{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "2013 is getting really weird..", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/631531966753325056/", "html": "

kontextmaschine:

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afronaut:

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monetizeyourcat:

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no-dachi:

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tibets:

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2013 is getting really weird..

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god fucking bless

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we sure have defined \u2018robot\u2019 down

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Middle-aged American uses robots to build furniture.

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All you commies are aware that \u201crobot\u201d basically means \u201cserf labor\u201d in Czech and it comes from a play that\u2019s literally Socialist Reverse Frankenstein? Like, at the end the robots are the mob at the castle gates killing the industrialist humans who lament not giving the robots national identities to divide them. Metropolis had precedent.

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There was a book called Sewer, Gas & Electric by Matt Ruff that was among other things a \u201890s update kinda. Only there had been a white supremacist engineered virus that as far as anyone knew killed all the black people, and it sorta came about that after that people wildly preferred these cyborg servants in black which was awkward, but for whose benefit are you really feeling guilty at that point, you know?

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And that\u2019s kind of interesting, because Atomic Age robofetishism really was a lot about giving the New Middle Class all the advantages of the old, narrow middle class (i.e. mansions and servants) without maintaining a servant class (i.e. blacks). The postwar right defined itself so hard against the New Deal that it kind of obscures that the New Deal was an entirely functional, entirely achievable populist nationalism where the nation was defined as white, or, you know, \u201cwhite nationalism\u201d.

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Ruff\u2019s book though kind of skirts that in favor of comedy wackiness. Like, there\u2019s a Nazi cargo cult submarine base under the Statue of Liberty, and comedic relief from the Angry Spirit of Ayn Rand trapped in a hurricane lamp, a lot of Randian pastiche actually.

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