The Amazing Digital Circus is deeper than I thought
About a year ago, my tween kid started talking obsessively about The Amazing Digital Circus. Like many of my tween’s obsessions, I got to listen patiently as she described the plot, the characters, the episodes…my initial reaction was “this sounds pretty freaking out there.”
But I watched an episode with her (mostly to make sure this was appropriate viewing material for her age) and was kind of intrigued once I understood what was going on. She explained that the show was loosely based on “a book or something written in the 1900s.” 🙄
The Inspiration
TADC was inspired by an essay titled “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” published by Harlan Ellison in 1967. In the essay, five people get trapped in a digital world (or inside a computer?) and can never leave. There, they are continuously tortured via adventures generated by AM, who is essentially their digital master. They can never die, they feel pain but cannot escape. It is dystopian but weirdly prescient, given what our society is now contemplating with regard to Ai, whether Ai could take over, destroy everything, and become self aware(ish).
(The essay also made me think of the recently published “Ai 2027” which is a mind-bending choose-your-own-adventure kind of publication that walks the user through the possible outcomes of Ai. It is long but a very worthwhile read.)
The Show
In the show, a cast of characters are stuck in a virtual world. They get sent on “adventures” by Cain, an unnerving looking creature whose head is just a set of teeth with eyeballs inside of it. Cain creates “adventures” for the poor souls stuck in this world in which they can’t die or escape. But they can abstract and glitch. As the show progresses more about each character’s back story comes out, details about who each character was before they were turned into trapped digital avatars. It gets kind of dark and sad at times.
Oddly, this show reminds me a bit of Pluribus, another great show (if you liked Breaking Bad and/or Better Call Saul, you will probably LOVE Pluribus…and Rhea Seehorn is just phenomenal). Both shows are about the world rapidly changing, and each show contrasts how different personalities work together and adapt, fight back, or accept their new existence.
Once I read the original essay on which the show was based, TADC started to feel less like an acid trip and more like a metaphor for society in general and where we are with Ai. That someone predicted this potential path in the 60s seems surreal. While the short story written 50+ years ago probably sounded very improbable at the time, we are now living in an era when it sounds a bit more like reality than science fiction. It is hard to watch the show and not wonder about whether Ai has the potential to alter human existence and consciousness to such an extreme.
