Tonia Schiff appears briefly out of character at the seven-minute mark in “The Genie and the Genome.” She’s seated near the front of that University of Tokyo auditorium, looking nothing like the show host who scampers through the interview segments. Her alert amusement disappears. For two seconds, her aura teeters, scared by the show onstage. Then the camera dives back into the sea of eager faces behind her in the auditorium.
She surfaces again ten seconds later, in the milling crowd. Even the way she stands and chats feels somehow experimental. Something in her hand movements hints at her childhood in New York and Washington, her adolescence in Brussels and Bonn. She speaks to one scientist in flowing German, but stops for a moment to greet a passing acquaintance with a few snippets of Japanese.
She turns to a couple next to her and says something that makes them bloom. She learned the trick from her father, a career diplomat: how to make everyone she meets feel like a conversational genius. From her mother, a medical policy adviser for international relief agencies, she’s learned how to turn a person’s worst impulses to good use. That is the secret of her edutainment fame: assure us all that we might still become the authors of our own lives. She’ll use the skill again, later, on a New York soundstage, filming the lead-in to this show’s segment. A flash of cosmopolitan charm undercut by a sardonic grin: “My kind of future would probably ask, ‘If I let you have your way with me tonight, will you still respect me in the morning?’ ”
From childhood through the age of twenty, Tonia Schiff nurtured the belief (acquired in a series of elite international schools) that the deepest satisfaction available to anyone lay in those cultural works that survive the test of Long Time. But a collision with postcolonialism in her second semester studying art history at Brown shook her faith in masterpieces. A course in the Marxist interpretation of the Italian Renaissance left her furious. For a little while longer she soldiered on, fighting the good fight for artistic transcendence, until she realized that all the commanding officers had already negotiated safe passage away from the rout.
In her junior year, vulnerable now to the world’s corruption, she belatedly discovered (blindingly obvious to everyone else alive) the lock on human consciousness enjoyed by the medium that her parents always treated as a lethal pandemic that would one day be successfully eradicated. At the age of twenty, Tonia Schiff, fair-haired, blue-eyed heir of dying high culture, at last got roughed up by television, and loved every minute of it.
In short order, she discovered:
Broadcast was what Grimm’s fairy tales wanted to be when they grew up
Broadcast was an eight-lane autobahn into the amygdala
Broadcast was the only addiction that left you more socially functional
Broadcast was what Homo ergaster daydreamed about, on the shores of Lake Turkana, between meals
One semester of Modern Visual Media Studies taught her that she didn’t want to analyze the stuff; she wanted to make it. After graduation, she talked her way into a Manhattan production studio, reassuring them that the Ivy liberal-arts degree could be overcome. She served time as a fact-checker for local news, where she learned, to her astonishment, what her country really looked like. From there, she worked her way onto a team specializing in archival footage for the Hitler Channel.
She realized, early on, how fast broadcast was becoming narrowcast, and she signed on with a boutique production outfit to work for a consumer-electronics tech showcase that the whole crew called Geek of the Week. She graduated to assistant producer and executed her responsibilities meticulously until someone had the brilliant idea to let her try hosting. The camera loved her, and so did the week’s geeks. In front of the lens, her old Brahmin insouciance combined with a sexy bewilderment to turn her into everybody’s favorite new toy with a new toy. Her arched-eyebrow amusement at the constant torrents of techno-novelty made Over the Limit, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, “science like you wished it had been, back in high school.”
Each week, the show delivers another round of Scientific American meets Götterdämmerung. In the months just before “The Genie and the Genome,” they do:
off-the-shelf electronic surveillance
drugs that eliminate the need for sleep
geisha bots
thought-reading fMRI
Augmented Cognition weapons systems
runaway nano-replicators
radio frequency skimming
untraceable performance enhancers
remotely implantable human ID chips
viral terrorism
Frankenfoods
neural marketing
smart, networked commodities
The show taps into the oldest campfire secret: in terror begins possibility. A sizable slice of the viewing public has unlimited appetite for all the latest ways that godly gadgets will destroy their lives. Schiff measures the success of each segment by the number of illegal clips floating around the Internet the next day. Even the occasional Photoshopped nude of her seems a testimonial.
It’s beyond lucky, getting to spend all her hours in the company of ingenious people. Her interviews have led to a few intense adventures with amusingly driven men. But even the ones who know how to entertain themselves need far more approval than she can deliver without irony. The best of these intervals are bittersweet, like Mahler by candlelight. In between, she’s content with her circuit through the exercise rooms of three-star hotels, listening to podcasts of technology-show competitors while on the elliptical cross-trainer. Lately, she has begun to bid in online auction houses on the letters of famous inventors. She imagines giving the whole collection to the smartest of her nieces, when she graduates from high school.
Meanwhile, Tonia enjoys the admiration of everyone she knows except her humanitarian mother. Sigrid Schiff-Bordet watches the program now and then, when she’s not in Afghanistan or Mali. Tonia’s mother long ago adjusted to the world’s basic schizophrenia. She thinks nothing about passing from climate-controlled concourses studded with free drinking fountains into armed outposts where mortars battle over a few potable liters. But she can’t adjust to Over the Limit.
“I’m too old for your stories,” Sigrid tells Tonia. “I’ve voided my citizenship in that kind of future. You have to let me die a functional illiterate.”
Once, in the closest thing to a compliment she could muster, Dr. Schiff-Bordet told her daughter, “Your show is probably good for me. It sickens me to watch, but it’s powerful medicine. Like chemotherapy for the naïve soul.”
As for Tonia’s father, Gilbert Schiff died three years before “The Genie and the Genome,” at age sixty-nine, of a massive heart attack in the consulate in Tyumen. Two weeks before his death, in one of their biweekly phone calls, his daughter had the gall-or call it the enduring filial pride-to ask him when he was going to write his long-postponed diplomatic memoirs. The former young cultural attaché under Camelot had managed to survive in the State Department all the way through Bush the Second, battered up to the rank of vice-consul, still trying to convince the six billion neighbors that America had gentle, nuanced, humble, and diverse insights to offer the world conversation. Tonia had grown up on his increasingly embattled accounts, a foreign policy hiding inside the official foreign policy, a beautiful losing proposition that only a handful of lifers kept alive.
Her father answered her challenge in his best stentorian white-tie voice. “No one wants to read my autobiography. Story of my life.” She foolishly pressed him, hinting at the ticking clock, until he released his last, jagged barb. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll write my memoirs as soon as you give up the technology ringmaster act and write that history of interwar regionalist realism you once promised me.”