Lady Liberty’s Cloak of Darkness
Why technological failures are such handy metaphors
by Adrienne LaFrance
Mar 08, 2017
4 minutes
The metaphors have become inescapable, it seems.
Consider the temporary dimming of the Statue of Liberty Tuesday night, which occurred on the eve of a widely publicized women’s strike, shortly after a new executive order curbing immigration to the United States, and at a time of deep uncertainty and partisanship in the country.
It had to mean something, right? In a word: Nope.
A portion of the lighting system that illuminates the statue had experienced a “temporary, unplanned outage,” Jerry Willis, a spokesman for the monument, told me in a statement emailed shortly before midnight. The outage, he explained, was “most
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