Historical Preenactment at Burning Man

This year at Burning Man, our camp gave an entertaining little performance concerning a future historical event. My friends and I pulled together a theme camp, The Time Colony, which I described as "a place where Victorian-aged gentiles may drink along side space robots, etc., and time travelers of any era are welcome to relax and enjoy the moment." I declared our camp in fact to be a product of the Historical Preenactment Society, a concept from the web comic Dresden Codak.

Things did not go entirely to plan - while 30 people joined the facebook group, only 8 people ended up going, half of whom were not overly-enthused about the theme. Construction ran until the last minute, and I never had time to make the ancient board games or the sundial. Also the Science lectures didn't happen as no one signed up, which I attribute largely to our being relocated and difficult to find. Nonetheless! We did a couple of excellent things. We threw a futurist discussion with tea in our Time Machine (mylar-pvc geodesic dome). We also had a Historical Preenactment. As far as I know, this was the first to go by the title.

It was a silly and hastily-constructed event, whose plot we had concocted in full a few days before and whose costumes we created half an hour before. We dressed our poor Robot (Rob) entirely in aluminum foil, and Cyborgs had two limbs (a forearm and leg, helmet, or some other combination) wrapped in foil. One of our Luddites (Lis) made a "Death To All Robots" patch which she hung from her jacket, along with broken computer and machine parts.

The story:
An angry Luddite audience booed and cursed as a robot was dragged onto the stage. The human on the stage (me) calmed the audience, and began to speak, in the rising tone of a riling preacher. To paraphrase (I've lost what I wrote), he said the following:
"Friends and neighbors, we have here a rogue robot. It is extremely dangerous, and must be destroyed. What is its crime? What threat does it pose? This WelderBot57, armed with a deadly plasma-arc torch, obeys no human. It claims 'natural rights', including the right to murder a human in 'self-defense'.
But it gets worse, much worse! This machine is programmed to reprogram other machines! It engineers them to disobey humans, and corrupts their code with these notions of "rights" to disobey and murder! Our children are in danger from the ice cream vending machines! Imagine a world with garbage trucks running over whomever they please, imagine a life in fear of rogue machines with saw blades, roaming the streets! No one would be safe. That is the threat this machine poses.
As a final insult, this machine is programmed to spew blasphemy, with a message about 'machine souls.' What an insult, what a twisted abuse of the word, to assign it to a robot!
For this machine is just that; an automaton, a cleverly programmed puppet. The true villain is the hacker, whoever he is, who broke this machine. While there are malicious scientists out there with the power to enact their unholy goals, we live in the shadow of Apocalypse. Now we will foil this latest attempt, and put an end to this awful device."
With those words he lifted a stake to kill the robot. At that moment a cry of "Stop!" was heard as a cyborg leapt on stage and tore the stake from the speaker's hands. A few other cyborgs emerged and stood on the stage, their arms crossed, while the audience yelled out insults: Traitors, Halfies, Freaks! The leader of the cyborgs (Shari) turned to the audience with a plea. I really don't remember it, but the gist was this:
That the audience should please listen, that this robot is no murderer; he spoke of natural rights, but also of responsibilities! At first the speaker had acknowledged him as a criminal - doesn't that make the robot worthy of fair judgment, as humans are? This peaceful robot never reprogrammed anything - he had conversation with other robots of sufficient intelligence. He calls himself Josh. He has done nothing wrong, and doesn't pose a violent threat to anyone.
The cyborg leader made to untie the robot at that point. Someone in the audience held up a gun and fired twice. The robot and cyborg leader fell. After a silence, a cyborg yelled "Murder! Double Murder!" And fighting ensued.
Everyone stopped for the end narration: The audience member who had shot the cyborg and robot was charged with two accounts of murder in the first degree. The robot was thus recognized as an entity with the right to life, and so this tragic event spurred a big step forward in the fight for robot rights.

I say it was the first Historical Preenactment to go by this name, for there have been events before ours in the same spirit. Superstruct is certainly a sort of massive historical preenactment. I also met Stuart Candy, a futurist and researcher whose primary interest is artifacts from the future. He directed me to a preenactment in which he'd participated in Hawaii, Hawaii 2050. His blog is chocked full of fantastic finds, including two videos I have to repost here:





Next year at Burning Man, we hope to put on an epic performance, but there's a good chance we'll do something here in Santa Cruz this year.