• Euphoria in Unhappiness:Technology and Revelation in Jennifer Haley's Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom and The Nether
• M. Scott Phillips (bio)

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (1954)

In recent years, a number of American playwrights have been in conversation with issues surrounding our increasingly dystopic cultural landscape. Lisa D'Amour's Detroit (2010) and Airline Highway (2015), Dominique Morisseau's Skeleton Crew (2016), and Lynn Nottage's Sweat (2015) explore the dismal conditions workers face in our neoliberal economy, while Will Arbery's Heroes of the Fourth Turning (2019) interrogates theocratic tendencies in a rising cultural right. Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview (2018) and Jeremy O. Harris's Slave Play (2019) brutally attack the comforting mythology of our putative "post-racial" turn, challenging audiences at a moment when white supremacism attempts to legitimize itself in mainstream political discourse. A sense of doom permeates The Humans (2015), Steven Karam's eerie and atmospheric exploration of American anxiety. While warm and compassionate in tone, Karam's play traces the slow percolation of characters who are, as Samuel G. Freedman writes, "teetering on the edge of an elevator shaft."¹ [End Page 205]

Also emergent in this troublesome milieu are concerns about technology, its disruptive power and disastrous potential. Ann Washburn's Mr. Burns (2012) and Brendan Pelsue's Wellesley Girl (2016) are post-apocalyptic; the former explores post-grid life after an accident at a nuclear power plant, and the latter, set centuries in the future after an ecological disaster (the result of toxic runoff from the production of robot AI), depicts a United States and a U.S. political structure that are confined to a small Massachusetts suburb surrounded by potentially hostile outsiders. In a sense, these tech-wary examples are merely newer iterations of where we have been many times before. The dystopic ramifications of hubristic technology are well-worn tropes of science fiction: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927), and the British television series Black Mirror (2011) have all reflected the collective angst concerning the unintended consequences of Promethean overreach. In this article I offer a reading of Jennifer Haley's The Nether (2013), an explosive and deeply disturbing play featuring characters who perform acts of virtual pedophilia on digital representations of children under a protective umbrella of anonymity provided by an advanced future version of the Internet.² I argue that the play captures the zeitgeist of our current technological moment, a moment in which the focus of our anxieties has begun to shift from the industrial technology of the twentieth century to the emergent digital, computational, and virtual technologies of the twenty-first. As part of this examination, I include discussion of Haley's earlier and, I admit, weaker play, Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom (2008) as important dramaturgical context.³ Neighborhood 3's treatment of digital culture differs somewhat in focus from that of The Nether, but both plays raise fundamental questions about digital life, about what philosopher Bernard Stiegler refers to as "the subject's transcendence and the subject's imagination of transcendence," within the virtual realm.⁴

Scholars such as David Berry, Scott Bukatman, and Stiegler have all expressed concern about the effects of the digital and the virtual on human perception and behavior, and I rely on them and other scholars, as well as journalistic sources, in documenting the phenomenological landscape from which Haley's work emerges. I also ground the work within the context of the critique of industrial technology and technological instrumentalism offered by the Frankfurt School's Max Horkheimer and [End Page 206] Theodor Adorno, as well as the work of Frankfurt associate, Herbert Marcuse.

The late Dragan Klaic observed that "ideas of the future in twentieth-century literature are expressed in more dystopian than utopian terms," but dystopian drama, even when set at some...

• 不幸中的欣快感：詹妮弗·哈利的邻居中的科技与启示3：末日与下界的征用
• M·斯科特·菲利普斯（简介）

无论我们热情地肯定还是否认技术，我们在任何地方都仍然不自由并受到技术的束缚。但当我们把它视为中立的东西时，我们就会以最糟糕的方式接受它。今天我们特别喜欢向这种概念致敬，因为它使我们对技术的本质完全视而不见。

马丁·海德格尔，《技术问题》 (1954)

近年来，一些美国剧作家一直在讨论围绕我们日益反乌托邦的文化景观的问题。丽莎·达莫的《底特律》（2010 年）和《航空高速公路》（2015 年）、多米尼克·莫里索的《骷髅船员》（2016 年）和林恩·诺塔奇的《汗水》（2015 年）探讨了工人在新自由主义经济中面临的悲惨状况，而威尔·阿伯里的《第四次转折的英雄》（ 2019）质疑新兴文化权利中的神权倾向。杰基·西布利斯·德鲁里的《费尔维尤》（2018）和杰里米·奥·哈里斯的《奴隶游戏》（2019）残酷地攻击了我们假定的“后种族”转向的令人安慰的神话，在白人至上主义试图在主流政治话语中使自己合法化的时刻向观众提出了挑战。史蒂文·卡拉姆 (Steven Karam) 对美国人的焦虑进行了怪异而大气的探索，《人类》 (2015)弥漫着一种厄运感。卡拉姆的戏剧虽然语气温暖而富有同情心，但正如塞缪尔·G·弗里德曼（Samuel G. Freedman）所写，“在电梯井的边缘摇摇欲坠”。¹ [第 205 页完]

在这个麻烦的环境中还出现了对技术、其破坏力和灾难性潜力的担忧。安·沃什伯恩 (Ann Washburn) 的《伯恩斯先生》(Mr. Burns) (2012) 和布伦丹·佩尔苏 (Brendan Pelsue) 的《韦尔斯利女孩》(Wellesley Girl ) (2016) 都是后世界末日题材；前者探索核电站事故后的后电网生活，后者以生态灾难（机器人人工智能生产有毒径流的结果）后的几个世纪为背景，描绘了美国和美国政治结构仅限于马萨诸塞州的一个小郊区，周围都是潜在的敌对外来者。从某种意义上说，这些对技术持谨慎态度的例子只是我们之前多次经历过的情况的更新迭代。傲慢技术的反乌托邦后果是科幻小说中常见的比喻：玛丽·沃斯通克拉夫特·雪莱的《弗兰肯斯坦》（1818年）、弗里茨·朗的电影《大都会》（1927年）和英国电视连续剧《黑镜》（2011年）都反映了对意外事件的集体焦虑。普罗米修斯过度扩张的后果。在这篇文章中，我将阅读詹妮弗·哈利 (Jennifer Haley) 的《下界》( The Nether，2013)，这是一部爆炸性且令人深感不安的戏剧，剧中的角色在先进的未来版本互联网提供的匿名保护伞下，对儿童的数字化表现进行虚拟恋童癖行为。 。²我认为这部剧抓住了我们当前技术时刻的时代精神，在这个时刻，我们焦虑的焦点已经开始从二十世纪的工业技术转移到二十世纪新兴的数字、计算和虚拟技术。第一的。作为本次审查的一部分，我将海莉早期的、我承认较弱的戏剧《邻里 3：末日征用》（Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom，2008）作为重要的戏剧背景进行讨论。《邻里3 ^》 对数字文化的处理重点与《下界》有所不同，但两部剧都提出了有关数字生活的基本问题，即哲学家伯纳德·斯蒂格勒所说的“主体的超越性和主体对超越性的想象”。虚拟领域。⁴

大卫·贝里（David Berry）、斯科特·布卡特曼（Scott Bukatman）和斯蒂格勒（Stiegler）等学者都表达了对数字和虚拟对人类感知和行为的影响的担忧，我依靠他们和其他学者以及新闻来源来记录现象学景观海莉的作品由此诞生。我还将法兰克福学派的马克斯·霍克海默和[完第 206 页]西奥多·阿多诺对工业技术和技术工具主义的批判以及法兰克福学派的同事赫伯特·马尔库塞的工作作为我的工作的背景。

已故的德拉甘·克莱克（Dragan Klaic）观察到，“二十世纪文学中对未来的想法更多的是用反乌托邦而不是乌托邦的术语来表达”，但反乌托邦戏剧，即使是在某些……