When the words London and underground come together, the first thing that comes to most of our minds, naturally, is the London Underground. But though it may enjoy the honorable distinction of the world’s first railway to run below the streets, the stalwart Tube is hardly the only thing buried below the city — and far indeed from the oldest. The video above makes a journey through various subterranean strata, starting with the paving stone and continuing through the soil, electric cables, and gas pipelines beneath. From there, things get Roman.
First comes the Billingsgate Roman House and Baths and the Roman amphitheater, two preserved places from what was once called Londinium. Below that level run several now-underground rivers, just above the depth of Winston Churchill’s private bunker, which is now maintained as a museum.
Farther down, at a depth of 66 feet, we find the remains of London’s tube system — not the Tube, but the pneumatic tube, a nineteenth-century technology that could fire encapsulated letters from one part of the city to another. More effective and longer lived was the later, more deeply installed London Post Office Railway, which was used to make deliveries until 2003.
At 79 feet underground, we finally meet with the Underground — or at least the first and shallowest of its eleven lines. The Tube has long become an essential part of the lives of most Londoners, but around the same depth exists another facility known to relatively few: the Camden catacombs, a system of underground passages once used to stable the horses who worked on the railways. Further down are the network of World War II-era “deep shelters,” one of which hosted the planning of D‑Day; below them is a still-functional facility instrumental to the defeat of different enemies, typhus and cholera. That would be London’s sewer system, for which we should spare a thought if we’ve ever walked along the Thames and appreciated the fact that it no longer stinks.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If the United States of America is the Roman empire of our time, surely it must have an equivalent of the Colosseum. A year ago, you could’ve heard a wide variety of speculations as to what structure that could possibly be. Today, many of us would simply respond with “the Sphere,” especially if we happen to be think-piece writers. Since it opened last September, Sphere — to use its proper, article-free brand name — has inspired more than a few reflections on what it says about the intersection of technology and culture here in the twenty-first century, not to mention the considerable ambition and expense of its design and construction.
A $2.3 billion dome whose interior and exterior are both enormous screens — visible, one often hears, even from outer space — Sphere would hardly make sense anywhere in America but Las Vegas, where it makes a good deal of sense indeed. Its location has also made possible such irresistible headlines as “Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas,” below which the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel gets into the details of this “architectural embodiment of ridiculousness,” including its surprising origin: “According to James Dolan, the entertainment mogul who financed the Sphere, the inspiration for the building came from ‘The Veldt,’ a 1950 short story by Ray Bradbury” involving a family house with giant screens for walls that can render whatever the children imagine.
Naturally, the kids get hooked, and when Mom and Dad try to intervene, the screens send forth a pack of lions to eat them. “Though the Sphere’s marketing pitch doesn’t explicitly mention being mauled by big digital cats,” Warzel writes, “I got the notion that at least part of the allure of coming to the Sphere is a desire to be overwhelmed.” How, exactly, the venue marshals its advanced technology to do that overwhelming is explained in the MegaBuilds video at the top of the post. With its form not quite like any event space built in human history, it necessitated the invention of everything from a custom camera system to audio-permeable screen surfaces, none of which came cheap.
Hence the cost of seeing a show at Sphere, whether it be the Darren Aronofsky’s “docu-film” Postcard from Earth, U2’s Achtung Baby-based residency earlier this year, or the now-showing Dead & Company, which revives not just the Grateful Dead in their various incarnations over the decades, but also the storied venues in which they played. Its viewers could hardly fail to be astonished by the sheer spectacle, even if they know nothing of the Dead’s colorful history. All of them will no doubt be moved to consider history itself: that of humanity, technology, and civilization, all of which has led up to this rare thing Warzel calls “a brand-new, non-pharmaceutical sensory experience.” Say what you will about the overstimulation and excess represented by Sphere; if you can blow a Deadhead’s mind, you’re definitely on to something.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Say you were a fan of Steven Spielberg’s moving coming-of-age drama Empire of the Sun, set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II and starring a young Christian Bale. Say you read the autobiographical novel on which that film is based, written by one J.G. Ballard. Say you enjoyed it so much, you decided to read more of the author’s work, like, say, 1973’s Crash, a novel about people who develop a sexual fetish around wounds sustained in staged automobile accidents. Or you pick up its predecessor, The Atrocity Exhibition, a book William S. Burroughs described as stirring “sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn.” Or perhaps you stumble upon Concrete Island, a warped take on Defoe that strands a wealthy architect and his Jaguar on a highway intersection.
You may experience some dissonance. Who was this Ballard? A realist chronicler of 20th century horrors; perverse explorer of—in Burroughs’ words—“the nonsexual roots of sexuality”; sci-fi satirist of the bleak post-industrial wastelands of modernity? He was all of these, and more. Ballard was a brilliant futurist and his dystopian novels and short stories anticipated the 80s cyberpunk of William Gibson, exploring with a twisted sense of humor what Jean Lyotard famously dubbed in 1979 The Postmodern Condition: a state of ideological, scientific, personal, and social disintegration under the reign of a technocratic, hypercapitalist, “computerized society.” Ballard had his own term for it: “media landscape,” and his dark visions of the future often correspond to the virtual world we inhabit today.
In addition to his fictional creations, Ballard made several disturbingly accurate predictions in interviews he gave over the decades (collected in a book titled Extreme Metaphors). In 1987, with the film adaptation of Empire of the Sun just on the horizon and “his most extreme work Crash re-released in the USA to warmer reaction,” he gave an interview to I‑D magazine in which he predicted the internet as “invisible streams of data pulsing down lines to produce an invisible loom of world commerce and information.” This may not seem especially prescient (see, for example, E.M. Forster’s 1909 “The Machine Stops” for a chilling futuristic scenario much further ahead of its time). But Ballard went on to describe in detail the rise of the Youtube celebrity:
Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.
The themes of celebrity obsession and technologically constructed realities resonate in almost all of Ballard’s work and thought, and ten years earlier, in an essay for Vogue, he described in detail the spread of social media and its totalizing effects on our lives. In the technological future, he wrote, “each of us will be both star and supporting player.”
Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.
Though Ballard thought in terms of film and television—and though we ourselves play the role of the selecting computer in his scenario—this description almost perfectly captures the behavior of the average user of Facebook, Instagram, etc. (See Ballard in the interview clip above discuss further “the possibilities of genuinely interactive virtual reality” and his theory of the 50s as the “blueprint” of modern technological culture and the “suburbanization” of reality.) In addition to the Vogue essay, Ballard wrote a 1977 short story called “The Intensive Care Unit,” in which—writes the site Ballardian—“ordinances are in place to prevent people from meeting in person. All interaction is mediated through personal cameras and TV screens.”
So what did Ballard, who died in 2009, think of the post-internet world he lived to see and experience? He discussed the subject in 2003 in an interview with radical publisher V. Vale (who re-issued The Atrocity Exhibition). “Now everybody can document themselves in a way that was inconceivable 30, 40, 50 years ago,” Ballard notes, “I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for ‘reality’—for ordinary reality. It’s very difficult to find the ‘real,’ because the environment is totally manufactured.” Like Jean Baudrillard, another prescient theorist of postmodernity, Ballard saw this loss of the “real” coming many decades ago. As he told I‑D in 1987, “in the media landscape it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.”
Artificial intelligence seems to have become, as Michael Lewis labeled a previous chapter in the recent history of technology, the new new thing. But human anxieties about it are, if not an old old thing, then at least part of a tradition longer than we may expect. For vivid evidence, look no further than Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which brought the very first cinematic depiction of artificial intelligence to theaters in 1927. It “imagines a future cleaved in two, where the affluent from lofty skyscrapers rule over a subterranean caste of laborers,” writes Synapse Analytics’ Omar Abo Mosallam. “The class tension is so palpable that the invention of a Maschinenmensch (a robot capable of work) upends the social order.”
The sheer tirelessness of the Maschinenmensch “sows havoc in the city”; later, after it takes on the form of a young woman called Maria — a transformation you can watch in the clip above — it “incites workers to rise up and destroy the machines that keep the city functioning. Here, there is a suggestion to associate this new invention with an unraveling of the social order.” This robot, which Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw describes as “a brilliant eroticization and fetishization of modern technology,” has long been Metropolis’ signature figure, more iconic than HAL, Data, and WALL‑E put together.
Still, those characters all rate mentions of their own in the articles reviewing the history of AI in the movies recently published by the BFI, RTÉ, Pictory, and other outlets besides. The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alien, Blade Runner (and even more so its sequel Blade Runner 2049), Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, and Ex Machina. Not all of these pictures present their artificially intelligent characters primarily as existential threats to the existing order; the BFI’s Georgina Guthrie highlights video essayist-turned-auteur Kogonada’s After Yang as an example that treats the role of AI could assume in society as a much more complex — indeed, much more human — matter.
From Metropolis to After Yang, as RTÉ’s Alan Smeaton points out, “AI is usually portrayed in movies in a robotic or humanoid-like fashion, presumably because we can easily relate to humanoid and robotic forms.” But as the public has come to understand over the past few years, we can perceive a technology as potentially or actually intelligent even it doesn’t resemble a human being. Perhaps the age of the fearsome mechanical Art Deco gynoid will never come to pass, but we now feel more keenly than ever both the seductiveness and the threat of Metropolis’ Maschinenmensch — or, as it was named in the original on which the film was based, Futura.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Though that line probably originated with a Canadian novelist called Grant Allen, it’s long been popularly attributed to his more colorful nineteenth-century contemporary Mark Twain. It isn’t hard to understand why it now has so much traction as a social media-ready quote, though during much of the period between Allen’s day and our own, many must have found it practically unintelligible. The industrialized world of the twentieth century attempted to make education and schooling synonymous, an ambition sufficiently wrongheaded that, by the nineteen-eighties, no less powerful a mind than Isaac Asimov was lamenting it on national television.
“In the old days you used to have tutors for children,” Asimov tells Bill Moyers in a 1988 World of Ideas interview. “But how many people could afford to hire a pedagogue? Most children went uneducated. Then we reached the point where it was absolutely necessary to educate everybody. The only way we could do it is to have one teacher for a great many students and, in order to organize the situation properly, we gave them a curriculum to teach from.” And yet “the number of teachers is far greater than the number of good teachers.” The ideal solution, personal tutors for all, would be made possible by personal computers, “each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers.”
At the time, this wasn’t an obvious future for non-science-fiction-visionaries to imagine. “Well, what if I want to learn only about baseball?” asks a faintly skeptical Moyers. “You learn all you want about baseball,” Asimov replies, “because the more you learn about baseball the more you might grow interested in mathematics to try to figure out what they mean by those earned run averages and the batting averages and so on. You might, in the end, become more interested in math than baseball if you follow your own bent.” And indeed, similarly equipped with a personal-computer-as-tutor, “someone who is interested in mathematics may suddenly find himself very enticed by the problem of how you throw a curve ball.”
The trouble was how to get every household a computer, which was still seen by many in 1988 as an extravagant, not necessarily useful purchase. Three and a half decades later, you see a computer in the hand of nearly every man, woman, and child in the developed countries (and many developing ones as well). This is the technological reality that gave rise to Khan Academy, which offers free online education in math, sciences, literature, history, and much else besides. In the interview clip above, its founder Sal Khan remembers how, when his internet-tutoring project was first gaining momentum, it occurred to him that “maybe we’re in the right moment in history that something like this could become what Isaac Asimov envisioned.”
More recently, Khan has been promoting the educational use of a technology at the edge of even Asimov’s vision. Just days ago, he published the book Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) and made a video with his teenage son demonstrating how the latest version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — sounding, it must be said, uncannily like Scarlett Johansson in the now-prophetic-seeming Her — can act as a geometry tutor. Not that it works only, or even primarily, for kids in school: “That’s another trouble with education as we now have it,” as Asimov says. “It is for the young, and people think of education as something that they can finish.” We may be as relieved as generations past when our schooling ends, but now we have no excuse ever to finish our education.
Find a transcript of Asimov and Moyers’ conversation here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Just a couple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted out a video promoting, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created.” The response has been overwhelming, and overwhelmingly negative: for many viewers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crushing a heap of musical instruments, art supplies, and vintage entertainment into a single tablet inadvertently articulated a discomfort they’ve long felt with technology’s direction in the past couple of decades. As the novelist Hari Kunzru put it, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized branded slab is pretty much where the tech industry is at in 2024.”
One wonders whether this would have surprised Aldous Huxley. He understood, as he explains in the 1961 BBC interview above, that “if you plant the seed of applied science or technology, it proceeds to grow, and it grows according to the laws of its own being. And the laws of its being are not necessarily the same as the laws of our being.”
Even six decades ago, he and certain others had the sense, which has since become fairly common, that “man is being subjected to his own inventions, that he is now the victim of his own technology”; that “the development of recent social and scientific history has created a world in which man seems to be made for technology rather than the other way around.”
Having written his acclaimed dystopian novel Brave New Worldthirty years earlier, Huxley was established as a seer of possible technology-driven totalitarian futures. He understood that “we are a little reluctant to embark upon technology, to allow technology to take over,” but that, “in the long run, we generally succumb,” allowing ourselves to be mastered by our own creations. In this, he resembles the Julia of Byron’s Don Juan, who, “whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’ – consented.” Huxley also knew that “it is possible to make people content with their servitude,” even more effectively in modernity than antiquity: “you can provide them with bread and circuses, and you can provide them with endless amounts of distraction and propaganda” — delivered, here in the twenty-first-century, straight to the device in our hand.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In 1885, Karl Benz built what’s now considered the first modern automobile. According to the Mercedes Benz website, the car featured a “compact high-speed single-cylinder four-stroke engine installed horizontally at the rear, a tubular steel frame … and three wire-spoked wheels. The engine output was 0.75 hp (0.55 kW).” Two years after its invention, Karl Benz’s wife Bertha proved that the car was ready for prime time, driving her early Benz from Mannheim to Pforzheim. After that groundbreaking drive, the Benz went into production, becoming the first commercially available automobile in history.
Above, you can watch a car enthusiast known as “Mr. Benz” take the nineteenth-century car for a spin. Below, watch a re-enactment of Bertha’s historic drive.
Even if you can name only one ancient Greek, you can name Plato. You can also probably say at least a little about him, if only some of the things humanity has known since antiquity. Until recently, of course, that qualification would have been redundant. But now, thanks to an ongoing high-tech push to read heretofore inaccessible ancient documents, we’re witnessing the emergence of new knowledge about that most famous of all Greek philosophers — or at least one of the most famous Greek philosophers, matched in renown only by his teacher Socrates and his student Aristotle.
Up until now, we’ve only had a general idea of where Plato was interred after his death in 348 BC. But “thanks to an ancient text and specialized scanning technology,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sonja Anderson, “researchers say they have solved the mystery of Plato’s burial place: The Greek philosopher was interred in the garden of his Athens academy, where he once tutored a young Aristotle.” This location was recorded about two millennia ago “on a papyrus scroll housed in the Roman city of Herculaneum,” which was entombed along with Pompeii by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Like much else in those cities, this scroll was preserved for centuries under layers of ash. It was just one of many scrolls discovered in a villa, which may have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, back in 1750. But for long thereafter, those scrolls were more or less unreadable, having been so thoroughly charred by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius that they crumbled to dust at any attempt to unroll them. But “recent breakthroughs have allowed researchers to read the fragile texts without touching them”: witness the projects involving particle accelerators and artificial intelligence previously featured here on Open Culture.
The research project that has deciphered part of this scroll, a text by the philosopher Philodemus called the History of the Academy — that is, Plato’s academy in Athens — is led by University of Pisa professor of papyrology Graziano Ranocchia. Using a “bionic eye” technique involving infrared and X‑ray scanners, he and his team have also discovered evidence that Plato didn’t much like the music played at his deathbed by a Thracian slave girl. “Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death,” writes the Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo, he “retained enough lucidity to critique the musician for her lack of rhythm.” Even if you know little about Plato, you’re probably not surprised to hear that he was pointing out the difference between the real and the ideal up until the very end.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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