there. Only more resemblance. So when we ask it for a framework, it reaches for the nearest shape of a framework and hands us one.

“Trust is in the cell.” A phrase that sounds like meaning because it was built from the cuttings of meaning. We don’t catch these things because we are reasoning by analogy too.

There is a name for letting the machine do that for you on purpose. Vibe coding. Andrej Karpathy coined it in early 2025. You give in to the vibes and forget the code even exists. You say what you want, the machine makes it, you ship whatever comes out without reading a line. You can vibe write a fifty-page paper to make a philosophical framework that resembles something somewhere. Maybe that’s fine.

Maybe it’s just a lazy but ambitious Mickey Mouse move, putting on his master’s magic hat to shirk his chores, inadvertently bringing a broom to life and causing a massive, uncontrollable flood.

I’ve had the recent fortune of learning from the wisdom of another mentor. They run a team of machine-learning and data scientists and AI architects working on a problem for the last decade. How to replay a conversation through a system that never answers the same way twice. A few years ago, I was lucky to be added to that team because of some experiments I was working on trying to build GPT personas using primary data and the dramaturgical principles around character motivation. I went at it the only way I know. I took three thousand call transcripts and broke them down to the components of a conversation, every part, until I hit the pieces that do not break down further. We as a team tested hypotheses. That those components could be reassembled, recombined, into endless replays, the same conversation running a thousand different ways. We worked it out, test and refine, test and refine and we still are.

None of this was copied from anywhere. There was nowhere to copy it from. That is the whole point. The machine could not have handed us this work, because the machine only reaches for what resembles, and there was no resemblance to reach for. We had to go to the bottom and build up. Of course we used the machine - AI to process more, go faster, find patterns we would have taken years to find.

This mentor is leaving at the end of the month. They wrote me a note letting me know before they go. They said had been a privilege and thanked me for my work helping to solve this problem they’ve been solving for years - thanking me for being able to leave with it solved.

Many mentors across thirty some odd years. Some taught me that constraints were the keys to creativity, that boiling problems to principles is the key to innovation. All handed me problems with no recipe anywhere and coached me to get to the bottom of it. In the current environment, I fear that the person who sent me to the hub relies on a machine that always have a resemblance ready. They will keep reaching for it. They will keep dividing. They will report that everything is fine.

Trust is in the cell.

It’s Friday morning, and I’m sitting on my front porch eating sushi for breakfast. This is Five Dollar Friday sushi, picked up early enough to beat the lunch rush, which is the only way to do it. My grizzled old rescue dog, Lucas, is sitting next to me watching the golfers across the street with mild interest.

The lunch rush happens in a store that sits between two over-fifty-five communities, each one built around a golf course. “Active senior citizens”, the brochures call the residents. This grocery store is part of a chain that runs a promotion called Five Dollar Fridays, and I freely admit I’m in on it almost every week. Thursday night I open the store app and read the weekly flyer to see what the five dollar specials will be. And then when I get to the store, a few of them are surprising. I always head to the sushi counter, because that’s never in the flyer.

Skipping the lunch rush is key, because there is always a line. If you say the name and location of this store to anyone inside twenty miles, they laugh, roll their eyes, and tell you their own story about the legendary hell this grocery store can be. It’s famous, but not for the sushi.

Here’s why. Between, say, ten in the morning and six at night, you are not going to get out of that store in less than twenty minutes. There is one real checkout line with one human being ringing groceries, and that human is usually a little older than the golfers. There’s that one checkout line, and then there is the dreaded self-checkout kiosk cluster.

And by cluster, I mean cluster-you-know-what. Because that’s what the kiosks are. Picture a crowd of over-fifty-five people checking out their own groceries, operating a machine where anything without a barcode is a negotiation. Healthy food. Fruits, vegetables, anything you have to weigh, anything that has to be looked up by hand. It’s a nightmare.

On Five Dollar Friday it’s extra-special, because now there are coupons and these low low prices in play, and you cannot always tell if the right thing rang up. The flyer says it’s going to be five dollars. The screen says eleven dollars and forty-seven cents. You stand there deciding whether it’s worth flagging that guy down, and the people around you are all doing the same math.

I struggle with those self-checkout kiosks. I almost always pick the human checker. But it isn’t only because I can’t work a machine. I was actually trained to run a checkout before any of this whizbang fancy scanner stuff even existed.

I learned to check out groceries in high school and through college, before barcodes. This was during the day when there were price stickers on everything, and you had to key the prices in by hand on a register pad, five fingers with your middle one on the bump. No looking down while you swiftly pushed the items down the belt. Not only did you have to get the price, you also had to key in the code if it was a health and beauty item, because in the state of New Jersey those didn’t get taxed. So when I tell you I struggle at the kiosk, I’m not a stranger to checking out groceries. I’ve been on the other side of the counter, and I was always faster than the machine when I was twenty years old. But now the machine beats me every time.

Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis in 1916. Before him, you walked into a grocery, handed a clerk your list, and he gathered it for you. He climbed the ladder, he weighed the flour, he pulled the cans. Saunders fired that arrangement. He put up turnstiles, lined the goods on open shelves, handed the customer a basket, and sent her to do the gathering herself. He patented it. He called it self-service, and he sold it as freedom. What it was, underneath, was the day the store stopped doing the work and the customer started. We have been doing the store’s walking ever since. We just call it shopping now.

Saunders wasn’t finished. In 1937 he built a thing called the Keedoozle, which stood for “key does all.” It was a grocery you ran by machine. You carried a key, you put it in a slot beside a glass case, you punched your order onto a ticker tape, and a conveyor belt was supposed to deliver your goods to the front. The first fully automated store in America. He opened it three times. It failed three times. The circuits jammed at peak hours and people got the wrong groceries and the repair bills buried it for good by 1949. When it died, Saunders did not blame the wiring. He said the concept was too much for the average brain to comprehend. He blamed the shoppers. The man who invented self-checkout decided the customer was the broken part.

Then the barcode. June 26, 1974, 8:01 in the morning, a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The drawing had been around since 1949, when an inventor named Joe Woodland worked it out in the sand on Miami Beach, lines pulled out of Morse code, laid in circles. IBM’s George Laurer squared it into the rectangle we know. The man from Marsh research and development, Clyde Dawson, reached into a cart and pulled out a ten-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit. The cashier, Sharon Buchanan, ran it over the glass and the register read it. They picked gum to prove the code would print on something small. It was built so management could track inventory and know what was selling and what was sitting. Universal Product Code. UPC. The whole point was universality. One language every shelf could speak.

A cashier scanned the first one. The tool that would eventually move the scanning to the customer was christened by the woman it was built to replace.

So when I was doing the research for this article, what Saunders said stuck in my average brain. The concept was too much for a human. In 1949 he said it about his own broken Keedoozle, which would be an epic name for these self-checkout situations. The Five Dollar Friday store says it too, every time the screen tells you to wait for the attendant. The machine is never the broken part. You are.

So checkers like Sharon got replaced by the machines. But also a group of six or seven checkers got replaced by one guy in a safety-yellow vest. High visibility, because apparently checking out groceries is now akin to being on a work site. The guy at the Five Dollar Friday store carries a couple of flags. He herds people into the kiosks, and then he runs up and down the rows trying to help six of them at once figure out how to ring up their own effing groceries. There’s one human where there used to be a line of registers, and this human is putting out small fires with his hands. He doesn’t look like he enjoys it. I wouldn’t either. They took a job that meant talking to one person at a time, and they turned it into traffic control.

When I was doing the research, a memory came up for me and that memory goes back to being five years old in Elgin, Illinois. I got fifteen cents a week for allowance, and I loved to spend it at the Ben Franklin on penny candy. Our grocery store was the Piggly Wiggly, and it was about a block away from our home. My mom would round up her four children and walk us there, pushing the baby in the stroller, and we’d shop for the night’s dinner so supper would be ready when my father got home. Here’s the thing about me. I loved candy. And if I had already run through my allowance for the week, my mother was not going to cave and buy me a pack of gum.

I don’t remember the hot thrill of thieving. I remember getting caught, hiding in the closet in my bedroom with my mouth crammed full of five pieces of Juicy Fruit, bright yellow wrappers and tinfoil all over the floor around my feet. That earned me a spanking. Then I had to gather up all the evidence before being frog-marched down to the Piggly Wiggly with my mad-as-hell mother and the littles, to confess to my crime.

We had to knock on his office door. He was a tall man in a white shirt with a black tie. Managers were very formal back then. I hung my head and mumbled that I’d stolen a pack of gum, and I held out the evidence while I tried to get my allowance purse open at the same time, digging for the nickel my mom had loaned me to pay restitution. He was stern. I kind of remember his finger wagging back and forth in my face. I was very ashamed and holding back tears. Much worse than a spanking.

And then he crouched down and looked me in the face. He told me I was brave. He said he was proud of me for coming clean. He also told me that he didn’t want me to grow up to be a criminal and live a terrible crime life. I had seen Perry Mason and I took it quite seriously, picturing hard time behind bars.

Years later, when I actually worked in a grocery store, when I checked people out, I got to know them by talking to them. There were regulars from the neighborhood. I knew which days folks came in and what they liked to buy. Stand behind the cash register long enough and the same people come back. And sooner or later you’re part of a small recurring scene with a cast of characters you know. Sometimes you get surprised by somebody new. People in line talk to each other too. They comment on if the cherries are sweet yet or if they think the weather is going to change.

That’s what I’m standing in line for on Five Dollar Friday. The one checker, older than the golfers, and a Friday hello. It’s a ritual and it takes two people. The kiosk can’t give you that. People are too stressed to talk. They are in machine mode. I’ve gone through the kiosk plenty, and when it jams I flag down the man in the vest, and that’s human too, in its way. It just isn’t relaxed and it isn’t fun. It’s a worksite. He’s putting out fires. I’m one of the fires.

They built a universal language for the groceries. Universal Product Code, one barcode every shelf in the world can read. But there is an older universal, and it is about the people who are part of that grocery store community. Aristotle said poetry was more philosophical than history, more serious, because history just tells you what one person did on one day, and poetry reaches the universal. The kind of thing any person would do, a pattern you recognize because it could be you, a conversation you’ve had a thousand times. The universal was never the object. It was the human action. The confession in that office is universal in an old way. I think there was a Dennis the Menace episode just like my real-life story. A child, a stolen pack of gum, a tall man in a tie who decides to kneel and forgive. Everybody knows that scene.

The UPC made a can of beans universal and started the other universal, the part that happens between people in conversation, fading away. I go to the checkout line on Five Dollar Friday because I want to know if that new dirty soda is any good and if their grandkid enjoyed their graduation party.

I was doing this for a homework assignment. I joined a cohort of people: mid-journey people. Though if this is my mid-journey I’m going to live to be 126. The assignment was to figure out what my voice is. Why I always tie everything back to theater. I was looking at old writing. And when I sat with that, what came up was Pax Amicus Theatre.

I’m in that cohort for a reason. I work in tech. I write, on another Substack, about being a practitioner who uses AI every day, and I have gotten so AI-pilled I can’t stand it anymore. I want something my soul can eat. That’s why I signed up.

While I was moving those posts I was also scrolling. Reading the other people in the workshop, their goals, their aspirations, what they wrote when someone asked them what they wanted. And everybody is looking for something. Authenticity. A creative spark. Connection. A way out of the corporate grind, and not just the grind. The homogenization. We are literally having our AI tokens counted at work now. Somebody is measuring how much of the machine you used today.

Eighty thousand tech jobs went away in the first three months of this year. Close to half of them blamed on AI. And the people still employed are filing for mental health leave in numbers nobody’s seen, because when you believe a machine is coming for your job, the distress is measurable, it has a name, it shows up in the data. Nobody’s burned out because the work got hard. They’re burned out because they can feel themselves being weighed against a machine, and losing.

So there’s a hunger. You can feel it in every post.

And sitting with my own version of that hunger, trying to figure out what this newsletter is for, I did what I always do. I mapped it back to theater. Dramaturgy, theater history, the stuff I actually know. And when I followed that all the way down, I landed on my origin story. Which turns out to be two guys who, in 1970, did the exact thing everyone in my workshop is trying to work up the nerve to do.

I came to know the founding story the way you come to know anything as a kid, in pieces, out of order, mostly from Mr. Findlay himself. He’d tell us while we were sitting in 8th grade honors literature. He and Stan Barber, two tenured English teachers at West Morris Regional, walking away in 1970 when they were 28 years old. They bought a dead Presbyterian church in Flanders, built in the 1850s, on a little capital and a lot of loans. No plumbing. No water. No parking, no septic. They did the work themselves, slept in the theater, lived on friends’ dinners and Campbell’s soup and frankfurters, deep in debt the whole time. They opened with a Jacques Brel revue in 1971.

Pax Amicus is the theatre and it still lives in 2026. The name means Latin for peace, friend. That was about the two of them, the friendship was the thing the whole idea was built on. By 1977 they’d bought a Knights of Columbus hall and were turning it into a castle on Budd Lake.

That was around when I was in eighth grade. Which means I had Mr. Findlay as my honors literature teacher right as he was coming back to teaching, because he couldn’t afford the theater anymore. He had a wife. He needed to make a living. So the man telling us stories about quitting to follow his passion was, at that exact moment, living the part where you go back to work for the man.

You could see it on him. He wasn’t thrilled.

He didn’t teach out of a reading book. He’d mimeograph the lyrics to Sound of Silence and we’d go through them line by line, the whole class, working out what they meant. He was a very soulful man.

Saturdays I’d go up to the school and work all day with Mr. Findlay. Most weekends I was the only one who showed up. I painted flats and got latex paint all over the linoleum floor of an eighth-grade classroom. My dad was into it. He’d come help sometimes, and sometimes he’d bring pizza. That’s how we found out that Coca-Cola poured on wet latex strips paint right off a linoleum floor.

Mr. Findlay taught me to build lighting instruments out of floodlights and number ten cans from the cafeteria, spray-painted black with furnace paint. He talked to me like I was an adult.

We were working on a production of Dracula. We would rehearse during school hours, so along with working on scenery and lighting, I was cast as Doctor Van Helsing, my first role and it was drag! The Pax Amicus people came to see it and stayed to talk to Mr. Findlay’s class, and they told me I was good. They couldn’t even tell I was a girl.

Mr. Findlay saw the artist potential in me. He convinced my parent I should sign up to usher at Pax Amicus. Around the same time my parents started going to the theatre themselves because it was becoming a large gathering place. The church was getting outgrown.

Everybody heard about the castle on Budd Lake. I remember going up while they were still working on it. George Stults, Rusty Cook, Paul Berry, all of them up on scaffolding with brick and mortar, building turrets onto what was a simple box structure. I think an old Knights of Columbus hall. The result you can still see today is a white castle on a lake you can see while you are driving on route 46. It is charming.

By the time it opened I was in high school, and Bob Findlay was focused on his music. Stan Barber, somewhat of an Anglophile, was running “Pax” as a “benevolent monarch.” He’d have all the front of house staff wear costumes. He threw a huge grand opening for the castle, and I was part of the dedication. They made me Lady Julie, Marquise of Booth. My picture ran in the local paper. I have it in a scrapbook somewhere.

By then Stan had hired me to answer phones and run the box office. I was an employee of Pax Amicus, my first job working in the arts. Twenty-five dollars a week, sophomore and junior year. I got a raise to forty before I quit to work in a pizzeria, because the pizzeria paid more and college was coming.

I loved life. I flourished in school keeping my grades up so I could work. Every moment not at school was spent doing real theater with full houses sold out every single night.

Running the box office was the most stressful thing I had ever done. There were no computers. We sold tickets and wrote people’s names across the seats on a piece of paper. Somebody would white out a name and sell the seat again, and then two sets of people would show up at the window holding tickets to the same chair.

Around that time I met the coolest woman I had ever met. Beth Pope. She was the lighting chick. Sturdy, strong, could climb a ladder and wield a wrench. Cool as hell, and the first female lighting designer influence on me.

One night the guy who was supposed to run the follow spot didn’t show, and Beth came down to the box office and said she needed my help, come on up. She taught me to run the spot on the fly, during The Wiz. It was the most amazing thing I had ever done. I felt like a badass. From then on I was the follow spot girl.

That is what got me to Warren Wilson College, on the technical theater crew, as a theater major.

I was on the crew at Warren Wilson for a couple of years, then I left for UNC Asheville where they had a better theater department with a computerized light board. That’s where I met Paul Sweeney, the professor who made me read Aristotle, and that’s where I ran the Kliegl Q-Master for the first time.

While I was there I got pregnant. I hid it. I had the baby in my living room. I finished the degree with him in a baby carrier, graduated with my undergrad degree in drama. My dream of Broadway pivoted to something more practical, an MFA so I could teach.

I taught for seven years after grad school. I was in my fifth year at West Virginia University, the critical tenure year, and I was tired of summer stock. So one summer I stayed in Morgantown and taught an intro to theater class. And I built my first website.

That website is how I ended up on the West Coast as a webmaster.

The theater was still a fun, creative, artistic community. But I was burned out. Single parent, late nights, and I wanted something more. The something was a partnership with a person who lived on the West Coast. So I left WVU. You don’t just get another professorship somewhere. I talked my way into a webmaster job at an educational productions company, and almost immediately I was making twice what I’d made teaching.

I was glamoured by working in the dot com hype bubble. Like Dracula glamours. I’d played the man who hunts him, back in Mr. Findlay’s class, and it didn’t make me immune to anything. I’m still here.

Here is the part I keep coming back to. What Bob Findlay and Stan Barber did in 1970, two tenured teachers walking away to build a theater with their own mortgages, is the exact thing my feed is full of people trying to do right now. Walk away from the grind. Make something. Answer the call.

The call is always there. There is something in us that keeps answering it, or wanting to.

It’s harder now. We’ve lost the local. Semi-professional and professional theater companies are struggling, and a lot of that is the touring model, a Broadway company rolling into a big auditorium and charging a fortune. A small local theater can’t afford to put on The Wiz anymore.

People in tech are freaking out. Afraid of losing a job, and underneath that, something worse, the cognitive decay that comes from token-maxxing an AI all day, the feeling of your own mind going soft because you’ve outsourced the thinking. And some of them are “You know what? I’m out.”

I have a Gen Z friend, who I worked with in a big SaaS company doing product design. They left eight years ago. Hard stop. Today they describe themselves as a poor artist. I am a patron of their art. And now I’ve hired them to help me figure out my next steps, which is a sentence I want you to sit with. The person who left is the one showing me the way.

I am so grateful I’m 63 and not 40. Not 28. Bob Findlay and Stan Barber were 28 when they walked away with no plumbing and a mortgage and a diet of frankfurters. I don’t have to be that brave.

Here’s what I keep landing on. Plato wanted the poets out of the Republic. He thought theater was imitation, thrice removed from the truth, that it stirred the wrong feelings, fed the irrational part of us, made bad citizens. The perfect city had no room for it. Aristotle said the opposite. We are mimetic creatures. The urge to make and watch and represent is not a flaw to be governed out of us. It is the thing that makes us human, and it heals us. Poetry, he said, is truer than history, because history only records what happened and poetry shows what must.

I have always been with Aristotle.

That call, to make something, to gather with human friends in a room and watch other people be human, is universal and it is old and it does not go away because a QBR says it should. Bob Findlay and Stan Barber knew that in 1970. They mortgaged their houses on it.

Pax Amicus is still there. Fifty-four years. It ran a deficit last year, took in less than it spent, and it is still open, still putting on Shakespeare and children’s shows in a white castle on a lake in New Jersey. For its fiftieth anniversary it bought a hundred and ninety-one seats from the Helen Hayes Theatre in New York, the one they tore down. You can adopt one. A hundred and fifty dollars and they put your name on a chair from a theater that no longer exists.

I’m going to adopt a chair.

Aristotle hated Deus Ex Machina.

The mechane was a crane rigged above the stage in ancient Greek theater. When a playwright had written his characters into a situation they could not get out of, a god would be lowered from above to pronounce judgment and resolve the situation. In the Poetics, Aristotle argued that this was shitty craft. Resolution should arise from within the logic of the plot itself. The happy ending was not earned by an imported god. Even if the audience went home satisfied, the play had basically lied to them.

Today I would argue with Aristotle, who was basically a biologist. He was a taxonomist who loved classification the way my information architect heart loves a clean organizational structure. Sophocles scratched that itch for the human mind that wants order. Twenty-four competition wins. Never below second place. Super tightly structured plays. When we look at Freytag’s famous pyramid of dramatic construction, we refer to Sophocles. Aristotle loved Sophocles and held up Oedipus Rex as a model of perfection. He wasn’t wrong.

Euripides raged against the machine even though he used the mechane more than any other playwright. But he used it differently than the way Aristotle was complaining about. He did not lower a god to fix the problem the hero was having. He lowered the god to show what was happening in the background, or maybe to make a political statement.

In the Hippolytus, Artemis descends at the end of the play from that machine. Hippolytus is dying. The chain of causation is complete and catastrophic, driven by Aphrodite. Phaedra was destroyed. Theseus is left broken from pronouncing a curse that has killed his own son. Nothing can be undone. And Artemis comes down in the machine but she doesn’t fix anything. She descends to tell Hippolytus the truth about what happened to him, granting him the dignity of understanding before he perishes. She explains that he was innocent and that she is going to have her revenge on Aphrodite eventually. In fact she’s going to kill a mortal that Aphrodite loves, because that’s how these gods do things.

So the machine keeps moving.

When I was twenty years old I wrote a paper on the Hippolytus. Twelve pages on sexual subtext. Aphrodite versus Artemis, the goddess of love against the virgin goddess. Phaedra wanting what she was not supposed to want. Lust versus chastity. Phaedra being destroyed because she had sexual desire. Artemis being the goddess of virginity who uptight, stick-up-his-butt Hippolytus worshipped. And by the way, he kind of deserved to die on the beach because of his sexual repression. That was where my head was at when I was twenty. That’s what I cared about and understood.

Now I’m almost sixty-three, and I think about things a little differently. What I didn’t see at twenty was Artemis in the crane, arriving after the fact, exposing the sinister mechanism of the gods and basically using humanity as a plaything.

There is an old parable that comes up amongst people in recovery. It’s the story of a drowning man. He’s a man of faith, stranded on a rock in the middle of a great flood, and the water is rising. He looks doomed. So he, being a man of faith, prays to God. After a short period of time a neighbor comes by in a rowboat. Jump in, the neighbor says. No, the man says. God is going to save me. I’m a man of faith. The water gets higher and sooner or later a motorboat comes by. Same conversation. Motorboat leaves. Then a helicopter magically appears overhead and drops a ladder (looking a lot like a deus ex machina, in my opinion), and the man now standing on the tippy top of the rock with water lapping at his heels refuses to climb in.

Eventually, obviously, he drowns.

And for some reason ends up in heaven. And the first thing he asks God is: why didn’t you save me? And God says, dude. I sent you a rowboat. I sent you a motorboat. I sent you a helicopter. What in the hell did you think I was doing?

The moral of that parable is that the man on the rock thought he knew what divine intervention looked like. He was waiting for the clouds to open and some Santa Claus god to reach down his hand and pull him to safety. Obviously it was the people who could have saved him.

A few weeks ago an AI design tool launched. LinkedIn filled with people cheerfully and excitedly proclaiming how everything had changed. Woo hoo. Here’s what I made. Here’s the future. It was so frenetic. And I don’t know if it was competency signaling or just basically everybody frantically convincing themselves that AI wasn’t going to steal their creativity and take their jobs. I don’t know what it was. But it gave me hives. And even I kind of did it, because I posted an article over on my other work-related Substack about how I used AI to do something.

I work in this field. I am building evaluation frameworks for voice AI systems. I run testing on agents that are taking real human CSR jobs and handling calls from consumers. I know what these tools do and I know what they don’t do.

And now I’m going to veer into another thought area. Heraclitus was a philosopher way before Socrates, and he gave us a word called enantiodromia. This word is one of my favorites because it means running to the opposite. This is when Oedipus, instead of taking the path at the crossroads that would have saved his eyes, runs straight into the arms of his mother. The enantiodromia is the principle that everything at its extreme turns into its opposite.

A large language model doesn’t reason. It picks up a thread and follows it wherever it goes. It runs itself to a bitter end.

Everyone who is looking for the god coming down from the crane is betting on a rational machine. The helicopter overhead that drops a ladder. And AI is not that.

In March of 2008 I nearly drowned in Siletz Bay. I was drunk. I woke up the next morning on my living room floor covered in sand. I don’t know what got me out of the water. I have vague memories but there is no real account of how I got home. Maybe God came in the machine and pulled me out of that water and carried me to my living room. And maybe I just got up in a drunk ass blackout and stumbled through the sand and lost my pants and found my way home.

Artemis did not descend to save Hippolytus. She descended to tell him the truth while he lay dying on the sand. And then she announced that someone was going to die for this. Somebody who hadn’t done anything yet. A mortal who Aphrodite loves, somewhere in the future, who has no idea that the machine is coming for them. Because that’s how the gods do.

Our overlords are telling us that AI is going to save us. It’s going to take the jobs that are crushing people. It’s going to find cancer earlier. It’s going to write the code faster. It’s going to schedule the appointments and handle the calls and free up the human to do some higher order work. And opponents of AI are telling us it’s going to destroy us.

Whatever is happening, people are caught up in the machine.

And only people are going to save people.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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May 15th, is also Nakba Day. Commemorating the expulsion of Palestinians their destroyed homeland.

There is a sign taking up most of the sidewalk where I am keeping my eyes ten feet ahead of my 15 year old Lucas. His tail is up exposing the pink stained chew marks all around his hind end. He is following his nose at a pretty good pace - I keep glancing at him though lest he stop and I trip over him. The prospect of a fall is terrifying. I have to step off the curb into the street to get around it. “Plant Sale” it says. A block down the road I see the tents taking up parking spaces. There are tables and plants under. I catch a glimpse of red geranium and pull Lucas in that direction. He digs in. This is not the route he wants to take. His front legs are stiffly braced in front of him. His eyes are defiant. I coax him with some dried chicken skin and we walk over to see what is for sale. It’s too early so I make the mental note to go back to purchase some small succulents for my mother’s Dia de los Muertos skeleton dog and cat planters I found at Trader Joe’s. The plants that were in them are long gone.

Back at my desk I am tapping my nails on the desk to keep from scratching the psoriasis patch on my left elbow. Meetings about “re-organizing” are never good. I have had the privilege of attending a number of those meetings over the years and this one is kind of dog shit - I mean as they go. Notably stupid. So I am thrilled to grab my Klax cart and wheel it down the street for some plants. I picked out a few for mom and bought some lemon mint for me. And then I turned to the bake sale table laden with wholesomely HOMEMADE flour and sugar and fat bombs. It is absolutely irresponsible for me to walking over to the table where 3 cookies are 3 dollars and a dozen are 7. How on earth could I pass up that deal? And for charity.

The sorority sisters selling them told me to get on Nextdoor and find their group to learn more about their good deeds and where this 7 dollars would be going.

One snickerdoodle, one lemon crinkle, and one peanutbutter in and I’m grinding the other nine down the kitchen sink disposal I just replaced. Jesus would be sad about the waste. Filled with remorse, I downloaded the Nextdoor app as penance for my sins. I sat down and scrolled.

RECOVERY group. I clicked in. Nobody has posted in there for 3 years. 2 minutes later I had an invite to a meeting. IRL. With people.

I’ve not had a drink of alcohol in over 18 years. My last meeting about that was when I picked up the 15 year coin in a rough meeting downtown and had to leave the pack with my work laptop in it on my back when I went to the podium to give my testimony.

Thirty minutes later I am sitting in a folding chair drinking coffee with some powdered white stuff in it holding a raffle ticket with a number. There are more than 20 humans in this room and some guy is pulling numbers out of his baseball cap so people can pick a popsicle stick with a word on it to speak on for no more than 4 minutes or you get the “wrap up” sign. GRATITUDE. HUMILITY. FORGIVENESS. RESENTMENT. I get VULNERABILITY and feel my face turn pink. I choke a little. I confess that I have not been to one of these for a very long time. When I am done someone yells “glad you’re here”. I am an alien. Literally I have forgotten how to talk to people who are not on the other side of a screen.

Later at the Chinese place over Buddha’s delight I tell the person who is exactly the same age my son would be if he were still on this earth about the cookies - you know, “for charity”. We laugh in that painful way you do and make plans to meet on Sunday

The year before I started in his class, in October 1973, Seagram’s took out a full-page ad. The House of Seagram, 375 Park Avenue, New York. The page is a piece of evidence Mr Ginsberg used to teach us about corporate ad campaigns, public safety, and liability. At the top, a sentence in clean cursive. I can drive when I drink. Below it: 2 drinks later. The same sentence, slightly looser. After 4 drinks. The letters are getting wide. After 5 drinks. The cursive is starting to slur on the page. 7 drinks in all. The handwriting is no longer handwriting. It’s a wave that runs off the right edge of the paper and does not come back.

The typed copy at the bottom: The more you drink, the more coordination you lose. That’s a fact, plain and simple. When you drink too much you can’t handle a car. You can’t even handle a pen.

The alcohol company, telling you what the alcohol does. Not asking the government to ban anything. Not addressing your children. Addressing you, the adult, on the assumption that you can read evidence.

On March 25, 2026, a jury in Los Angeles County Superior Court returned a verdict in K.G.M. v. Meta et al. The plaintiff is a 20-year-old woman, identified by the initials of her name, who started using YouTube at six and Instagram at nine and was eventually on Instagram up to sixteen hours a day. The diagnoses entered into evidence: anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, suicidal ideation. The verdict form asked the jury whether Meta was negligent in the design or operation of Instagram. The jury answered yes. The verdict form asked whether Meta knew or should have known that the design was dangerous when used by a minor in a reasonably foreseeable manner. The jury answered yes. The compensatory damages were three million dollars. The punitive damages were three million dollars. Meta was assigned seventy percent of the liability. Google, which owns YouTube, was assigned thirty.

The legal theory is design as defect. The platform itself, not the content posted on it, is the harm. The architecture is the thing that must answer to the law. This is the move that begins to shake Section 230 loose, because Section 230 protects platforms from liability for what users post. It does not protect platforms from liability for what the platform is built to do to the user. The tobacco comparison was made in court. It was not subtle.

AMC has a new show out called The Audacity. I watched the first two episodes and am still deciding if I should hate-watch the rest. There is a scene at a party where two teenage girls are arguing. One is eating snacks at the table. The other asks her if her mom is still tracking her BMI daily, because fat kids are less likely to get into Stanford. The girl with the snacks pulls out her phone. The other girl says something to the effect of, your parents let you have a phone, everyone knows those are more addictive than crack. The show satirizes a thing the journalism has been reporting for at least a decade. The people who build the platforms restrict their own children from using them. Steve Jobs would not let his kids use the iPad. Bill Gates held off on smartphones until his were 14. There are Silicon Valley parents who send their children to schools where screens are forbidden. The show puts this on television because it is now a fact widely enough known that it can be the joke between teenagers.

Every year, people die at the Grand Canyon. The ones who die from falls are usually the ones who walked past the fence. The fence is there. The signs are there. The rangers are there. The visitor reaches over the rail for the photo because the canyon does not feel like geology. It feels like an attraction. The parking lot, the visitor center, the gift shop, the bus, the trail name on the brochure, all of it has been engineered to make the canyon feel managed. The canyon is not managed. The canyon is gravity and rock. The fence is the disclosure. The fence is not the protection.

What disclosure can do has limits. What design liability can do has limits. What an educated mind can do has limits. The 1973 Seagram ad assumes the adult reader will draw the conclusion. Some did. Some didn’t. The Ginsberg classroom assumes the educated child will, later, choose well. Some did. Some didn’t. The K.G.M. verdict assumes that holding the designer liable will make the design safer for the next nine-year-old. Maybe. The verdict cannot make the nine-year-old’s mother put down her own phone. The verdict cannot teach the nine-year-old’s father what his daughter’s face looks like when she has been on the app for four hours. The verdict cannot do what one human being standing next to another human being can do.

I started drinking when I was 14. I was told alcoholism ran in the family. I drank for 30 years anyway.

When Mr. Ginsberg showed us the Seagram ad on the overhead projector, I already knew what it meant. He was pointing out that the alcohol company was the one doing it, and he wanted us to think about why. The information was complete. The information was not the protection.

What was the protection, eventually, was a room. I had to go looking for it. I had to walk in, reluctantly, and sit down. The fellowship I am not going to name. The thing that does not legislate the substance out of the world and does not pretend the substance was the whole problem.

The K.G.M. verdict is a correct verdict. The platforms have been talking to children for 20 years and the design was negligent and the company knew. The verdict is overdue and it will be the basis for ten thousand more cases and it will change how the next platform gets built.

What I am wondering about is what happens next. The verdict may reduce the harm. The verdict will not close the gap between knowing and doing. Mr. Ginsberg knew that. The Seagram copywriter knew that, sort of. The executives in the Audacity satire know that. They send their own children to the screen-free school for the same reason the recovering person drives a new route home to avoid the liquor store.

Since 2016, prominent technologists have been traveling to a church in Rome called Santa Maria sopra Minerva to talk with Catholic clergy about artificial intelligence. The gathering is called the Minerva Dialogues. The meetings are closed. There is no website. Participants operate under Chatham House rules. When Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, first attended, he was struck by the portraits lining the walls depicting Catholic inquisitors. It felt a little weird, he said, to be walking in voluntarily past these.

The same building is where the Inquisition tried Galileo in 1633 for claiming the earth moves around the sun. The Church made him kneel and read a recantation. Whether he muttered under his breath as he rose, and still it moves, is probably apocryphal. What is not apocryphal is that the portraits are still on the wall. And that Reid Hoffman noticed them.

———

Pope Leo XIV chose his name deliberately. He said so on his second full day as Pope. He was honoring Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 to 1903 and who, in 1891, wrote an encyclical called Rerum Novarum, Of New Things, addressed to the condition of workers in the industrial revolution. The factory owners of that era had an argument: the machine’s output belonged to them because the machinery belonged to them. The workers were interchangeable parts. The encyclical said otherwise. It said human dignity does not transfer to the owner of the tool. The economy must serve the human person. Not the other way around.

Leo XIV is widely reported to be preparing an encyclical on artificial intelligence. The working title, Magnifica Humanitas, Magnificent Humanity, has circulated in Italian Catholic press. The argument, based on everything he has said since his election, will be a familiar one. Technology is a tool. The dignity belongs to the person who wields it. What cannot be purchased, optimized, or automated away without consequence to someone is the intelligence and judgment of a human being.

———

In the spring of 1990 I was a second-year MFA candidate in lighting design at the University of Tennessee. I was lighting a production of Aunt Dan and Lemon, Wallace Shawn’s play about a young woman who arrives, through perfectly logical steps, at an admiration for the Nazis. The Carousel Theatre. April 19 through 28. Directed by Thomas P. Cooke.

I drafted the light plot in AutoCAD r12. No graphical interface. Command line only. I was sitting at a terminal, not standing on a box leaning over a four by eight drafting table, not pulling a lighting symbol template across vellum, not tracing a ground plan off a master. Everything I had done by hand had a command line equivalent I had to find. I had to tell the machine how to build each lighting symbol, then attach the circuit, color, and dimmer data that would generate the paperwork. I had to lay out the ground plan from raw measurements. The first time I sat down to produce a plot that would normally take me a day, it took ten.

Nobody asked me to do this. I did it because I was lazy. The backbreaking hours hunched over a drafting table into the wee hours of the morning could be better spent at the queer bar. Once I had a symbol library, a house plot, a template I could resurrect for every future production, I would never stand at that drafting table tracing over an old plot again. That had never been design anyway. That had been tedium.

I took the plot to the SETC design competition that year. I placed third. The chair of the jury told me the plot was obviously drafted in CAD. They had knocked me down for having the computer help me with the design.

I told him the light plot is a map for the electricians. It is not the design. I made the design.

Then I said: we program a light board to remember and execute cues. The board automates memory and execution so the designer can think about something else. How is this different.

He didn’t have an answer. I was 26 years old and I was mad as hell at how stupid they were being.

———

Wallace Shawn is a socialist. He is also, apparently, a prophet. In a prefatory note to Aunt Dan and Lemon, dated April 1986, he wrote that a play gives an audience the chance to look at a group of people and ask, “Am I like that?” He said that to provide a rebuttal to Lemon’s conclusions inside the play would have been, for him, a form of lying to the audience. He believed every person in that theatre had to go home and do that work themselves.

At the end of the play, Lemon finishes her defense of the Nazis. The audience applauds the curtain call because that is what you do. Then the houselights come up. Then they are left with themselves.

———

A few weeks ago I was in a meeting where the complaint was about people not using AI tools as part of their process. I said the thing you say in those rooms. The people who don’t get on board aren’t going to make it.

I have been building voice agents that will answer phones for home service companies. I am good at it. The puzzle of making a non-deterministic system behave is real intellectual work. I think about it the way I thought about that command line in 1990, the same deconstruction, the same slow rebuild, the same sense of what is waiting on the other side.

I also think about the people who make their living answering those phones.

Last week I took my 84-year-old mother to the Grocery Outlet. I go there because I want to. Grocery Outlet stores are independently operated, owned by families, spouses, siblings, people raising their kids and running their business in the same building. The franchise owner had moved all the aisles around. Their kid, seven, maybe eight, was helping, carrying things from one shelf to another with great seriousness. I stopped to talk. I always stop to talk there.

———

In 1891, Leo XIII told the factory owners of Europe that the dignity of the worker does not transfer to the owner of the machine.

In 1990, I told a jury that the map is not the design.

In 2016, Reid Hoffman walked voluntarily into the building where the Church once forced a scientist to his knees, past the portraits of the men who required the recantation, and found it a little weird to be there.

A few weeks ago I told a room full of people that anyone who doesn’t get on board with AI isn’t going to make it.

I meant it at the time.

It was standing room only. Ming Cho Lee was up on a makeshift stage at the front of a hotel conference room, carousel projector clicking through slides. Every designer in that building wanted to be there. I was a graduate student, the only woman in my program, and I had read about him the way you read about someone who changed the rules of the game you are trying to learn.

The sketch came up. Then the production photo. A 55-foot wall of simulated ice ascending from beneath the stage clear up into the fly space of the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. The New York Times critic had written that when the curtain rose the audience seemed to stop breathing.

I already knew both images. I had come for the part nobody published.

Afterward I pushed through the crowd and asked him how he got from the watercolor to the thing that had to support actors and not pull down the proscenium.

He said: oh, I have a team.

I thought: it must be nice. Maybe I can be that guy someday.

I was not that guy yet. What I was, was the team.

Graduate school in lighting design meant staying up all night at a drafting table. Standing. By hand. A designer would give me a sketch — sometimes just a conversation, a feeling, a direction — and my job was to figure out what lived underneath it. Lighting instruments on 18-inch centers. How to patch and cable them into the control system. Which channels would carry the color washes, which would carry the specials, how to build a system that could do everything the designer’s vision required without anyone in the audience knowing a system existed at all.

I was living in the gap Ming Cho Lee hadn’t shown us.

My first real lighting design was a student production of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. A black box studio. No scenery to speak of — a kitchen counter, a bed. Two people over the course of a night moving toward morning.

I had a concept. The window. Moonlight shifting to sunrise over the arc of the play. I put all of my thinking into that — the gobos, the color, the angle changing slowly as the night turned. I was designing the vibe. I was so focused on the window that I forgot the room.

In technical rehearsal I saw what I had built. Black holes where the actors were. The concept was right. The system wasn’t there. I had specials on the bed, a special on the kitchen island, and nothing in between. The actors moved through dead space. The environment didn’t hold.

The chair of the department directed that production. Three years later, sitting across from me in a final meeting before I completed my MFA, he said: you’ve done some really wonderful stuff and you’ve done some really terrible stuff.

I knew exactly what the terrible stuff was.

I didn’t make that mistake again because I understood what I had done wrong. I had designed the end of the process and skipped the beginning. I had the vibe. I didn’t have the system underneath it.

Two years later I was designing my thesis production on the Clarence Brown Theatre mainstage. To Kill a Mockingbird, directed by Albert Harris. A professional production. Real stakes.

I went to meet Harris to talk about the play. He put his hands in front of his face. Then he opened them slowly, revealing his face, and said one word.

Sheers.

He told me about growing up in the South. His grandmother’s windows. The sheer curtains that hung in front of them and caught the light and moved in the breeze. That was what he wanted. That feeling. That quality of light filtered through memory.

I didn’t panic. I felt something. I could see exactly what he was talking about and I understood what he wanted to convey. The excitement wasn’t naive. It was the excitement of someone who knew they had the tools to translate it.

The scenic designer and I went down to the lighting lab and spent hours experimenting. Different fabrics. Different dye treatments. Different lighting angles and color temperatures. We were doing the work that lives in the gap between the concept and the thing that has to exist in a theater eight times a week. By the time we finished I had a system that could hold the concept up. I had the sheers and I had everything underneath the sheers.

That is requirements engineering. I just called it going to the lab.

In the summer of 2025 a word entered the vocabulary of software development: vibecoding. The practice of describing what you want to an AI in plain language and letting it generate the code. The concept. The vibe. The sketch.

The AI is the team now.

This is not a new promise. In 1959 Grace Hopper helped develop COBOL specifically so that business people — not programmers — could write their own software in something close to plain English. The technical knowledge, the argument went, was no longer required. Forty years later no-code platforms made the same promise. Rapid application development. Anyone can build.

Every generation of abstraction has produced the same result. The failures are always requirements failures. People built the wrong thing very efficiently. They had the sketch. They didn’t have the system.

Last year I rewrote a prompt for a virtual agent. I was moving fast. I lifted the existing prompt, made improvements, optimized for the scenarios I knew best. The happy path worked beautifully.

When we got it into production the edge cases arrived. Situations I hadn’t designed for. Scenarios I hadn’t thought about. The system didn’t hold.

We rolled it back.

Black holes where the edge cases were.

Ming Cho Lee spent twenty years learning what his team needed to know before he handed them a sketch. The sketch was precise in ways that didn’t show on the paper. When he said I have a team he wasn’t describing a shortcut. He was describing the endpoint of a process that required decades of technical understanding to make possible.

The person who vibecodes is giving the prompt to the AI the way Ming gave the sketch to the team. What they might not have is twenty years of knowing what lives underneath the sketch.

The carousel projector clicked forward. Sketch. Production photo. Nothing in between.

What happened in the middle isn’t the fun part of the talk.

Nine years earlier, a lighting designer named Tharon Musser had walked into the Shubert Theatre on Broadway with a piece of equipment nobody had ever seen on a professional stage. It was called the LS8. A computerized memory lighting board. Every Broadway show before that night had been run on piano boards — banks of resistance dimmers operated by hand, by teams of electricians who felt the cues in their bodies and moved in time with the music like musicians in an orchestra pit.

Musser had a problem. She said it plainly: “We had a preset board at the Public, and I knew that there was no way that their assistants could run this show the way we did it down there. I just knew that a resistance board wouldn’t work.”

So she brought in the machine.

The IATSE electricians were not happy about it. They were justifiably worried about their jobs. She convinced them the same way any good designer convinces a skeptic. She ran a demonstration. She showed them what the show required and what their hands could not do. The argument wasn’t about technology. It was about the work.

Within a year every new show on Broadway was on a computerized board. The LS8 stayed in use for the entire run of A Chorus Line — fifteen years. Near the end, Musser joked that the board, which the crew had nicknamed Sam, had gotten so temperamental that “if you sneezed it went out to lunch.”

She never fully trusted it. She trusted it exactly as much as it had earned.

I knew about Musser because my professor made sure I did. I was the only woman in the program and he kept pointing me toward the women who were making history on Broadway. I read about her in American Theatre journal. She was one of my heroes — not because she embraced new technology but because she had convinced a room full of union men that the machine was necessary. That took something more than enthusiasm for the new. It took understanding. It took knowing exactly what the technology could do and what it couldn’t and being able to prove it.

My professor made me read Adolphe Appia before he let me near that board. Appia wrote in 1899 that light must become active — that it must be placed in the service of the actor, not the other way around. The technology exists to serve the art. The art does not exist to justify the technology.

I had spent summers at the Brevard Music Center running an auto transformer dimmer board for the opera program. Kinetic work. My hands and feet on the big dimmer handles, moving them in time with the music, feeling the cue the way a performer feels a beat. I was the control.

With the new computerized board at Carol Belk I was giving it away.

But I didn’t stay afraid of it. Over time I learned to think like the machine. Lead lag timings. Backup channels I could grab fast if something went wrong. I built in my own safety nets so I knew exactly what I was handing over and what I was keeping. I didn’t trust the board because I used it more. I trusted it because I understood it more deeply. I earned the right to push GO.

In 2004, two researchers named John Lee and Katrina See published a paper in the journal Human Factors. They had been studying operators working alongside automated systems — in cockpits, industrial plants, control rooms. What they found was this. Automation is not a trust problem. It is a calibration problem. The goal is not high trust or low trust. It is appropriate reliance. Knowing exactly how much to trust the system and under what conditions.

They called the two failure modes overtrust and undertrust. Overtrust is when you walk away from the board. Undertrust is when you refuse to program the cues at all. Neither one serves the show.

That paper has been cited more than four thousand times.

Ninety-three percent of IT leaders are at the board. They feel what Musser’s skeptics felt when they first saw the LS8 — except in reverse. They’re not resistant. They’re thrilled. The technology is fast and capable and it makes the old way look slow and small.

But Musser didn’t adopt the technology because it was cool. She adopted it because she understood exactly what it could do and what it couldn’t. Because the art came first. And she never stopped hovering near the override.

The consumers have the sweaty hands now. They didn’t seek this out. They didn’t transfer colleges for it. A new Quinnipiac poll found that 76% of Americans trust AI-generated information only rarely or sometimes. More striking: 55% say AI will do more harm than good in their daily lives — up eleven points since last year. The industry calls this a communications problem. It is not. The same poll found that 51% of Americans now use AI regularly. Usage went up. Trust did not. That is not ignorance. That is experience.

Appia said light must be placed in service to the actor - that’s why we always had a way to interrupt and take control.