“We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow…The readiness is all.” Hamlet is speaking to Horatio, at the end of a play during which his conflict has been the difficulty of human action. In “Thursday,” human autonomy and initiative are ping ponging through the forms and structures of technology. The patterns of circuits and city streets, repetitious but somehow hypnotic, invoke technological determinism. Yet the woman has her thoughts and the man, his. They arrange to meet. They connect. All amid the hum of technology and the flitting, flickering “augury” of the birds. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends/Rough hew them how we will.” Is it in us or the machine? That’s the question I think “Thursday,” poses.
