As we walk to a café in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District,
has just been extended for a second time, until Oct. 4. The news
confirms what I already suspected: Hoyle is the right man in the right
place at the right time. His hilarious, moving and inspirational
critique of our smartphone-centric lifestyle feeds a desperate hunger
for meaning acutely felt in the exact neighborhood we are strolling
through. We love our new technology in the Bay Area, but we’re also
getting more than a little alarmed by it. What exactly are we doing to
ourselves as we submerge ecstatically into the screen? Is this really
how we want to live?
Theater, where Hoyle has been performing in front of sold-out audiences
since June. Next to us, a couple of tech bros are talking about content
management systems. Beneath Hoyle’s chair, the word “gentrotech” is
stenciled on the sidewalk, embellished with an illustration of curved
devil’s horns. It’s not hard to guess that the street art is a product
of endangered indigenous inhabitants irate at how rapidly the Mission is
changing.
The political and economic transformations precipitated
by the latest wave of digital innovation provide the cultural backdrop
for “Each and Every Thing.” But the essence of Hoyle’s show is the
search for something more ineffable —
human connection,
the kind built from eye contact instead of Facebook likes — in a world
in which our behavior in public space is increasingly isolated and
isolating. We’ve all seen what Hoyle’s talking about: a couple out for a
date both staring down at their phones; pedestrians locked so deeply
into Facebook or Twitter that they barely avoid bumping into each other;
a subway car in which every single commuter is thumbing his or her way
through Instagram or Imgur or Candy Crush. Phone zombies, everywhere, a
plague of the digital undead that swept across the world before we fully
realized what was happening. (Because we were too busy playing with our
amazing smartphones!)
The
miracle of “Each and Every Thing” is that in just 75 minutes onstage,
inhabiting a dozen or so characters, from Aryan Brotherhood muscle heads
to Chicago drug dealers to Indians sharing coffee and conversation in
Calcutta, Dan Hoyle manages to create the very sense of human connection
that he yearns for — with his audience. He doesn’t hector, he doesn’t
lecture, and except for one very funny moment about two-thirds into the
show, he doesn’t get angry (aside from when he’s depicting the
aforementioned Aryan). He follows the cardinal rule of great narrative;
he shows, he doesn’t tell. And as he shares his own story, the life of a
performer whose highest artistic goal is to get to know people on a
deep level and share
their stories, he enacts his message.
“Each
and Every Thing” is a true story. The characters Hoyle inhabits are
real people that Hoyle has met– including his best friend, an
Indian-American software developer. Hoyle uses these characters to
illustrate his personal journey to understand himself as an artist,
sandwiched around the disruption caused by the smartphone, which
inhibits all of us from understanding ourselves and each other.While
turning a critical eye on contemporary digital mores, Hoyle makes it
clear that we need to find a new balance between our machines and the
people around us, and, in the process, he demonstrates just how to
adjust the scales. It’s a bravura performance, and so very, very
necessary.
* * *
It is an
inescapable irony of our contemporary existence that less than 24 hours
after I saw “Each and Every Thing” — a show in which Hoyle not only asks
everyone to turn off their phones, but tells us that he hopes we
keep
them turned off for an hour or two after the show — we’re connecting
directly, for the first time, via Facebook. But Hoyle is unbothered by
what could be deemed a trifle hypocritical. He loves technology as much
as the next 34-year-old raised in San Francisco (and currently living in
New York). He’s not opposed to social media, in principle. He owns a
smartphone.
But he’s convinced that the emergence of that
smartphone as our default interface with basically everything has
altered something significant about how we behave when in public.
“It’s
one thing when we’re all alone in our homes, connecting online,” says
Hoyle. “But when we’re out in public checking in on our phones, we are
creating new private spaces in the public arena.”
“Something has
changed. You have five minutes to kill, and instead of looking around,
maybe having some random conversation with a stranger, maybe just
sharing some glances … we’re looking at our phones. I think these new
technologies enable a level of self-isolation that’s greater than ever
before.”
It all makes sense, says Hoyle, quoting a line from his
show, because “reality is awkward … And life through a screen is less
awkward.”
Anyone with a bare minimum of self-awareness can
appreciate Hoyle’s critique. I tell him that ever since I’ve owned a
smartphone, I’ve stopped reading magazines off the rack at the local
grocery store, but I’ve also started feeling increasingly guilty about
that behavioral modification. Not just because the collective impact of
people like me on off-the-rack magazine sales has been devastating, but
because I wonder how alienating it must be for the cashier to see a long
line of people staring down at their phones, only raising their eyes
when it is time to pay. And yet, on those rare and horrible occasions
when I forget to bring my phone with me, I feel destitute, at the mercy
of an unforgiving universe.
My observation gives Hoyle a chance to
preach a little, to spread a gospel of connection that is quite
different from Mark Zuckerberg’s fantasy of a connected world.
“So
when I’m in a situation like that, waiting for someone, or waiting for a
train, I say to myself, hold on a second. I people watch. I look
around: Are there any new stores in this area? What’s changed? All of a
sudden, as opposed to it being dead time, I am practicing my
observational skills. We have all these tools to document our
experience, and yet so much of it is deployed to perform that experience
on social media. All the pictures we share on Instagram — instead of
being experiences that we process, and that go into our creative funnels
— they just become something that that we perform for other people
online.”
“And then we’re like, how many likes did we get?”
I
suggest to Hoyle that most people are not willing to go to the lengths
that he does to establish relationships with drug dealers and scary
Aryan dudes. Yeah, yeah, he acknowledges, and says again, “Reality is
awkward.” He also concedes that for people who are naturally shy, the
Internet has been “a revolution in the way that they can connect with
the world.”
“But I think the place where we need to be worried is
when we are never forced to challenge ourselves socially — or at least
forced to engage on some level with other people’s realities just a
little bit. There are all these studies that are coming out that suggest
that when we have these devices in front of us, we are less able to
listen to people, we are less able to be empathetic. And we’re not
allowing our brains the idle time that is the spark of creativity. I
think finding a better balance is something worth fighting for.”
Hoyle
says he thinks the popularity of his show is explained by the fact that
audiences are feeling the same “cognitive dissonance” that he is. “They
want to get that balance back. It’s not just that we are afraid of
losing ourselves in screens, it’s that we are afraid that we are less
able to lose ourselves in the moment and with other people.”
Hoyle
says the genesis of the show grew out of a project in which he was
interested in exploring the decline of newspapers. But he soon realized
that “the revolution in how we experience everything in the world wasn’t
just influencing the news media, it was happening everywhere.”
“And
then I had to ask myself, ‘Why do I care so much about the
disappearance of ourselves into our screens in public space?” Well, it’s
because I’ve been trying to create something else for my whole life.”
That
“something else” is the necessity and value of connecting with people
at a deeper level than is possible via Twitter, or the “yelpification of
every experience,” that isn’t supported by what Hoyle describes in his
show as “the cocoon of earbuds, the never-bored safety of the
smartphone.”
The opportunity to never-be-bored is an intoxicating,
addictive thing, all the explanation we need for the astonishing
rapidity with which smartphones have conquered the world. But that very
rapidity has had unforeseen consequences, not least of which is we
haven’t had the time to adapt to our new tech. Social habits do not
evolve as quickly as mobile operating systems. When tech moves more
swiftly than our capacity for understanding the implications of that
tech, it can be destabilizing. But it creates a fantastic demand for
artists who can step outside the moment, see what is happening, and
craft a moral and aesthetic response.
Hoyle’s ability to do so
while provoking belly laughs, his skill at venturing perilously close to
territory that he calls “hippie shit” without losing himself in the
vacuity of be-here-now stonerhood, his success at bringing the audience
so deeply into his own world that he leaves us all imagining that, you
know what, we
can do
better, we can live fuller, more
intimate lives, we can share eye contact instead of retweets, is a
remarkable thing. The more exposure it gets, the better. (After his run
in San Francisco is finished, he will perform “Each and Every Thing” at
Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York.)
As we shared our
perceptions of the digital lifestyle on Valencia Street, as tech
commuter buses rolled by and tourists scurried past, staring more
closely at their phones than at the city around them, Hoyle told me he
hopes, now that his show has been extended, that Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg and Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams come to see
it. Here’s hoping that they find the time. The people who are building
these tools need to understand their implications even more than the
people who use them. And maybe the most encouraging thing that “Each and
Every Thing” tells us is that we do have the capacity to catch up to
change, and think it through, and decide for ourselves how to be in this
world.
(Credit: lassedesignen via Shutterstock)
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