Why This Matters

We asked each of our creative team members to write a short essay on why this project matters to them. Here's the first of five. -Ed.

We are plunging headlong into a great epistemological frontier. For generations, Westerners have turned to journalistic news sources to learn what happens and why. Now that these institutions are disintegrating, it isn't clear where objective information is supposed to come from. It's not even clear what the word “objective” even means any more.

Every person with an internet connection can gather information, on events both current and historical, through an established ideological filter. This filter can be set up deliberately or it can arise organically through social networks, email, and repeat patronage of selected news sources. We can customize, personalize and pre-editorialize not just our opinions, but our facts, too. Inconvenient facts therefore need not exist. This can all be accomplished without reducing the quantity of knowledge whatsoever, creating an alternate but seemingly complete reality, unique to each person.

The gates to understanding are falling away. We are left without a general consensus on what happens—yet alone a consensus on why.

What is the human cost?

This project matters to me because theatre is uniquely equipped to examine this epistemological frontier from a humanist perspective. Or, to be less college-boy about it, what happens when we don't know what we do and don't know? How would a group of people react to the very idea of knowledge changing?

I realize that to an extent this is a resurrection of ancient debates. But it still matters. Our society has a lot of decisions to make and we can't even agree on the facts that we're basing these decisions on. And if we fail to make these decisions wisely, it won't be because of this or that politician, or some particular special interest group, or any given faction of people. The failure will be within our own minds, because before power comes from guns or from money, it comes from ideas.