Or: How I became the focus of a mass ritual against generative AI, and what I did about it.

I have resigned from Google. I plan to return to the world of open-source projects, for now. After three years of grinding away at the cutting edge of cloud services documentation, I feel the call to help tend to the world’s slow, stable technologies instead.

My time at Google, in retrospect, was like a full graduate-degree course in technical writing and teamwork. I will treasure the skills and the professional relationships I developed there for the rest of my life. Part of me wishes I could have stayed longer, but I know that moving on is my best path today.

Every major transition like this involves both external incentives that pull you to a new place, and internal factors encouraging an exit from your current location. As for my reasons in the latter category, I only gesture to how Google itself has adjusted its goals and attitudes quite publicly in the three years since I joined, making it feel like a different employer than the one I interviewed at. I don’t fault Google for trimming its sails—life is change, for both individuals and organizations. Inevitably, the growing tensions between my values and the company’s became large enough to make my third anniversary seem like a natural Graduation Day, and so that’s how I met it.

Embarking upon these transitions often requires a shift in perspective, as well. Sometimes these come about through a trigger, such as a surprise encounter that shocks you into a new realization. This happened to me, at the end of May, and I can tell you that story.

A theatre-loving friend insisted that I see the show Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, a one-woman performance by the self-described clown Julia Masli. My friend instructed me to avoid reading about the show before attending it, and so that is what I did.

As I chose my seats while buying tickets, I noted with curiosity how most people chose seats as far back in the theater as possible, except for a smaller crowd who purchased seats right up against the stage. The middle rows were oddly empty, especially along the center aisle. I shrugged and chose a center seat in the fourth row. This was because I didn’t know what would happen if I did.

The gist of the show is that, after a tone-setting introduction that mixes meditative chanting with sudden furniture-wrecking violence, Masli asks audience members to name their problems, so that she can improvise solutions for them. Problems on the night I attended included worry over homelessness in Los Angeles, grief over a lost friend, anger about the conflict in Gaza, weariness from raising three children, and a tummy ache.

Masli responded creatively in every case, sometimes with small gestures. She instructed the tummy-ache person’s friend to put her hand on his tummy, because caring touch can feel good. Does he feel better now? Yes? Problem solved.

After the grieving person said that her fondest memory of her friend was smoking together behind their high school, Masli paired her up with another audience member who had cigarettes and directed them to share a smoke outside the theater, remembering the lost friend. Masli followed them out with her wireless mic, and we listened through the theater’s speakers as the woman, out on the sidewalk, laughed how she hadn’t smoked since high school.

A few solutions later, inevitably, Masli approached me as I sat squarely in the target area. “Problem?” she asked in a smiling sing-song: Prob-leeeeem?

I smiled. “Can’t complain.”

“Oh… yes you can. Here, tonight.” Masli is Estonian with what I would call a Russian-accented voice, and her clown persona spoke in a slow, deliberate cadence on top of that.

Amy, who had read up on the show and therefore knew precisely what we were in for, sat beside me. I turned to her. “What’s my complaint?”

Amy and I are married to each other so a lot of our complaints are about our jobs. So this is how she answered, as succinctly as possible: “AI?”

Masli immediately drew back, looking horrified.

“Sure, we can start there,” I said.

“Oh, AI. That’s very scary,” Masli said. “Very frightening. I am worried I may lose my job to it. Are you worried you may lose your job to AI?”

“No, I am worried it might make my job much worse.”

“Oh. What is your job?”

And there was only one possible answer to this, right? It came to mind immediately, but I waited a beat before saying it:

“AI.”

I gazed at the performer placidly while we both paused to let the whole theater respond to this. It was a beautiful moment.

Eventually: “And you have moral difficulties with this, yes?”

I looked pained. I worked my jaw. I started to say “We can start there” as a weak callback joke, but Masli, the actual artist here, had already taken control back: “All right. Tonight, you shall be… the symbol of evil. We are all capable of evil! But you will symbolize it now tonight. OK.” And she carried on to the next problem-haver.

Some problems Masli solved by producing props from the wings, sometimes surprisingly large ones. The tired mother got a full-sized lounge chair, a sleeping mask, and noise-canceling earphones. The Gaza conversation resulted in the name of a Gaza children’s charity written on a back wall in fluorescent marker while another audience member symbolically repaired the chair that Masli had destroyed in a screaming fit at the start of the show.

And then Masli found an opportunity to speak about the importance of washing away our collective evils together, as she walked back towards my seat and held out her hand, beckoning me to join her on the stage. I watched along with the seated audience as she pulled a curtain aside to reveal a full-sized shower stall. I did my best to respond with a silent pose of grim acceptance. She then directed me to prepare myself, backstage.

Masli’s assistant greeted me as I entered a backstage wing, led me up some stairs, and assigned me costuming and blocking instructions for the rest of the show. Shorts approximately matching my skin tone had already been laid out. I was to change into them, then wrap myself in a white towel and a robe, both of which I’d flip up onto the frosted stall door after entering. “That way it’ll look like you’re naked. It’s a gag.”

I changed, descended the stairs, and re-entered the stage barefoot and dressed for the bath while Masli worked through another chaotic solution. The audience vocally expressed its surprise and delight. I took a seat on an upstage chair to watch the performer complete her work, even though I couldn’t see very well because I had left my glasses upstairs. She was collecting socks from the audience, to burn them in a bucket; I admit that I never learned what the problem was, here. With all that completed, Masli directed me through gesture and spotlight to enter the stall. Dance music commenced as soon as I turned the water on, and I threw my hands up and bopped like I was on a crowded club floor. So did everyone else that I could see.

And the guy finished his chair, and everyone had a good time. Amy took the photograph accompanying this article, capturing the moment. You can just make out my hands reaching over the shower stall as I hyped up the chair guy. The seated woman in the photo was using the computer to order some plane tickets for Berlin on Masli’s instructions, if I recall correctly.

And the next day, a Friday, I showed up to work as usual. By lunchtime I felt strangely sick. By the end of the day, I had an inkling as to why. I wrote up a summary of the evening’s events and shared it with several friends. One who knows a thing or two about modern-day magick said: “Okay, actually, yes, that is absolutely a ritual.” I had stripped (pretend) naked before an audience of hundreds, and had all their attention on me as I engaged in act of overtly symbolic ablution of a named “evil”, because outside of the bounds of the ritual space I was an active and direct participant in the thing that was named.

And what could I do then? One of two things, really. I could reject the experience, swallow the tension that the event had put in my heart, let all of that energy dissipate and go to ground. It would take a while and I’d feel soul-sick the whole time, but I could do it. Perhaps I’d emerge with a fiery and renewed will to succeed at my work for my employer.

Or, I could accept the absurd and oblique energy of that evening as a gift, something truly unexpected that happens maybe once in a lifetime if you’re lucky, and let it transform me. The acceptance would require reciprocation, an action that would complete the circuit and reify the focus. I would need to do something to shift myself from a passive receptacle of one audience’s one-time attention to an active and ongoing conduit, a person choosing to adjust their stance to make the world a little less bad.

And I chose what I chose, and I feel pretty good about it.