Michael J. Kramer's Blog, page 3
June 12, 2025
More Than a Face
Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk being arrested by what appear to be masked, plainclothes United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers, Somerville, MA, 25 March 2025.A mask tells us more than a face.
— Oscar Wilde
The mask continues to reveal the nature of US culture and politics in the 2020s. The right first called for no masks, dismissing them as an affront to individual rights during the Covid-19 pandemic. Then, various efforts were made to prevent anti-Gaza War protesters on university campuses from concealing their faces. Now, the mask is on the other face. Police officers, National Guard troops, ICE and DHS plainclothes officers, and federal immigration officers (we think, but who knows since we cannot see their faces) are the ones masking up to arrest, detain, and attempt to deport persons in the United States.
Who gets to shield their face? Who gets to see and who must be seen? To be able to put a face to a name remains at stake. What it means to be a person, a faceless fist of state power, or a protester as part of the amorphous masses—the mask conceals, but it also reveals. Struggles over the gaze and the visage remain as crucial to these battles as weapons of other sorts.
June 11, 2025
A River of Criticism
To introduce this critical attitude into art, the negative element that it doubtless includes must be shown from its positive side: this criticism of the world is active, practical, positive. Criticizing the course of a river means improving it, correcting it. Criticism of society is ultimately revolution; there you have criticism taken to its logical conclusion and achieved. A critical attitude of this type is an operative factor of productivity; it is deeply enjoyable as such, and if we commonly use the term ‘arts’ for enterprises that improve people’s lives, why should art proper remain aloof from arts of this sort?
— Bertolt Brecht
May 31, 2025
Rovings
Maurizio Nannucci, Let’s talk about art, 2023, Raising Flags Project.SoundsMarc Ribot, Map of a Blue CityBranford Marsalis Quintet, BelongingPeter Rowan, Tales of the Free Mexican AirforcePeter Rowan, Awake Me in a New WorldTexas Tornados, Texas TornadosAnna Butterss, ActivitiesVarious Artists, Italy: Avanti Popolo! Forward People!Gal Costa, SF Jazz Festival, 2009Pouya Ehsaei (live electronics), Tara Fatehi (poetry and vocals), and Adib Rostami (kamanche), From the Lips to the Moon (Safe Harbor), The Radio Art Hour, Wave FarmSettler Empire w/ Aziz Rana, The Dig, 10 April 2025Liberal Hegemon w/ Aziz Rana, The Dig, 19 April 2025Black Power, Cold War w/ Aziz Rana, The Dig, 26 April 2025Rogue State w/ Aziz Rana, The Dig, 3 May 2025WordsDan Nadel, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s LifeJohn Kelly, “Unraveling the mystery of the man called Mad Peck, 1942-2025,” The Comics Journal, 5 May 2025Dinah Lenney, The Object Parade: EssaysDinah Lenney, ed. Snapshots: An Album of Essay and ImageLiam O’Donoghue, “World’s Largest Collection of Punk Records Leaving Bay Area for Tennessee.” SF Gate, 19 May 2025Jesse McKinley, “Clayton Patterson Photographed New York’s Lower East Side. Where Will His Archives Go?” New York Times, 19 May 2025Mina Tavakoli, “The Kings of College Radio: What Happened When R.E.M. Went Mainstream,” The Yale Review, 5 February 2025Emma Goldberg, “Living the Slop Life,” New York Times, 19 May 2025Molly M. Henderson, “‘Put Your Money Where the Kids Are’: Mobil Oil, Social Responsibility, and Cultures of Privatization in the 1970s,” Modern American History, 21 May 2025Clare Croft, ed., The Essential Jill Johnston ReaderRyan Rubin, “A Golden Age? Today, criticism is being practiced and received as an artform in its own right. What makes this possible, and can it last?,” Vinduet, 24 April 2023Colleen Lye, “Identity Politics, Criticism, and Self-Criticism,” South Atlantic QuarterlyKellie Jones, ed., Now Dig This!: Art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980Adrienne Edwards, ed., Edges of AileyMarin R. Sullivan, ed., Edgar Miller: Anti-Modern, 1917-1967Allison Rudnick, ed., Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930sPavel S. Pyś, ed., Breathers: Paul ChanMichael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff, An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their CircleJoel Meyerowitz, Joel Meyerowitz: RetrospectiveJoan Jonas and Laura J. Hoptman, Joan JonasJoan Jonas, et al., Joan Jonas: Good Night Good MorningAdam Phillips, On Giving UpWallsRaising Flags @ Museum in ProgressAlicja Kwade, Telos Tales @ PaceLindsay McIntyre: Ajjigiingiluktaaqtugut (We Are All Different) @ Eastman MuseumLife with Photographs: 75 Years of the Eastman Museum @ Eastman MuseumLiz Deschenes: Frames per Second (Silent) @ Eastman MuseumGertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery @ Carnegie Museum of ArtRoom to Move: Dance Theater Workshop and Alternative Histories of Downtown Dance @ The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsRhythm Is My Business: Women Who Shaped Jazz @ The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsLaura Lima, Balé Literal @ Tanya Bonakdar GalleryJoana Choumali: Languages of West African Marketplaces @ University Research Gallery, Harvard Art MuseumsThe Solomon Collection: Dürer to Degas and Beyond @ University Research Gallery, Harvard Art MuseumsMadalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets @ American Folk Music MuseumPatricia Leite, Cold Water @ Istituzione Fondazione Bevilacqua La MasaStaying with the Trouble @ Irish Museum of Modern ArtFashioning Circuits @ San José State UniversityStagesThe Ferryman @ Rochester Community Players, MUCC, 3 May 2025Branford Marsalis Quintet @ Hochstein Performance Hall, 4 May 2025Carlos Niño & Friends @ Roulette, 29 May 2025Mary Halvorson and Bill Frisell @ Long Play Festival 2025, Roulette, 3 May 2025Rethinking Fringes and Mainstreams: Insights into the History of the American Right from the Divided America Project Archive @ Brown University Library, 24 January 2025Bill T. Jones in Conversation with Dwight McBride, New School, 7 March 2023Bill Chats: Bill T. Jones in conversation with Judith Butler @ New York Live Arts, 5 February 2025Screens
Destination Earth
Tetsuya Maruyama, Dead SeeFreelandMobland, Season 01Friends and Neighbors, Season 01Wolf Hall, Season 02
Fallen Leaves
Bill T. Jones: A Good Man
O Mother Gaia: The World of Gary Snyder
May 24, 2025
Brushing Against the Body
Tala Madani, Solitaire (still), 2023. Single-channel color animation; 5 minutes, 58 seconds. Courtesy the artist; 303 Gallery, New York; and Pilar Corrias, London.First, you think The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020 is about painting and its persistence. It’s about how vital painting remains as a—maybe the—core form of visual art. Then you think, no, actually it’s about technology. The exhibition tracks pigmentation as it has migrated into pixelation. Ultimately, however the show becomes about something else. The brushwork does not merely mutate into bits and bytes, it also turns back to the biological. Reaching for technologies beyond painting’s traditional tools, the art form heads straight for the flesh. Yet the body, which in fact seems to be the key if unnamed theme of the exhibition, never quite appears. It always gets away. It brushes past.
Cloth instead of canvas, oil to bodily fluids, watercolors to electric lights, video cameras and televisions, copy machines, typewriters, glass, sculptural elements, interactive computer displays, painting directly on the walls of the gallery itself, performance art instead of the art itself: in this show, no artists want their art to stay in the conventional mode. Yet as far as the works range from painting’s traditions, almost all of them come back to the body. Skin and bones, organs and tissue, joint and muscle, limbs and heart, hand and eye—these artworks want to represent the real, the embodied, the human.
Particularly as other technologies of production and reproduction, of capture, transcription, and representation, have taken hold, painters have been keen to question the conventions of their practice. Yet they still want to be paint, to be painters. Why couldn’t one paint with a Xerox machine? Or a video camera? Or computer graphics software? Or even turn the body itself into the brush, or the canvas?
It turns out it’s difficult to abandon painting. In this exhibition, painters still want to be painters, but they want to reject the rules of the form. Could painting leave its past behind for more immediacy, more visceral representation, more compelling urgency? What’s funny, however, is that as one moves through the show, one often experiences not more immediacy, but less. One sees the artist, the painter, experiencing immediacy. Longing to leave the gallery space, the nicely framed art on its walls, many leave the viewer behind as well.
That’s fine. Art need not only be for museums, thank god. But what’s weird in this exhibition is that the works often feel less like works than like reports on works. The painting pulls away from the encounter with them. It appears as a trace of a trace. We get not painting but photographs of the event of painting. We get not painting but playlists of videos of painting. We get not painting, but the ability to click on an icon that opens up a computer graphic of a painting. If the goal once was to leave the conventions of painting behind so that the painting would leap off the canvas to the viewer, here, oddly, painting recedes into tape, behind screens, or within sculptural elements. There is a strangely confounding distancing effect produced by the effort to record and present moments of visceral embodiment.
To be sure, this is conceptually fascinating. if you know some of the history of the advanced artworld during the last century or so and some of its modernist and postmodernist debates, the show provides much to ponder. But it is less appealing sensorially. You can feel the conceptual flags being planted, the effort to stake out new terrain, the goal to reimagine paint and canvas; what you can’t always feel is the painting seizing your eye and mind.
This all seems a funny place for painting to arrive. After all, at least since Jackson Pollack, if not before him, the goal was to get the paint off the canvas and into the rest of the actual world. Think of Allan Kaprow’s essay about the action painter himself, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” published in 1958 just after Pollack’s death. Kaprow thought that post-Pollack, painters should get the paint to splash onto real life itself. Kaprow himself left brush and canvas behind and started producing ”happenings.” Painting with settings, participants, and events. Painting as performance, the “blurring of art and life,” as became the title of a Kaprow’s essay collection.
Painting is indeed good for blurring things. It melds colors, creates different textures, incorporates light and dark, pulls in the eye and asks it to look at things anew. In this exhibition, the painter’s hand sometimes grips with nails, with prints. Sometimes it clicks and drags. Sometimes the fingers go digital. We see augmentation of the body and sometimes even automation of the body. Yet the art never quite steps across the threshold between maker and made. As painters abandon the brush, the art brushes up against the body, but the works never quite dissolve the difference between core and skin, subject and shadow, essence and tint. In that gap, the paint, whatever form it takes, still drips. Which might be the point. The ends of painting still live on in The Living End.
May 19, 2025
Inner Thoughts
Zadie Smith at Christchurch City Libraries, 13 November 2019. Photo: Donna Robertson.But so much of life is structurally invisible, I noted, and has no way of fitting into the external accounts of our lives. Our lives are so different on the inside. We can never express their full particularity and strangeness in public, their inner chaos and complexity.
— Unnamed narrator in Zadie Smith’s short story “For the King,” published in Grand Union
Fannie Barrier Williams Quotations Displays
Through an independent study with Megan Asbeck in Art and Dr. Michael J. Kramer in History, SUNY Brockport Art Major and graphic designer Mats Garlock spent the Spring 2025 semester finishing up the design for table tent cards, posters, and a digital slideshow featuring quotations from Fannie Barrier Williams. To see the options for displays, visit the Fannie Barrier Williams Project website.
These were researched and developed in their first drafts by students in Dr. Kramer’s Fall 2023 seminar in History, HST 412/512 Public History, and in his Spring 2024 course HST/AAS/WGS 381 The Fannie Barrier Williams Project, a class cross-listed in History, African and African American Studies, and Women and Gender. The table tent cards and posters can be printed by SUNY Brockport Printing Services very affordably (instructions included). The digital slideshow can be downloaded and looped on most video monitors and display screens. These can be used on campus, off campus, or wherever one might be interested in sharing the words and story of Fannie Barrier Williams, social reformer, Brockport native, and the first African American graduate of Brockport Normal School, the precursor to SUNY Brockport.
For more about the Fannie Barrier Williams Project, a digital public history project in the SUNY Brockport History Department’s SUNY HistoryLab, visit the FBW Project website.
May 4, 2025
The Archive of Songs
Archive of Contemporary Music, 2019. Photo: Rhododendrites.Songs, as everyone knows, are the very greatest of archives. They are the containers, the modes of aesthetic technology, in which many of us store away those passages of bygone time that are most precious to us and also most resistant to preservation in any other form. They carry inside them not only places and persons, dates and names, but entire scenes, atmospheres, drifts of mood and spirit insusceptible to signification in any other register. And so we keep them there, many of us, in these flimsy pop products, as if for safekeeping, like seeds in an underground vault, guarded against deterioration, loss, apocalypse. Again, everybody knows this, or at least everybody who has ever fallen in love with a three- or four-minute jolt of pop intoxication. Only one consequence of this is that among the many things you might hear in songs—old joys restored to the present tense, the cruel passage of time, your own heart’s history—is the flourishing of what we might call counterpossibilities: all the desires and aspirations and inflections of political will, all the reaches of the thinkable, that have since become mute, inaccessible, inoperative. (Or, at least, that seem to have done so, since history, as we are forever finding and forgetting, is significantly weirder than most of our models suggest.)
How Becoming
It is therefore not a question of what our traditions make of us so much as what we make of our traditions. Paradoxically, our cultural identities, in any finished form, lie ahead of us. We are always in the process of cultural formation. Culture is not a matter of ontology, of being, but of becoming.
— Stuart Hall
May 3, 2025
X Musks the Spot
The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
— Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”
X marks the spot in Jill Lepore’s revised podcast exploration of Elon Musk’s career, biography, and ideological origins. Four years ago, in a radio show that grew out of her detective-style approach on the podcast The Last Archive, Lepore began to investigate Musk’s fascination with science fiction. Now, given Musk’s recent immersion in reactionary politics, she has gone back to the Muskiverse. In X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story, she updates her tale. On X Man, Lepore cleverly uses Elon Musk’s obsession with the letter X to tell her story. It becomes a sign, a symbol, a clue, an elusive signifier, a recurring motif. It becomes a way to denote the uncanny connections worth chasing on a mysterious map of buried historical treasures that, when unearthed, might reveal surprising discoveries, that might, at last, reveal the essence of what is going on and what it all means.
As a historian, Lepore is not merely a perceptive observer, she is also a magnificent stylist. One characteristic of her approach is the positioning of careful historical research within a mood of detective-story suspicion and uncanny connection. It’s not quite conspiratorial, but there is an uncanny quality of “let’s connect the dots.” Or is it, er, let’s locate the X’s. History is a puzzle, the clues left there for noticing, the revelations to be found in piecing things together. Sherlock Holmes lurks in the background here (elementary, my dear von Ranke!), as does Monsieur Poirot (mon ami, Herotodus!). Aha! declrares Lepore, now it all adds up and is clear. Elon Musk’s childhood in Apartheid South Africa, his obsessions with comic book heroes and science fiction fantasies, his strange family origins in the obscure Technocracy movement, his painful relationship with women, his difficulty with the complexities of gender as a whole, they explain who Musk is and what has driven his righward turn.
Yet what takes Lepore’s historical detective work to another level is the lingering suspicion that sometimes it does not all quite add up. There is a more noirish shadow always creeping into her history, a sense that maybe there is no order, no plan, no coherent logic to discover from the clues. She never goes full-on nihilistic, not by the slightest, but the edge of anxiety always gnaws at the tale. We find ourselves perhaps more with a figure such as Sam Spade (We didn’t believe you. But we believed your $300 billion dollars).
Lepore never gets quite as cynical as that hero of the hard-boiled detective story, but one does sometimes feel that we are wandering a landscape of darkly lit streets, flickering neon signs, and endless double-crossings. There is never resolution, no stunning return to order and normalcy at the end of X Man. There is only the continued haunting of the present by the chaos of the past. As Lepore remarks toward the end of her saga, “Nothing in the past can tell us what might happen next.”
The detective story approach to history was already present in Lepore’s earlier podcast, The Last Archive, but in X Man she moves over to the not unrelated genre of science-fiction. Here, Lepore claims, are the stories that Musk loved growing up and that continue to inform his efforts to make sense of the world.
To Lepore, however, he profoundly misinterprets the deepest warnings and lessons of science fiction. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Karel Capek’s play R.U.R (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti) to Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler to more contemporary authors, science fiction hinges on the dangers of expertise and tech solutionism, of engineers and scientists thinking they can control the world and bring it to perfection. Emerging during an earlier era of enormous social inequality, imperialism, racism, sexism culminating in world wars about what sort of system might prevail—fascism, communism, liberalism, capitalism—science fiction often questioned, or at least cautioned against, the efforts of those in power to resist democratization. It is, as one of its more recent practitioners tells Lepore, ultimately an extension of the ancient theme of hubris.
The ultimate X in X Man is Musk’s futurism, which to Lepore is anything but . It is, instead, for her, all about the past. Musk’s motives are haunted, even driven, even trapped, by buried stories of the struggles of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This is where X marks this spot. It’s where the excavation is necessary.
In the course of eight episodes, we learn not only about the obvious parallels between Trump’s MSG rally in 2024 and the infamous German American’s Bund’s 1939 Nazi rally there in 1939, but far murkier and more intriguing origin stories. For instance, Musk’s obsessions with Batman, the Joker, and the Dark Knight remakes of this 1930s comic book figure become a far deeper well lurking below obvious accusations of fascistic tendencies. The supervillian as superhero, one of the themes from Batman, has moved into actual politics. After all, what did Musk call himself, at the 2024 MSG rally? “Dark MAGA.”
Lepore takes us back into the “magnificantly inflated” initiatives of increasingly wealthy tech companies in the early twenty-first century. Some have called their vision “platform capitalism” or “surveillance capitalism” or “identity capitalism.” Lepore proposes we call it “X capitalism.”
She notices that Google named a new division by the letter and of course it would become a hallmark (an x-mark?) of Musk’s career too. “X for extreme, extravagant, existential,” she explains. Tech sought to “save us all” in yet another era of social dysfunction, economic inequality, and this time around, a growing climate catastrophe. Yet in doing so, tech masked the very forces of capitalism that powered its own prominence. Entrepreneurs such as Musk claimed they were here to save us from human extinction, but the X in extinction is the tell. What is causing the problem is precisely their own capitalistic practices, their own drive to secure dominance, wealth, and control for themselves, their dream of visionary engineers capable of exploiting resources, from the natural to the human, in order to save it. “Science fiction as business model,” Lepore calls it.
Before Musk donned his “Dark Maga” hat, the inventor-millionaire-eccentric entrepreneur Tony Stark, or Iron Man, was his model. Rolling Stone magazine literally equated Musk with Stark in a 2017 article (written by another rather problematic, messianic, manipulative figure, the “pick up artist” king Neil Strauss). But the true origins of tech billionaries making their money in the extinction economy of capitalism, only then to argue that it is only tech that can save humanity is to be found, for Lepore, in Musk’s own South African childhood.
Musk (like big tech business partner Peter Thiel) grew up in that nation’s Apartheid system while also, during his early years, absorbing science-fiction parables from Tom Swift‘s boy wonder tales to the absurdist parody of Isaac Asimov’s classic sci-fi work Foundation found in Douglas Adams’ novel Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (itself starting a radio show, like Lepore’s podcast).
Musk’s own father described him as possessing an “X factor” as a young man, but it was Musk’s grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman, who offers the most fascinating past in which Musk’s vision of the future resides. Having lost his farm in Western Canada during the Great Depression, Haldeman joined the Technocracy movement, an obscure, strange, cultish, vaguely fascistic, science fiction-infused call for engineering expertise to save society. Here, Lepore argues, we can locate the savior complex of big tech, and of eccentric figures such as Musk, who have made their millions within it. Technocracy members even changed their names to numbers, just what Musk himself has done with one of his children, named, you guessed it, X Æ A-12—or X for short.
In the Technocracy vision of the future, all the problems of the past can vanish if we let the technocrats run things. Wearing matching grey suits, as in the masses in the famous 1984 Apple commercial, they would hold rallies and car rallies in matching gray automobiles blasting messages from rooftop speaker horns. Workers of the world unite, and let us run the show, was the main message, or civilization will crumble.
And what if it does? For Musk, we can leave it for outer space. Musk’s SpaceX, of course, blasts off from long-running sci-fi fantasies of a dying earth and a search for escape to Mars or elsewhere, all led by visionary rebel engineers. They will take humanity to “Planet B.” Capitalism destroyed the Earth, now its richest beneficiaries will save us by leading us to new planets where, as Lepore notes, the goal seems to be to establish colonies modeled precisely on the history of colonialism. The goal is not an egalitarian, democratic future, but one that gets rid of all that mess for order and hierarchy. Lepore turns to mixed-race South African comedian Trevor Noah to make the comical point emerge in full. What would we find if we follow Musk to Mars? That we have been brought there to be slaves in this new technocractic dystopia. Space-ism and racism—they are linked. The further away Musk dreams of going, the more his trajectory leads back to the immediacy of the past, always present, in all its traumas—buried, barely, just below the terraform.
Discoveries in the X files continue. To help explain the “domestic politics of Muskism,” Lepore leaps to the “Baby X” experiment published in Ms. Magazine of 1972, in which a baby was not assigned a boy or girl name at birth, as well as more avant-garde, radical science fiction. Here Elon Musk’s strange saga of relationships with women links to the larger vexing Tech Bros relationship to women in general. Short story: the misogyny is never far from the plot for them.
Lepore then takes us to post-gender, feminist, domestic, and other revolutionary visions of the future. These are quite different from the antiquarian and modernist sci-fi that so preoccupies Musk. Mentioning the legacy of Ursula Le Guin and interviewing the contemporary science fiction writer Vandana Singh, Lepore points out that there is much else out there in the sci-fi imagination beyond the masculinist anxieties driving the genre’s most famous texts.
In the dominant version of sci-fi, “boys with toys” are the protagonists, trying to save the day. Yet they can never quite execute their plan. Unruly others keep getting in the way. To wit, the Baby X of 1970s “gender-free” experimentation turned up again as an AI experiment, an algorithmically designed bot named, of course, Baby X. In the 2014 film Ex Machina, the AI is a woman. Modern day computational Frankensteins often get gendered female.
The plots often turn on the question: what happens if the invented, superintelligent being turns on the humans who created it. What if its logic goes berserk? That logic, of course, is the logic of those few in power, in which intelligence is only about how to maximize profit, exploit others, and dominate them for one’s own benefit. As Lepore slyly notes, maybe that isn’t so intelligent.
The deepest fear of conventional sci-fi, she points out, is of the robot rebellion. What if the robots, the women, or, in the case of recent AI, the robot-women, revolt? That’s the deepest worry, Lepore thinks. As perhaps it has always been for the powerful. To flip the saying of Mary Shelley’s husband, “They are few, ye are the many,” the nagging concern for these men is always “They are the many and we the few.” Women, poor people, colonized populations, trans folks: they are the disobedient masses who must be controlled. They are the actual disrupters who keep ruining everything in this little boy’s fantasy of the world. They are…the X factor. If they awaken, watch out.
Woke, indeed. We arrive at precisely Musk’s recent shift from identifying climate change as the main problem facing humanity to an obsession with the so-called “woke-mind virus.” By the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Musk tilted ever-rightward, linking the fantasies of his grandfather’s Technocracy movement ever more closely to the fascistic dimensions of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and eventual victory in 2024. DOGE is the tech-savior vision come true, only the raygun has now become a chainsaw. Shades of the horror genre more than sci-fi: Chainsaw Massacre!
It’s really, however, Lepore points out, The Terminator that has become Musk’s key fantasy. Here is a film in which after all, a robot becomes the ultimate Frankenstein, returning from the future to the past to to try to root out those who would oppose its dominance in coming days. Questions linger, though. Is Musk the builder of the terminator, Lepore wonders. Is he the owner of Cyberdyne Systems, the maker of the apocalyptic Skynet? Or does he picture himself as the rebel human in danger of being killed? Or is he the Schwarzeneggerian protagonist himself, come to terminate (in this case federal contracts, grants, and jobs)?
By the end of Lepore’s podcast, we learn that what whatever Musk is, he might most of all be more the end of a story, not the beginning of one. His is a long-running tale of powerful mens’ fears of the rest of us. Robots become fantasies of the proletariat, of women, of the colonized, of the masses. They are only “resource to be exploited,” as contemporary science fiction writer Ted Chang remarks to Lepore, and never equals to be embraced. Anything but democracy. Anything but equality. Only “no-holds barred capitalism” is, as Lepore notes, the vision of what the world has been, or could be, or should be.
Fascism, as Walter Benjamin noticed, comes not only for the living, but also for the dead, not only with manifestos of futurism, but also with a claim on the imagined past as well. For Lepore, as it was for Walter Benjamin during another time of crisis, one response is to reclaim that past by brushing it against the grain to reveal its uglier roots, its buried origins. Might we coax out from there other potential futures than the ones on offer by the powerful elites? It would take, Lepore’s podcast proposes, moving beyond the self-proclaimed alphas to perceive other, yet-to-be-determined X, Y, and Z factors.
