The climax of Nathan Englander‘s very funny play What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank sees the four main characters play a game – the “Anne Frank game” – that two of them invented as children. The play is on at the Marylebone Theatre until February 15.
The plot: two estranged former best friends in a New York yeshiva have arranged a reunion for themselves and their husbands. Debbie (Caroline Catz), has let her religious attachment lapse in the secular environs of Miami, Florida, where her husband, Phil (Joshua Malina), is an attorney. Their college-age son, Trevor (Gabriel Howell), calls the action.
They host Hasidic Shosh (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) and Yuri (Simon Yadoo), formerly Lauren and Mark, whose lives in Israel and traditional black dress and, in Shosh’s case, hair-covering wig, have left them unprepared for the bare arms and legs of Floridians. Having spent her adult life in a cramped apartment with Yuri and their eight daughters, Shosh is astonished at the size of Debbie’s house.
They talk. They share life stories. They eat. And they fight: what is the right way to be Jewish? Trevor asks: given climate change, does it matter?
So, the Anne Frank game: who among your friends would hide you when the Nazis are coming? The rule that you must tell the truth reveals the characters’ moral and emotional cores.
I couldn’t avoid up-ending this question. There are people I trust and who I *think* would hide me, but it would often be better not to ask them. Some have exceptionally vulnerable families who can’t afford additional risk. Some I’m not sure could stand up to intensive questioning. Most have no functional hiding place. My own home offers nowhere that a searcher for stray humans wouldn’t think to look, and no opportunities to create one. With the best will in the world, I couldn’t make anyone safe, though possibly I could make them temporarily safer.
But practical considerations are not the game. The game is to think about whether you would risk your life for someone else, and why or why not. It’s a thought experiment. Debbie calls it “a game of ultimate truth”.
However, the game is also a cheat, in that the characters have full information about all parts of the story. We know the Nazis coming for the Frank family are unquestionably bent on evil, because we know the Franks’ fates when they were eventually found. It may be hard to tell the truth to your fellow players, but the game is easy to think about because it’s replete with moral clarity.
Things are fuzzier in real life, even for comparatively tiny decisions. In 2012, the late film critic Roger Ebert mulled what he would do if he were a Transport Security Administration agent suddenly required to give intimate patdowns to airline passengers unwilling to go through the scanner. Ebert considered the conflict between moral and personal distaste and TSA officers’ need to keep their reasonably well-paid jobs with health insurance benefits. He concluded that he hoped he’d quit rather than do the patdowns. Today, such qualms are ancient history; both scanners and patdowns have become normalized.
Moral and practical clarity is exactly what’s missing as the Department of Government Efficiency arrives in US government departments and agencies to demand access to their computer systems. Their motives and plans are unclear, as is their authority for the access they’re demanding. The outcome is unknown.
So, instead of a vulnerable 13-year-old girl and her family, what if the thing under threat is a computer? Not the sentient emotional robot/AI of techie fantasy but an ordinary computer system holding boring old databases. Or putting through boring old payments. Or underpinning the boring old air traffic control system. Do you see a computer or the millions of people whose lives depend on it? How much will you risk to protect it? What are you protecting it from? Hinder, help, quit?
Meanwhile, DOGE is demanding that staff allow its young coders to attach unauthorized servers, take control of websites. In addition: mass firings, and a plan to do some sort of inside-government AI startup.
DOGE itself appears to be thinking ahead; it’s told staff to avoid Slack while awaiting a technology that won’t be subject to FOIA requests.
The more you know about computers the scarier this all is. Computer systems of the complexity and accuracy of those the US government has built over decades are not easily understood by incoming non-experts who have apparently been visited by the Knowledge Fairy. After so much time and effort on security and protecting against shadowy hackers, the biggest attack – as Mike Masnick calls it – on government systems is coming from inside the house in full view.
Even if “all” DOGE has is read-only access as Treasury claims – though Wired and Talking Points Memo have evidence otherwise – those systems hold comprehensive sensitive information on most of the US population. Being able to read – and copy? – is plenty bad enough. In both fiction (Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) and fact (IBM), computers have been used to select populations to victimize. Americans are about to find out they trusted their government more than they thought.
Illustration: Changing a tube in the early computer ENIAC (via Wikimedia).
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard – or follow on Twitter.
