Op-Ed: Be Like Jeremy

I cannot say I’ve ever been a fan of Jeremy O. Harris. I thought Slave Play, his breakout Broadway debut, was provocative but shaggy, as one might expect from a student writer, which Harris was when he first penned the play about an “Antebellum sexual performance therapy” group. I was more impressed with ”Daddy”,  his play about an interracial intergenerational gay relationship (written before Slave Play), but it also betrayed the playwright’s tendency to explain his own work, artist and critic wrapped up in one, a deadly side-effect of the university’s conquest of the theater.

Harris once confronted me at TheaterMania’s Times Square office (where he had just concluded a joint interview with Will Arbery) about my review of Black Exhibition, a show at the Bushwick Starr he wrote and starred in under the pseudonym @GaryXXXFisher. I wrote that while I appreciated Harris’s candor, the play’s unrelenting barrage of explicit gay sex grew dull by the end. “Sorry for boring you,” Harris told me, extravagantly rolling his eyes and giving me no chance to respond. He was already on his phone making lunch reservations at the Yale Club.

Harris has obviously become better at direct confrontation in the ensuing seven years: On the Ides of March, he approached Sam Altman at the Vanity Fair Oscar party and, before assembled guests including Timothée Chalamet, Kylie Jenner, Jacob Elordi, and Jeff Bezos, called the OpenAI CEO the “Goebbels of the Trump administration” for his eagerness to assist the Pentagon with artificial intelligence after its previous partner (and OpenAI’s rival firm) Anthropic balked due to concerns that the technology could be used for the mass surveillance of Americans.

“It was late and I had a few too many martinis so I misspoke when I said Goebbels,” Harris later clarified to the New York Post. “I should’ve said Friedrich Flick.” Flick was a German industrialist who used slave labor to fuel the Nazi war machine and was later convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity.

Fuzzy historical analogies aside, what matters is that, for 10 glorious minutes, Harris laid into one of the richest and most powerful men on Earth, a central member of a tech oligarchy that is leading us down a dark path to mass unemployment and fully autonomous flying death robots—and Altman had to just stand there and take it in front of an audience of Hollywood and Silicon Valley glitterati. According to eyewitness accounts, Altman listened and responded calmly, but seemed startled to even be having this conversation. Does anyone ever speak to the king this way? And in a country that allegedly has no kings, why not?

“You came out into the world, used our tax dollars in a nonprofit that espoused its goal to save humanity, to be this bright beacon for the future and hope,” Harris recounted his indictment of Altman to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “Heel turn” feels like too gentle a phrase to describe how Altman has taken his now for-profit venture and put it at the disposal of the Department of War for “any lawful purpose,” a caveat that is practically meaningless in the second Trump administration.

It is sadly unsurprising that Altman is unaccustomed to public interrogation about the source of his wealth, a project to create thinking machines that will irrevocably alter the course of human history. If Jeffrey Epstein and Diddy have taught us anything, it’s that hideous crimes can persist as an open secret for decades at the apex of society, and no one will call them out. Everyone is too afraid to be disinvited from the party. They value access too much, so they keep their mouths shut, smile for the camera, step and repeat. Knowing that, it feels like a tiny miracle that this messy queen has been admitted into those rarified circles; and while he’s there, he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.

TheaterMania last reported on Harris in December when he was released from custody in Japan after spending nearly a month behind bars on suspicion of drug smuggling. Japanese police found 780 milligrams of MDMA in his carry-on luggage, a dumb move but hardly that of a seasoned drug dealer (he had enough for about 8 standard doses). Rather, it reveals a certain generosity of spirit: Harris is the kind of guy who brings enough to share. This is not the behavior of a master criminal, but a human being: curious, flawed, a little too incautious for his own good. But when so much of our 21^st century existence feels managed and mechanical, with the zest of genuine life sucked out by busybody PR flacks and HR scolds, leaving only inoffensive blandness in their wake, I’m glad there is someone like Harris disrupting the shockingly genteel dinner party situated atop the American tinderbox.

Chances are, you won’t be invited to next year’s Vanity Fair Oscar party. You’ll probably never get anywhere near Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or Dario Amodei to give them a piece of your mind. But you can already feel the trickle-down effects of their work in every interaction with an AI agent that used to be a human, and every pang of dread you feel when you think about that technology being deployed on the battlefield. Artificial Intelligence is an anti-human project to outsource thinking and make you irrelevant as the owners of the technology continue to amass wealth and separate from the bulk of humanity to become a new master species—perhaps by merging with the very machines they have invented. Altman believes that process has already begun.

But you don’t have to be complicit in your own obsolescence. You don’t have to quietly submit to a future of techno-feudalism, in which we all must beg for scraps from the lords of Silicon Valley. You don’t have to assent to the shredding of our Constitution as new technologies designed for surveillance and control make a mockery of our unalienable rights. And you certainly don’t have to make the people profiting off this erosion of our freedom feel comfortable or safe. Speak up while you still can. Rebel, even in small ways. Advocate for your own humanity in whatever corner of the world you inhabit. Be loud, clear, and brave. Be like Jeremy.