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- [00:04]
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- [01:25]
John Plotz
Welcome to the New Books Network hello, and welcome to Recall this book where we invite scholars and writers from different disciplines to make sense of contemporary issues, problems and events. So if you were to Google today's topic, and I don't necessarily recommend it, that is what you're feeling Fearless Host is for. You might, for example, as I did get the following There was a young lady named Bright whose speed was far faster than light. She set out one day in her usual way and returned the previous night. Or you might, as I also did get a thousand jokes like this one. How many ears does Captain Kirk have? Three. The left, the right, and the final. Frontier. Yes.
- [02:14]
Ben Mangram
Yeah.
- [02:15]
John Plotz
So our topic falls inside the category of humor and comedy and satire in science fiction, and I'm Jon Plotz of the Brandeis English Department joined today to elevate us up, up, and away from the pit in which I've started. Us is my almost neighbor, my landsman, my city mate, Ben Mangram, who is an MIT professor of literature whose first book in 2019 was Land of Post War Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, and is, I believe, even as we speak, hard at work on a cult of the origins of the Rights of Nature movement. However, we're here today to talk about his charming, witty Second book, the Comedy of Computation, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence, which is just out, I think, from Stanford University Press in 2025. Ben, it's a great pleasure to have you here. Welcome to recall this book.
- [03:08]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, thank you for having me.
- [03:10]
John Plotz
Cool. So, Ben, the nature of the podcast, as you know, is a discussion of the general topic, the great topic inspired by your, in which the two of us are going to go on to explore common ground or maybe even sites of productive disagreement in a field that we both care a lot about. But if you accept our five year mission, or actually 45 minute mission, we do like to get things rolling by asking our guests to describe the German of text that is this wonderful new book, Comedy of Computation, in your own words. So maybe how you came to write it, maybe what you think its key claims are, or even if you're feeling hyped, where you think it's heading, like what new kinds of scholarly arguments it opens up, what its skyhooks are. So over to you. Great.
- [03:59]
Ben Mangram
Yeah. So the book is a cultural history of the computer. I was really interested in lots of technical and business histories of the computer that I had studied for other research that I had done, and they were really fantastic. But what I was interested in and what I found often was that those technical and business histories, you know, were in some ways unfamiliar with or unaware of the many sort of cultural manifestations of computing technology, the way culture interacted with computing. And as I was sort of thinking about the cultural history of the computer, I came across what I found was this really interesting discovery Broadway play that I have had not previously encountered called the Desk Set by William Marchant. And what I found was that apparently the first appearance of a computer on Broadway was in this romantic comedy. And it was surprising to me that the computer's appearance, you know, was in a genre that is in some ways at odds with, I think, some of our anxieties about computing. And so this sort of set me down, set me on a path of wanting to know more about this intersection between comedy and computing in the computer's cultural history. And what I found was that it's pervasive and also understudied. So the book is an attempt to try to grapple with that, to think about how comedy has shaped public attitudes and sort of private perceptions about computing and how comedy has been really a kind of genre for our experience of the technology.
- [05:45]
John Plotz
Awesome. That is great. And there's so many places to start there. And I'm so sorry I Don't know. Desk set. Only from your description, but it's incredibly interesting and maybe if I could, like, jump. I understand the nature of the book is that it really begins in the 20th century and brings us through this mid 20th century set of concerns. But maybe if I can try to relate that kind of dialectically, not leaving the mid century, but like going to 2025 as well. You're interested in human knowledge work. So a couple of lines that I really liked. Here's one. The intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we ourselves made are going to replace us at it. So nowadays we have AI as the locus for that. But, I mean, your point, I think, would be that there's a deeper set of concerns here. Like if the robot is the replacement of the human as maker or worker, then the computer is the replacement of the human as knowledge worker, which is like a definitive. Which is like a definite sociological category, not just a way to describe human work in general. So I'd love to hear you say more about that.
- [06:56]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, that's well put. Yeah. So, yeah. So one of my interests in a key term in the subtitle obsolescence is in some ways how that term is specifically, although by no means exclusively classed, and it's sort of pertinent to this specific class of worker, the knowledge worker. And in the computer's history and its social and cultural history, their workers have been. Knowledge workers have been anxious about the ways their expertise, their professional judgment, their knowledge is threatened by computation, by automated computing. And that's a kind of ongoing story from the mid-40s to the present moment. Right. And so there are different kinds of technological threats to knowledge work, and I'm not trying to collapse them all together. There are some differences. But, yeah, one of my interests is in how comedy has provided a kind of toolbox for managing those anxieties or responding to those anxieties about the obsolescence of the knowledge worker. Right. And yeah, I think that it's a salient, again, not exhaustive, but really salient feature of the computer's cultural history.
- [08:22]
John Plotz
Cool. So maybe this is potentially infinite question and we can kind of grapple with it here and go away and maybe come back to it. But I like your point about the comedy being a generic affordance that allows us to cope with anxiety. You know, I guess that's sort of the Laughter is the Best Medicine account. How do you think about. I mean, you know, we live in this era with, you know, TV shows aplenty that are kind of of the black mirror variety. Right. Like there's a kind of horror in which the horror is manage manifested as satirical. Sure. But it's satirical in a not funny at all way. So how do you think. So how do you think about comedy? Kind of two part question. How do you think about comedy in relationship to that? And then also comedy in the sense that we think of with Shakespearean comedy, which is like, oh, all's well that ends well. Like it's comedic in that we can provide coupling like heteronormative resolution, but also just like a smiley, happy, upbeat feeling. Feeling at the end. So comedy makes you laugh. Sure. But comedy also is generically, we're instructed that it's made to reassure us about the promise of a happy ending.
- [09:31]
Ben Mangram
I kind of have a pragmatic approach to the genre, to comedy or the comic. I find its uses and I make claims about those usages. And in some ways, you know, I don't always distinguish between say like a kind of bleak satire and an upbeat like happy ending and a romantic comedy if there are, you know, at one point I used the word homologies, if there are kind of like similarities in function or similarities in form and structure between those two things. So I think that that's a. I anticipate criticism of that approach.
- [10:12]
John Plotz
Yeah, I get it. I really appreciate how you, how you frame it that way. I mean, so I'm writing a book about manipian satire and manipian satire, like asks you to be, you know, it tries to make sharper, a sharper, smaller category. But I appreciate your point that you can't like the buckets overflow. And there is a good way. I do think you're right to see bleakness and happiness as perhaps like, you know, like making use of the same cultural repertoires. And can I just pick up on a word you use? Because I think it's. It might be crucial for, for the point you're making, which is the word coupling. And so that's a romantic comedy word in ways that we all recognize from like Midsummer Night's Dream. Right. It's just like the pachinko machine of comedy. Like that you can put hetero, literally heterogeneous units together to form heterosexual pairs. Right. And I hear you saying that the coupling impulse when you have the machine and the human is actually subtler and more interesting than that. In a way, I think you're arguing for queering it because you're saying that we can think about a different kind of hetero, which is the coupling of human and machine, which is pretty different from the coupling of man and woman. But in, I don't know, like a movie like her, let's say the Scarlett Johansson figure is like, coupled with the Joaquin Phoenix figure in a way that is like computer meets human, but it's also, you know, sexy male lead, sexy female lead. So, so can you say more about the way the word coupling is like deconstructed there or also or maybe reconstituted in this, in these machine human dyads that you're writing about?
- [11:57]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, that's a great question. So there's, there are a few things to say about, about that. First, you know, I briefly cite Caroline Levine's argument about happy endings, that there's a. There's a kind of way in which happy endings have been misunderstood, that they can be sort of oversimplified. And with this point, and I try to think about the ways that there are tensions or contradictions or conflicts contained within happy endings. They sometimes seem neater than they are. And so there is a kind of complexity there that sometimes our knee jerk reaction to a generic trope might allow. So that's one point to make. But the other point, and this picks up on the sort of. The point you were trying to make about the queering of the coupling as a trope is really central actually to the argument because I make this claim early in the introduction that in some ways the computer often occupies this really queer role in the 20th century. It's 20th century cultural history. It's often a challenge. It presents itself initially as a kind of challenge to a couple's union. For example, it's the kind of antithesis of the happy couple. This is really prominent for most of the desk set, both the film and the play, that the computer is a kind of threat to the happy couple. But what happens at the end is that the computer becomes assimilated within the couple. And I think that assimilation, that joining with the happy couple actually changes the nature of the couple in this kind of plot structure, such that what seems at first glance to be a kind of heteronormative or traditional plot structure is actually much more complicated and, and you know, in several senses of the word queer, you know, non normative. But also I talk a good bit in the book about the, you know, the so called antisocial thesis in queer theory and how the computer is often perceived as antisocial. Right? It challenges social norms, it unravels social bonds. This is the threat of computational technology, social media, et cetera. And so there's a kind of way in which often in the computer's cultural history, it's presented as antisocial. And yet in some comedies, by no means all. In some comedies, there's also a kind of assimilation of the computer within, you know, as a kind of third term right in the couple. And I think that's a really intriguing dynamic that I try to analyze from different.
- [14:36]
John Plotz
I'm actually. I forget if you write about it, I don't think you do, but I'm thinking about the ending of War Games with how about a nice game of chess? You know, like the warmth of that. And there is, if you remember, there is like a heterosexual coupler there. Because I think, isn't it Ione sky is like hanging around to be the girlfriend? But, you know, the point is, like the computer and Matthew Broderick have come back on terms and that the idea is that they'll sit down and play chess together, which is certainly the ultimate, like, cozy comfort ending. Instead of nuclear war, why don't we play chess? Yeah, that's really interesting. So can I just push on this a little bit more to unpack? Because when we think about coupling in this world, I feel in this. This sphere of discourse, I feel like there is a big set of terms which is activated by Donna Haraway in the Cyborg Manifesto. And that is the idea of the kind of affordances of always already cyborg humanity. And I noticed you don't mention Haraway in the book. You have a footnote about Hales, who I think of as kind of, you know, a student of Haraway, let's say, like, coming off of Haraway's work. But yeah, it just feels like a really interesting set of terms that Haraway activates to think about the chimeric in that technical sense, chimera, like the melange issue, where coupling is something that is always about internalized affordances that technology allows us. So in the Stone Age, people had a huli and axes and the axe could change what they did. And then people had the wheel and the wheel could change what they did. So they became wheel men. And now, you know, I mean, in the high, you know, the Haraway argument is that, like, feminism is going to be misplaced if it goes for a natural, authentic, proto feminine essence that precedes the machine. We need to figure out what feminism has to say about the fact that we're all, you know, like, because I'm wearing an apple watch as well as glasses, like that we're all implicated in this coupling, you know, within personhood, rather than between persons. So, yeah, about that.
- [16:46]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, So I. Yeah, several things. So the first, the first sort of point, I guess is that when I say that comedy is a genre for, you know, our experience of computing, I really do mean a genre, not the only genre. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, there are sort of forms of, of science fiction. There are sort of, we might say, modes like the sublime that are really crucial and important. There's dystopian, you know, plot structures and such that are, that are also important. So I guess I think of Haraway's argument. I see absolutely the point you're making and agree with it that Haraway's account of that kind of like the modern human as cyborg is a kind of coupling that's consistent with that metaphor that I'm drawing out throughout the book. I agree with that completely. I guess I sort of had thought that the kind of better genre, generic forms for the dynamics that Haraway is interested in are not comedy, but perhaps I'm wrong. Nothing immediately comes to mind as a kind of Haraway esque kind of literary text or film that is also comic. But maybe some of the Black Mirror episodes that are, as you've mentioned, kind of darkly satirical, maybe those are good examples and that would be a kind of phenomenon that needs. That I don't talk about, that should be talked about.
- [18:22]
John Plotz
Yeah, no, that's an interesting point. And then as you say that since we've sort of. One of the things that's really cool about your work is that you put together the mid 20th century and you know, the modern moment, the contemporary moment. So that in the case of Black Mirror, you would put it together with the Twilight Zone. So maybe there are Twilight Zone episodes and I don't, I mean, I'm not thinking of them either, but, but I did have a. I did have a thought that I wanted to kind of, you know, hear your thoughts about, which is there's a, you know, there's like various ways to run the sort of comic sci fi genealogy. So you could think about, you know, like all those Stanislaw Lim stories in the Siberia ad, which I feel like those are maybe get at the Haraway thing because all of the seeming computers turn out always to be humans. Like, I don't know if you remember how the structure of those stories is that people are always disguising themselves as computers because they think they're surrounded by computers only to discover that the other computers are also in fact human beings. So I feel like Lem is maybe on one side of that, But I actually was wondering, you know, Star Trek itself is kind of a comedy, I suppose, certainly in its resolution structure and, and also its coupling of Trek, of Spock and Kirk. I mean, you know, people who write slash fiction are right to discern that. I think, you know, Spock and Kirk are some kind of, you know.
- [19:45]
Ben Mangram
Couple.
- [19:45]
John Plotz
Yeah, couple. They're a couple. Whether you want to call it a sexual couple or not, they're a couple. But, but, you know, then I was thinking about Doctor who, but the one I really landed on, and I wondered if you just wanted to talk about it, but if you don't, that's fine. Would be Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I actually think is a really deep set of books. I mean, they're incredibly funny, they're incredibly popular. But you know, like, among other things, the premise is that the, that the Earth itself is a computer. You know, like everything we are and what we do is designed to produce the answer 42.
- [20:19]
Ben Mangram
You know, that is programmed by mice.
- [20:22]
John Plotz
Program by, by hyper intelligent mice and like, you know, incarnated in whales. And at one point somebody says, well, I think the actual question is what is 8 times 7? And the answer is good. Very. Yeah. But in any case, I mean, yes, it's, it's comedic in that sense, but also I feel like it's sort of deep about that fear that Katherine Hales also has of like, you know, we are post human, like in other words, that the things we think of as distinct from the computational. Maybe not, maybe not, you know, maybe we're actually like engulfed in that without accepting it or realizing it.
- [21:01]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's fantastic. I mean, so I don't talk about, I've only read the first.
- [21:08]
John Plotz
I think if you've read the first one, you've got it. I mean, the rest is just iteration. But.
- [21:13]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, yeah, right. And I. So I mean, this is probably another limitation of the book, which is that it is an Americanist book.
- [21:21]
John Plotz
That's totally fair. Yes.
- [21:22]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, I loved that novel when I read it. I mean, I think it's hilarious and is a great example of the phenomenon generally that I'm talking about. I mean, I think. Yeah. I mean, again, this idea of coupling is so central to the book for the very reason you're identifying, which is that in some ways there's a kind of false binary. I think no one would really hold to this if they were pressed to do so. But that, you know, between the human and the machine. Right, between the human and the computer. And that the, the image of coupling is actually one form for that, you know, coming together of those two supposed opposites or those two supposed, you know, you know, sides, binary. And, you know, and I think nobody's perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, it's a, it's a way of like making legible, making intelligible. This thing that we all know, which is that our lives are so closely bound up with or entangled with technology, with computing technology, that's my interest, but other forms of technology too. And how do we make sense of that? Or can we make sense of that? Comedy is one way of doing that.
- [22:39]
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- [24:08]
John Plotz
Yeah, so maybe I could connect this like. Okay, just to push on this idea of like the affordances of technology and the way that the dyad represents, you know, a kind of comforting oversimplification that allows us to have like our pure humanness over there and then the machine age over there. And I really, I actually like your point about this being an American story because a lot of my examples are British or Czech. Like I was thinking a lot about Karel Czapek's R U R or Stanislaw Lem is Polish and they're not very American. They don't have that kind of Leo Marx machine in the garden kind of optimism. I Mean, I think it's interesting. I mean, we could talk about this how, like, the first science fiction stories are those Edison ads, those. The Steam man of the prairies in the 1860s. You know, like, there are these visions that, like, being a good settler, Colonial American, means like, having machines, like, at your beck and call.
- [25:09]
Ben Mangram
Right? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, so I talk about the Steam man of the Prairies and some other.
- [25:15]
John Plotz
Oh, shoot, I forgot I missed that. You did. I. Sorry. I look forward to reading it. Yeah.
- [25:18]
Ben Mangram
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in the. In the first. The first chapter, I mean, I'm really interested in those kind of, like, early robots. Really. I mean, you know, pre. I guess you could call them pre robots or proto robots. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of my interests in that is exactly as you're saying that that, you know, it kind of provides a prehistory that that computing technology, when it's developed in the 40s and 50s, really inherits the norms and conventions around the robot. Right. And the robots is a use object. You know, the Steam man of the Prairies. The robot in that. In that dime novel is. Yeah, I mean, it's a use object for settling the West. Right. But it. But interesting. One of my claims in that chapter that discusses these sort of proto robot figures is that these early robots often become comic through their proximity to racial discourse. To that. In other words, like the menstrual stage is a kind of analog that really feeds into early depictions of this use object, the robot, and makes it comic. So the Steam man of the Prairies not only has sort of blackened skin, but also kind of exaggerated minstrel figures, facial figures, for example. And there are lots of other robots in. Like the wizard of Oz, for example, TikTok. And the wizard of Oz is a comic figure. And one of my arguments is that there's a kind of similarity between TikTok's comic performances and the minstrel stage performances contemporaneous to the novels.
- [26:56]
John Plotz
That maybe gets me to this question of critique, how you see critique as baked into the genre. Not baked in, because it seems to me you talk about a couple of different things. You talk about, like, you have a line late in which you say that this genericity, like, of the comic of the computation provides forms for making a computationally mediated social world seem more habitable, even as it also provides for criticizing and objecting to that world. And I get that as a double claim, but can you unpack it a little bit more? Because it seems to me that habitability goes towards norming and criticizing and objecting goes towards estranging. You know, it goes towards.
- [27:41]
Ben Mangram
So, right, yeah, yeah. So there's a. I'm making an argument that. That has been made about irony, the idea that irony is trans. Ideological. And I'm making a similar argument sort of about this genre of experience, this various sort of intersections between comedy and computation, which is that those intersections often set up types of critique. So, for example, one common phenomenon that I analyze in a chapter on authenticity is what I call the great tech industrial joke. So it's this idea that there's this gap between the kind of overinflated big claims, you know, utopian claims that tech companies often make about their products and the actual realities of what those products achieve. The results, the, you know, whether technical or social, that there's this gap between those two, and there's a kind of setup there that makes that gap absurd and sometimes quite funny. And that's also a setup for a critique. Right. So I describe, like, Dave Edgar's work as, in this vein, that it, you know, kind of takes a certain joke structure as really central to the ways in the every. And the circle he's depicting technology. Right. The large tech corporation. And there are lots of other examples I discuss in that chapter. So in other words, I was just.
- [29:14]
John Plotz
Looking to see if you talked about Gary Larson's the Far side, because it seems to be. You just described, like, every Far side joke ever.
- [29:21]
Ben Mangram
That's a great example, too. Yeah, yeah. But it also, I think, you know, so even as that's a phenomenon that, you know, has at bars, a kind of joke structure for setting up critiques, you know, there are also other ways in which, you know, jokes are really central to making corporate interests palatable.
- [29:40]
John Plotz
That's the habitability point. Right. And. Yeah, and I've heard people make this argument about irony as well, not just comedy, that it's anesthetizing or something, you know, that you're. Yeah, absolutely. You know, there's an argument about, like, Swiftian irony, that it's always on the side of the powerful. Basically, you know, that it's just mocking. Mocking novelty, Mocking difference. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I mean, I recognize that it's like.
- [30:05]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, yeah, I guess I would say. I guess I would say always is too strong.
- [30:08]
John Plotz
Right, Yeah, I agree with that point.
- [30:10]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I'm trying to. I'm trying to first of all, like, describe phenomena as I understand them, and in some instances, I move into critique. But I think the method, like. Like, I'M I'm. When I'm talking about, for example, Edgar's novels that are, you know, I think, really funny and really interesting, but, you know, sometimes they're or they are providing, as I was saying just a second ago, they're using a kind of joke structure to. To articulate a critique of. Of Big Tech. But I'm describing that critique. Right. And. And other moments, I'm just describing the ways that. That, you know, Apple, the tech corporation, uses humor as a sort of way of making its technology palatable.
- [30:54]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [30:55]
Ben Mangram
And so in terms of. What I'm trying to say is my approach is first description and only sometimes critique, but within the phenomena I'm describing, there's lots of critique.
- [31:06]
John Plotz
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Can I ask you another. To come back to this sort of historicity question and like, you know, the knowledge worker, the vulnerable knowledge worker, it's like sort of the moment we're at right now with AI, I guess. Like, how much do you think. What did you discover that makes you think that what we're looking at in the culture is a similar phenomenon of novelty, which always kind of provokes a particular sort of cultural reaction. And how much is there? What I think I want to say this is Michael Lewis's phrase, the new new. You know, like, in other words, how much of the novelty of the 50s gets reiterated in the novelty of the 2000 and 20s and provokes structurally comparable reactions versus how much is really different? I loved your reading of the John saybrook article in 1994, the interview with Bill Gates. I went back and read the whole thing. I loved it. And there's that realization that Bill Gates represents the end of the nerd as we know it, because essentially not the word's gonna disappear, but it's become valorized. We're all nerds now. And that, like, that's such a great insight. Like, that does feel like a real. That's a new new. So you get what I'm asking, How much is new?
- [32:27]
Ben Mangram
I do, yeah.
- [32:28]
John Plotz
How much is just like the same old new and how much is a new new?
- [32:31]
Ben Mangram
Yeah. So the answer. It's a great question. I think the answer is messy because, you know, one of the claims that at the end of the book, I look at this Netflix series in which.
- [32:41]
John Plotz
I have the title.
- [32:43]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, yeah.
- [32:44]
John Plotz
The first romantic comedy written entirely by bots. Is that what it's called?
- [32:48]
Ben Mangram
Right. And the Written Entirely by bot series that Netflix produced is really great. I think it's super interesting, really funny. But also the series now it just seems outmoded because the AI that's now available to us is so much better than the sort of. Yeah. Than the jokes that are, you know, sort of central to the series. So. So the idea of the series, for those who haven't seen it is, is that, you know, AI supposedly wrote a script for, produced the animations for, and also voiced the characters in this, this romantic comedy. Or there is also a horror film. There are Christmas specials there, there's several. And, and they're atrocious. They're so bad, but they're so bad that they're funny. And it turns out that a comedian, you know, is faking this sort of AI voice, but.
- [33:39]
John Plotz
Well, that's a Stanislale Lem joke, by the way. That is the joke. Yeah, yeah, Fake robot. Like I'm a fake fake. I'm real because I'm a fake fake. Yeah, that's, that's his entire idea with the Siberia. Yeah.
- [33:51]
Ben Mangram
Right. Which touches on this sort of idea of authenticity too, which is really interesting. But yeah, the reason I'm talking about this example is just that, you know, in some ways, like the reference of these comedies go out, become outmoded really quickly. Right. So there's like jokes and you've got mail about sex and dial up Internet, you know, and I think, I think, you know, my undergraduates wouldn't get the joke right.
- [34:15]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [34:15]
Ben Mangram
And I think there's a way in which, in some ways, some forms of, some, some of the phenomena that, you know, are sort of bubbling up in our, in the computer's cultural history, they just. That bubble pops really, you know, it doesn't last very long. But in other, other ways there are kinds of like strands or ideas that are, I think, are, are abiding or really sort of constant. So I mean, again, we've used the word authenticity. That's a really prominent sort of feature of my argument that what philosophers call an ethics of authenticity is central to this, towards our attitudes about computing, towards our critiques of it. And so, you know, it's a both and answer. Like on the one hand there are sort of jokes, forms of comedy that become obsolete really quickly. And on the other hand there's a, I think a kind of structures of feeling, to use Raymond Williams term, that, you know, really stays with us, you know, throughout the, from the 50s to the present, that there's a lot of continuity between the 50s and, and the present moment because there are certain kinds of, again, structures of feeling that are themselves continuous between those moments.
- [35:31]
John Plotz
So do you like that book by someone whose name I truly don't know how to pronounce. I think Chise Rone is the author. But Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, the thing I like from it is that familiar with it. Oh, yeah. Well, so the concept that I got from it, which I bet appears. You will tell me other places you've read a version of it, but it's the science fictionalization of everyday life is the phrase that he uses. And the point he makes there is that people have turned to science fiction in a way for comfort, because there's like, so much cultural lag in most of our cultural products that only science fiction allows us to see the present that we're truly inhabiting. So in other words, the science fictionalization of everyday life is that like. Yeah, given how AI actually operates and given how the affordances of like, you know, Google Glass and all that actually operate, we're living inside what to our past self would seem like science fiction. Therefore, we need science fiction to give us the. The. The vocabulary just to describe the real.
- [36:36]
Ben Mangram
Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, that's a really interesting claim. Yeah. I mean, I do think that there's this kind of, like, striving or groping after language for making intelligible this experience, this kind of like, structure of experience that we have, which is, you know, in some ways, like, you know, we're. Each new crop of undergraduates has a kind of different vernacular for talking about their. Their technological experience. Right. Like, we're. And yeah, those of us who are not involved in, in like, that community, like, we just. We don't always know how to converse. Right. And so there's this kind of dynamic in which, like, we're constantly grasping for language to make sense of the. The experience. And yeah, in some ways the language.
- [37:20]
John Plotz
Is like, how archaic. Yeah, no, I love that point because, like, how archaic email seems to them. Like, they email with us because they know it's their job, but they think of it as the equivalent of sending us telegrams or something. Yeah, it's totally fascinating. Like, I feel like I'm meeting them on their terms and they're just like, okay, geezer, I'll grab a quill pen. Yeah, so that's okay. But. So. But again, I kind of want to ask a question. The question then is the new, new. The new newness of that. So is that about, like, is that just what all generations are like, or are we actually at some kind of cusp where. Oh, yeah, the genres are faster or, you know, are struggling to adapt Precisely because, like, you know, the. You know, the jumps are just much larger and much quicker than they used to be.
- [38:14]
Ben Mangram
Yeah. So one of my. One of my claims about obsolescence that I try to develop in the last section of the book is that in some ways, computing technology has created this kind of phenomenological obsolescence as a structure of experience. That. Which is just to say, like, we're, you know, the ways we make sense of our everyday life, they become obsolete, increasingly sort of faster, I think, as a result of the speed and rapidity of change in. In the technological moment that we inhabit. That, in other words, computing technology, AI, these kinds of technologies are just, you know, accelerating the obsolescence of our phenomenological categories, you know, the ways we make sense of our experience. At the same time, you know, while that is true, while I do think that, like, the pace of change is faster and that the sort of genres and tools, cultural tools we have for making sense of that change, you know, become obsolete quicker, while I think that's true, I also think that there's a kind of continuity between that fact and just modernity itself. That in some ways, you know, modernity is also this process of, on the one hand, creating sort of new forms of relating to one another, new forms of community, and at the same time, also constantly creating new forms of alienation from one another.
- [39:39]
John Plotz
And.
- [39:40]
Ben Mangram
And that. That the computer is just a technology that's continuous with that much older, modern.
- [39:45]
John Plotz
Yeah, yeah. So, like, I haven't gone back to Leo Marx, who, I guess was also an MIT professor, come to think of it, for a long time, but maybe, like, the new version of the machine in the garden is like, the machine is the garden. You know, like, it's just like with generational change, these things get subsumed. And the thing we used to think of as waste is now part of wilderness. Yeah, that's a really. I mean, that's a. That's a deep question. I feel like it's a hard one to know how to think about because we have these real challenges that we're facing that science fiction and everybody else is trying to figure out, you know, climate change and the Anthropocene and the anthropogenic nature of our alterations, and yet. Yeah, yeah, I see why obsolescence is an important category for you.
- [40:26]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just, I guess as an aside to what you were just saying, you know, natural imagery, sort of the language of the natural is a central kind of term for a lot of. A lot of computing, a lot of big tech corporations like, you know, Apple often sort of describes its, its operating system as a, as a kind of like, as a garden, as a kind of like tall wall natural space that it curates. There are lots of other examples about sort of technology and the natural intersecting or interfacing with one another that, that we could talk about. But, but I think one reason for this has to do with this real concern with addressing this angst about authenticity, that technology makes our lives inauthentic. And so in some ways, one among many reasons for this pull toward the natural in tech culture, I think has to do with this attempt to re authenticate or to give authenticity to our experience.
- [41:30]
John Plotz
That's actually perfect because it's given me. I just thought of a recallable book that I'm going to talk about, which is so much about that. Or like the astroturfing of organic imagery for legitimation of computer science. That's a really fascinating point. So, Ben, unless there's other big topics that you wanted to get to, I think this makes a great moment to turn towards the final part of our discussion, which is the recallable book where I ask you, based on this conversation, are there other books that you would recommend to our listeners who've made it this far? What books might they also find interesting?
- [42:09]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, so there's a great book, Elif Bataman, the Idiot, which is really, I think it's Bataman's first novel and it's a fantastic comic novel that among other things, is sort of a retrospective about encountering email in college for the first time. The protagonist sort of has an email correspondence love affair with an older undergraduate. And, you know, it's a novel that looks back on the, you know, early days of email. In some ways nostalgic for that moment, in other ways sort of laughing at what feels nostalgic about it. It's a fantastic book. Especially the first half is really funny. And yeah, just does a, you know, sort of brings in the different elements we've been talking about today in lots of different ways. Alienation, connection. Right, that kind of dialectic. Also, you know, humor for making sense of things. But also in some ways the humor is a symptom of the alienation of the experience too. So there are sort of really complicated dynamics in the novel that are salient to what we've been discussing.
- [43:20]
John Plotz
Okay, so that's great. So now I'm going to pivot again because I was actually going to recommend a novel that I don't even really think is a great novel, but plowing the Dark by Richard Powers from 2000, which is about someone who goes to Seattle to work on creating, like, a new immersive 3D virtual ecosystem, which is all about, like a new garden, kind of like oryx and crake, actually like that image that you have to start again in the garden. But. But you're putting it in terms of nostalgia for email brings me back to a book that we've actually argued a lot about on the podcast, including in our most recent episode about Hannah Arendt, which. Which is Sally Rooney. Conversations with Friends. Wait, Conversations with Friends or Conversations between Friends? No, conversations with Friends. Right, but. But. Or normal people. Both of those two first novels. Let me make sure I have. Yeah. Conversation with Friends, in which, you know, email and texting is the new normative medium of exchange and people. It became, I think, in a fascinating way, a litmus test that some people read it as. Oh, there's this creepy new norm of exchange, which ultimately is depersonalizing and empties out subjectivity. But I think in the novel, it's very clear that it's more like the new generation of young people in the novel are struggling to figure out how personhood gets reconstituted with this new affordance of email. So it's not super funny, but it is a romantic comedy, I suppose, in that it ends well. And so. So, yeah, I don't. I like that point. I really like the point of thinking of email as being one of those kind of visible, encapsulated technologies that we can use as like a litmus test for. For how these things are happening in a way that we really can't, let's say, you know, a large language model, AI, because we don't have the. We can't get our feet around, you know, we can't get our heads around it yet.
- [45:17]
Ben Mangram
Right, Right. Yeah.
- [45:19]
John Plotz
Okay. Well, Ben, nothing remains at this point, but just to thank you so much for a great conversation. And again, the book is the Comedy of Computation, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence. Oh, wow. And we didn't. We didn't even talk about Dr. Strangelove one time. But it's a fantastic book, just out from Stanford University Press. And thanks so much for coming on.
- [45:41]
Ben Mangram
Yeah, thanks again for having me.
- [45:43]
John Plotz
Great. And thank you all for listening. Recall this book is the creation of John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferri. Sound editing is by Kamiyah Bagla, and music comes from a song by Eric Chaslow and Barbara Cassidy. We gratefully acknowledge support from Brandeis University and its Mandel center for the Humanities. We always want to hear from you with your comments, criticisms or suggestions for future episodes. Finally, if you enjoyed today's show, please forward it to five people or write a review and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.