Quiz #67. Twitter+
How did watching "Hamilton" make me think of a better way to do social media? Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz for July 11, 2010.
I have a confession to make. Last Friday, July 3rd, I fell asleep before intermission when Sara and I watched “Hamilton” on the night that the filmed performance of the hit Broadway musical premiered on the Disney+ streaming service.
I’d had a long day at work after a long week of work--and I’d seen the play on Broadway. The play and its streaming version are beyond great--especially with people hungry for something “new” to watch from their coronavirus cocoons. From what I saw before I fell asleep, the one thing that the TV version could not convey was one of the biggest takeaways I had when Sara and I had seen the play in person on January 20, 2017.
My “Hamilton” ticket from January 20, 2017.
When I saw the play in person, the thing that struck me was how much there was going on on stage. You never really knew where to look. Each chorus and refrain coming from somewhere new. Off to the side. Away from the action. Always something new. Surprise after surprise. On the big screen, you knew where to look next--it was right there--but from our seat in the Richard Rodgers theater, you did not. It’s no small part of what made the play so wonderful in person.
In the room where it happened.
Living in the New York area, the hype around Hamlton was no small thing. I tried for years to get tickets, signing up for the online lottery and trying to buy tickets online every few months when they went on sale. During the summer of 2016, I finally got through and Sara and I bought tickets for the performance on January 20, 2017. I remember the date because, though we had not realized it when we bought the tickets, it was the night that the 45th President of the United States would be sworn in. The play’s messages and themes seemed especially poignant that night. No one mentioned the inauguration, but the actor playing George Washington openly wept and broke down as he sang, “One Last Time.” As Sara observed, his weeping was extended and raw--and even caught the cast and orchestra by surprise, the play frozen. After a few moments, the actor took a deep breath and the show went on.
In “One Last Time,” Washington’s character explains to Hamilton why he is stepping aside as president to teach the country about the meaning of America where it is elected presidents--and not anointed kings--who lead our nation.
[Washington:]
I'm stepping down, I'm not running for President
[Hamilton:]
I'm sorry, what?
[Washington:]
One last time
Relax, have a drink with me
One last time
Let's take a break tonight
And then we'll teach them how to say goodbye
To say goodbye
You and I
[Hamilton:]
No, sir, why?
[Washington:]
I wanna talk about neutrality
[Hamilton:]
Sir, with Britain and France on the verge of war, is this the best time
[Washington:]
I want to warn against partisan fighting
[Hamilton:]
But
[Washington:]
Pick up a pen, start writing
I wanna talk about what I have learned
The hard-won wisdom I have earned
[Hamilton:]
As far as the people are concerned
You have to serve, you could continue to serve
[Washington:]
No! One last time
The people will hear from me
One last time
And if we get this right
We're gonna teach 'em how to say goodbye
You and I
[Hamilton:]
Mr. President, they will say you're weak
[Washington:]
No, they will see we're strong
[Hamilton:]
Your position is so unique
[Washington:]
So I'll use it to move them along
[Hamilton:]
Why do you have to say goodbye?
[Washington:]
If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on
It outlives me when I'm gone
Foreshadowing for this quiz: in looking up the lyrics to “One Last Time” for the writing of this quiz, I was struck by some of the very first lines of the song. It is Washington who approaches Hamilton to ask Hamilton to help Washington write his farewell address. He does so to make way for his rival, Thomas Jefferson, who has decided to run for president. At first, Hamilton doesn’t get it--and offers to go after Jefferson, using a pseudonym.
I'll use the press
I'll write under a pseudonym, you'll see what I can do to him
In telling Hamilton that he will not run against Jefferson, Washington rejects using a pseudonym. Though Hamilton may have helped him write his famous farewell address, Washington speaks his truth with his name attached. Think about that--we’ll return to it later.
It should be no surprise to anyone that I planned extensively for our trip to see “Hamilton.” First, I read Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton biography that Lin-Manuel Miranda has said inspired him to write the Broadway musical.
The thing that struck me reading the biography back then is something that was noted this week on Friday, July 10th in the weekly newsletter from Tommy Tomlinson. Tomlinson talked about what a crazy and audacious idea it was to base a hip-hop Broadway musical on that biography.
Everybody loves it now. But 10 years ago, what if somebody had asked, "Would you pay top dollar to see a hip-hop musical about one of the lesser-known Founding Fathers?" You probably would've kept your money in your pocket. But Lin-Manuel Miranda saw something that nobody else saw.
So much entertainment is a sequel, or a remake, or a copy of something else that came before. That doesn't mean it's bad ... it just means it's safe. There's built-in demand, because it's something people have wanted before. But the best moments -- as a creator and a consumer -- are when you fall in love with something you never knew you wanted.
Be open to the Hamiltons in your lives. They're often the things that move us the most.
Side note: I have often found that I am attracted to movies and TV shows which are written and directed by a single person. Making great art takes teamwork, but the real works of genius are not done by committee. One vision. One creation.
In addition to reading the Chernow biography, I also bought the CD with the soundtrack of the musical. Because I am hard of hearing and have trouble making out lyrics when listening to music, before listening to the CD, I first read all the lyrics which came with the CD. The first time Sara and I listened to the Hamilton CD the whole way through it was on a long car-trip to Michigan for the wedding of Ted and Erica, my son and daughter-in-law.
For months, I planned and prepared to go to the Broadway play--and then I found out that I had a large brain aneurysm. On December 22, 2016, I was told that follow-up brain scans from an April, 2016 car accident revealed the aneurysm. Doctors call it an “incidental discovery” which does not mean they say, “Incidentally, you have a brain aneurysm.” They were looking for something else--and found the aneurysm. It had nothing to do with the car accident.
The aneurysm was 6mm large--and 7mm is the size for immediate action. From late December to mid-January, Sara and I scrambled to figure out what to do, meeting with three different brain surgeons and having an angiogram in which they injected dye through my groin and I woke up on an exam table to video monitors showing doctors and technicians probing inside my brain.
It was a very odd time--and yes, I wrote all about it in “Steve’s Accidental Brain Surgery Quiz.” 102 “What did NOT happen?” questions. A week-by-week diary and journal of what I was thinking and what we were going through from diagnosis to surgery to recovery.
In this strange period between diagnosis and scheduling the surgery, “Hamilton” was always on my mind--and it was an unspoken question that Sara and I always had between us. Would we still be able to go see “Hamilton?” My aneurysm was not so big that the brain surgeons were worried that it might burst right away--which would have been catastrophic because when a brain aneurysm bursts, about 50% of the cases are fatal and two-thirds of those who survive have serious damage to their brain. Still, my aneurysm was big enough and at such a bad location that the doctors told us that it would likely burst in my lifetime. We should not wait—or at least not long. For my surgery, they did a craniotomy. They drilled and sawed open a hole in my skull, went in and inserted several titanium clips to seal off the aneurysms (a second one had been found in the angiogram).
As we worked with my brain surgeons to schedule the procedure that January, “Hamilton” was always on our mind--and Sara warned me that I could never mention the “Hamilton” tickets to the doctors. “No, I’m sorry the week of the 20th won’t work for brain surgery. We have “Hamilton” tickets that weekend.” As fate would have it, the brain surgeon who did my procedure was not available until February 9th. I was more than secretly relieved that we’d still be able to go to “Hamilton.” Still, the impending surgery made seeing the “once-in-a-lifetime” play even more surreal.
It should also be no surprise that the advice which Aaron Burr offers to Alexander Hamilton stuck with Sara and me. “Talk less, smile more.” Brevity, as you now know, is not one of my virtues. Chernow, in his biography, wrote that Hamilton, a prolific writer, was “a human word machine.” (Imagine what he would have done with a laptop!)
Reading the Chernow biography, I was also struck by the many pseudonyms that Hamilton used in his writings throughout his life. Many of them are made famous in his arguments for the Constitution, but the writing back then wasn’t always so noble. Faced with sex scandals, Hamliton and his contemporaries traded personal attacks based in rumor and iunnedo in the form of anonymnous writings published in leaflets and tabloid newspapers. To me, a modern reader and journalist, it all seemed so ridiculous, so other-worldly, a relic of a time gone by. No one would publish stuff like that now, right? And yet, that’s what happens on social media all the time. Anonymous accusations written under pseudonyms.
My own solution for social media, shared with friends a year ago, would be the creation of a site where people were forced to use their real names, names verified by the sites, forcing people to stand behind what they posted. No bots. No hiding. No anonymous comments or attacks.
It’s an idea put forward by Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times on April 10, 2019. Sorkin, writing about Mark Zuckerberg coming under attack for posts from fake accounts, proposed applying a concept from banking where banks can only take on customers after they’ve verified their existence.
The concept is “know your customer” — or KYC, as it’s called on Wall Street — and it’s straightforward: Given concerns about privacy, security and fraud when it comes to money, no bank is allowed to take on a new customer without verifying its existence and vetting its background.
The idea of applying such a rule to social media has been floated before, but it has so far failed to take hold. Now may be the right time.
Consider this: Facebook has said it shut down over 1.5 billion fake accounts from April through September last year (yes, that’s a “B” in billion). That was up from the 1.3 billion such accounts it eliminated in the six previous months. To put those numbers in context, Facebook has a reported user base of 2.3 billion.
What if social media companies had to verify their users the same way banks do? You'd probably feel more confident that you were interacting with real people and were not just a target for malicious bots.
The whole issue of anonymous posts, written under pseudonyms, is in the news today. Indeed, it has prompted me to write this quiz on Saturday morning, July 11th. I woke up early as I always do during these troubling times, 5:47 AM, and began reading my daily morning diet of online newsletters (all from known and identified authors). Among them was CNN’s Reliable Sources from Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy. Acting on an anonymous tip, Darcy broke the story of how the lead writer for Tucker Carlon has resigned from Fox News after CNN reported that he’s been writing racist posts for years in online forums under the pseudonym, “CharlesXII.” It’s a troubling yet fascinating read. Beyond the writings in the online posting and how they lined up with details of the writer’s life, what also helped CNN identify the writer was inadvertent selfies.
Even more clearly identifying, however, were photos that CharlesXII posted to the forum in 2018 to the forum after visiting a museum in Egypt. In three of the photos, a reflection of Neff is visible snapping the pictures in the artifacts' glass enclosures.
It’s remarkable that people are allowed to go online, feeling free to post almost anything they want because they can use a pseudonym. Would they say those things if they needed to attach their name to what they posted? There are certainly times and places where anonymous writing has its value and importance, giving authors freedom they might not have otherwise in a totalitarian regime, for example. In addition, Sorkin acknowledged that there are more than a few practical problems that would need to be sorted out to make this system work on social media, but ask yourself this. Would you sign up for--and maybe even pay to subscribe to--a social media site where you knew that only verified people could post there?
Imagine Twitter+
I’d sign up--and next time around on Disney+, I promise to stay awake for “Hamilton.” Sorry about that.
What did NOT happen?
A. Work friend Phil watched “Hamilton” on Disney+ and wrote, “VERY late to the party as usual. But I finally get what all the fuss is about. Simply Brilliant.”
B. In searching for new things to watch, last weekend Sara and I started watching “Game of Thrones.” We missed it the first time around. So far, I am following along and we finally get what all the fuss was about;
C. To get more “new” things to watch, Sara ordered a DVD player from Amazon for $40 so we can watch old movies that we own. Remember owning CDs?;
D. Even though they’re now on HBO Max, my daughter Annie still uses her DVD player to watch old episodes of “Friends” every night as she goes to sleep;
E. High school friend Tom has told me that he’s reading things again that he read decades ago. After re-reading Dickens, he’s back for a second time on “The Last Gentleman” from Walker Percy, a favorite author of mine from my college years.
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Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #68. “tay Stron.”
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #66. Pluck It.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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