About the work
“RCE #RemoteCodeExecution” is a dystopian novel by the German-Swiss author Sibylle Berg, published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in April 2022. It is the second part of a trilogy that began with “GRM. Brainfuck”, takes up some of its characters and yet stands on its own. The stage version by Kay Voges and Sibylle Baschung premiered at the Berliner Ensemble on 25 April 2024, directed by Voges; a further production by Wilke Weermann followed at Theater Münster in May 2024.
Plot
In the near future, large parts of the world are devastated, health care and the police have been privatised, and corporations and banks control politics and education. While most people have resigned themselves to surveillance and impoverishment, a small group of hackers in Ticino plans a digital overthrow. Using remote code execution, running code on other people's computers, they aim to spread information about the exploitative system, redirect financial flows and supply chains, and so spark a revolution.
Cultural significance
In May 2022 the novel entered the Spiegel bestseller list at number 14 as the week's highest new entry; critics praised Berg's shifts between a brash post-punk and a laconic tone but found it weighed down by technical detail. For the premiere, an eleven-member video team worked with AI-generated images, texts and sounds and was named “Video of the Year” in the 2024 critics' survey of “Theater heute”.