ANTIGONE 21 - Author's Note

Modern retellings are ways for the new author to address a new issue. It is a renewal of the original; a transcription of the outdated; an urgent call that directs attention to a new scenario.

In Sophocles’ Antigone, the conflict between Antigone and Creon, between divine and human law, individual and society, clearly addresses moral dilemmas applicable in the Greeks’ time. In our society, in which technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate and speeding up with no bounds, there must rise a set of problems similar to that of Antigone’s Thebes. Where does digital law start and where does it end? Is human law and digital law mutually inclusive or exclusive? Moreover, is ethics still applicable when there is hard, written law that must be followed unless there is unrest in society? These questions, still awaiting to be addressed, are highly pertinent to today’s society and to each and every one of us sitting here.

ANTIGONE21 is set in a post-apocalyptic world. 21 years before the story begins, a digital system named the StateNet overwhelmed human society and replaced all offline interactions. The cities, under the guidance of the StateNet and CODE ZEUS, creator and creation of the StateNet, flourished and became the epitome of development. The countryside became polluted with the results of mass-induced industrialization and was named the Ragtag Lands, where survival is hard. When one’s digital profile is expelled from the StateNet, one is automatically exiled to the ragtag lands.

As a form of doing good, there are charity houses in the ragtag lands – donated buildings that were once helpful but are now broken down and grimy. These charity houses are the only way of maintaining survival in the Ragtag Lands, as it is nigh on impossible to build one’s own unfiltered houses in the polluted air without succumbing to the toxins. Fortunately, as life is hard for everybody in this section of the world, people are generally kind and look out for each other, valuing genuine human interaction and not the exchange of digital signatures. This is where Polynices would’ve gone, and is where Antigone and Haemon are going.

ANTIGONE21 is set in this world, the same world as a series I completed this year that documents a strange writer’s café established in the middle of the ragtag lands and how the main character, a middle-aged poet named Fern Edelweiss who still remembers “the good old days”, try to balance livelihood and their ideals for art and literature in a rational age. ANTIGONE21 fundamentally addresses the same question: as the age of AI creeps closer, is it responsible to cooperate or to deny it? Will we reject that which might replace us and battle for our lives, or will we do our best to live symbiotically, even though it means that we are not in control?

We must find a solution to comply with both morals and laws before it is too late.