Literate Machine
17 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago -Literate Machine explores media through the lens of culture, history, and politics, examining the ways capitalism, power, and ideology shape and are shaped by the stories we love.
Written and performed by Eric Rosenfield, Literate Machine is available as blog entries, newsletter, podcast, and YouTube channel.
Literate Machine is available on Apple Podcasts and finer podcast apps everywhere.
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Episodes
Elon Musk, Wokeness, and the Myth of Meritocracy
April 01, 2024 13:32 - 37 minutes - 86.8 MBHow Tony Stark, the myth of meritocracy, and our unspoken beliefs about genius explain Elon Musk and the (re)turn of eugenics to the right wing Blog version and information about podcast and mailing list: https://literatemachine.com/2024/04/01/elon-musk-wokeness-and-the-myth-of-meritocracy If you enjoyed this, please tell someone, as word-of-mouth is how projects like this grow. For as little as $1 an episode, you can get exclusive authors notes, excerpts, and early access to episodes...
How Will Capitalism End? The Orville, Eduard Bernstein, and What is to Be Done?
November 16, 2023 18:19 - 1 hour - 70.5 MBWhat does comedic science fiction television show The Orville tell us about how capitalism will end? How did Germany go from having the largest and most powerful socialist movement in the world to finding its movement gutted and its country given over to fascists? How did Eduard Bernstein, despite his best intentioned, upend the Marxist movement and provide cover for those who wanted to destroy it? And was he actually right all along? All this and more will be answered! The previous video,...
Star Trek into Socialism: or Who Deserves the Future
April 12, 2023 01:19 - 1 hour - 69.7 MBDoes Star Trek show us what socialism looks like? What would it look like if we organized society democratically instead of allowing a few people to control most of the resources? Bibliography and Further Reading * Obviously, the work of Marx and Engels is key to this piece. Particular texts I drew on here include The Civil War in France (1871) (modern editions contain the first draft and the address on the Civil War) and The Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). Marx's "La Liberte...
Loki and How Conservatives Become Fascists
August 21, 2022 13:32 - 41 minutes - 93.8 MBMarvel's Loki shows us what fascism looks like, and how it comes to take root within innocuous conservatism. https://literatemachine.com https://Patreon.com/ericrosenfield Corrections: • Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Bros are not Jewish. Actual examples of Jewish funders of the right include Sheldon Adelson and Ike Perlmutter. I may upload a revised version of this audio with the names changed. • Malthus never directly said that the poor and unskilled should be liquidated, but he di...
The Confused Ideology of Schitt's Creek
February 23, 2022 16:18 - 18 minutes - 25.1 MBHow a show about poverty that can't ever bare to really show poverty illustrates everything we've been blind to. Support the show on Patreon and get early access to episodes and exclusive Authors Notes: https://patreon.com/ericrosenfield Text of the show and more information about other formats it's available can be found at: https://literatemachine.com Bibliography and Further Reading - Hallmark Christmas movie montage sourced from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vu6GlstKl8 - On t...
Defund the Paw Patrol
October 12, 2021 14:15 - 24 minutes - 28.7 MBIs the Paw Patrol an unintentional conservative utopia? What can the show tell us about how the political spectrum views the police, its purpose, and its funding. For as little as $1 an episode (going forward) you can get early access to episodes, as well as exclusive author’s notes at Patreon.com/ericrosenfield. More information about the show and other formats in which it's available, including YouTube, can be found at https://literatemachine.com Bibliography and Further Reading Ho...
How the Hippies Became Yuppies: The Trial of the Chicago 7
July 03, 2021 16:19 - 23 minutes - 28 MBHow Aaron Sorkin whitewashes the story of hippy activism, and how the hippy activists whitewashed themselves. Text and video version of this episode, as well as how to get it in your inbox, can be found at: https://literatemachine.com **Bibliography and Further Reading** * Abbie Hoffman testimony at the Chicago 7 trial: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Chicago7/Hoffman.html * Differences between the film and what really happened: https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfa...
Pixar's Soul: Finding Yourself Under Capitalism
March 27, 2021 01:42 - 11 minutes - 13.8 MBPete Doctor takes us into the meaning of life, but is there something hollow at its center of it? Bibliography and Further Reading * Soul using uncomfortable blackface: https://noripatterson.medium.com/whats-wrong-with-pixar-s-soul-animation-racism-and-blackface-c9a7709cd50f * Tom Wolfe’s famous article declaring the 70s the “me decade”: https://nymag.com/news/features/45938/ * Google ngram of the term “personal fulfillment” showing its rise in the 1960s and 70s: https://books.google....
Why Stories? Henry Fool and What the Artist is For
January 22, 2021 00:23 - 14 minutes - 16.5 MBWhat does it mean to be an artist? Corrections: * The high school students put one of Simon's poems into their high school yearbook, they don't post it up everywhere. Henry puts the poem up in the mute woman's store at her request. * Fay puts Simon's poem on the internet after Henry asks her to. Henry doesn't know how to use a computer.
Doom, Myst, and the War for the Soul of Video Games
November 20, 2020 22:23 - 20 minutes - 22.9 MBIn the 1990s, Myst and Doom fought a war for the soul of video games. Myst sold almost twice as many copies. Within ten years, the entire industry had remodeled itself around Doom. Special call out to Jimmy Maher at the Digital Antiquarian (https://filfre.net) whose work covering early video games I drew on extensively. Some Corrections: * I mention the Nintento 64 as the rival to the Genesis when I meant the Super Nintendo * Doom was not Id’s last Shareware game; their next game, Quake,...
Cerebus: Misogyny and Madness
August 28, 2020 20:57 - 22 minutes - 25.3 MBFor 30 years, Dave Sim engaged in one of the most remarkable ongoing artistic endeavors ever while he gradually lost his mind. Bibliography and Further Reading * A collection quotations of Dave Sim's most misogynistic writing: https://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/sim.html * An account of Sim's LSD epiphany at the unofficial Cerebus fanzine site: http://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2016/03/sims-lsd-breakthrough.html * Sim on his schizophrenia diagnosis: https://www.google.com/url?s...
Pink Floyd's The Wall and the Rise of the Alt-Right
July 12, 2020 23:27 - 11 minutes - 10.5 MBHow the worms ate into my brain, what I did and did not understand about The Wall, and what it tells us about the rise of the Alt-Right. Follow me on Twitter at @ericrosenfield Support this show on Patreon for as little as $1 an episode at https://patreon.com/ericrosenfield and get access to show notes where I talk about how I produce episodes and the current state of the show. Bibliography and Further Reading * The Libertarian-to-Fascist Pipeline: http://[https://medium.com/@thomas...
Superheroes and the Police
June 11, 2020 21:00 - 15 minutes - 18.9 MBWhat do you do when the authorities have been compromised? If you enjoyed this please tell someone about it, word of mouth is how projects like this grow. Bibliography and Further Reading More general information about abolishing the police: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/abolish-police-instead-lets-have-full-social-economic-and-political-equality/ Still don’t think the police need replacing? Consider this report from the inside: https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of...
How Can I Save You?
May 15, 2020 20:46 - 25 minutes - 29.3 MBLet’s go back in time, to before the Pandemic, and see if we can change anything. You can support my Patreon for as little as $1 an episode: https://patreon.com/ericrosenfield Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ericrosenfield Join the newsletter and get this in your inbox: https://mailchi.mp/aaab46d4f3f2/literatemachine If you enjoyed this, please share it with people; word-of-mouth is how shows like this grow. Thanks! Bibliography and Further Reading Unfortun...
There is No Alternative: Doctor Who, "Kerblam!", and the Specter of Technological Unemployment
March 29, 2020 17:29 - 11 minutes - 16.2 MBIn the 2018 Doctor Who episode “Kerblam!”, something is killing workers off at a far future Amazon analogue. Is it Capitalism? Or is the system not the problem? In this episode, Doctor Who is used as a lens to understand the history of technological unemployment and what it means for our automated future. Bibliography and Further Reading Who Were the Luddites from History.com: https://www.history.com/news/who-were-the-luddites Article in the Guardian about Doctor Who’s Issues w...
A Mind Forever Voyaging into Neoliberalism
March 01, 2020 02:40 - 16 minutes - 22.5 MBIn 1984, Ronald Reagan won reelection in a landslide and one man responded the only way he knew how: by channeling his horror into a video game. My favorite video game. So let's leap through time as the artificial intelligence Perry Sim and see what A Mind Forever Voyaging tells us about our present moment. Bibliography and Further Reading I could not have written this piece without the website The Digital Antiquarian and its many excellent articles about Infocom and Interactive Fiction ...
Vintage Season
January 25, 2020 20:26 - 15 minutes - 21 MBIn the premiere episode of Literate Machine, a look at the so-called "Golden Age" of Science Fiction through the lens of one of its finest practitioners, C. L. Moore. Her story (and the story of her husband, Henry Kuttner) in the science fiction mills of the mid-twentieth century is the story of America in the gig economy.