The great horror film that predicted our cultish post-truth predicament

Welcome to the first installment of Blood in the Machine's culture studies series.

Hey folks,

Hope everyone’s hanging in as things oscillate wildly between bad and embarrassing and worse out there. As for me, I’ve been all over the place, which has not helped keep the head from spinning any less. The Friday before last, I gave a talk to a group of community college presidents about AI, and I think I managed to plant the grudging seeds of skepticism, especially about enterprise AI in higher ed. Who knows. Then I went up to the 50th anniversary of a biotech conference in Monterrey, where, among other things, biologists and engineers debated how or whether to regulate the use of AI in their fields. My good friend Paris was there, too, and you can hear us discuss the proceedings on System Crash. Finally, last Wednesday, I moderated a talk at Stanford between the great tech critic Evgeny Morozov, AI legend-turned-skeptic Terry Winograd, and optimist Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first minister of digital affairs. The chat was held to celebrate the Boston Review’s AI issue, to which I contributed an essay. It’s worth checking out. Made it home by Friday for the kids’ choir recital, where the school sang, beautifully, We Shall Overcome. Sure hope so.

Just writing all that out has tired me out all over again. But somewhere in between it all I managed to watch a film that lodged itself very deeply into my brain; a classic horror movie that I think is somehow both under-recognized and over-referenced. It’s a film that feels darkly and depressingly prescient, given that it came out many decades ago, in the way that it examines how and why a society might abandon its respect for science and order—and give way to something more misogynistic and apocalyptic. Something more post-truth.

This will be the first installment of a series I might wind up calling Crisis Culture, or Blood in the Media, or Culture in Crisis—name pending I guess lol, but something like that seems to fit—in which I’ll write reviews and dispatches for paying subscribers, about the best and most relevant stuff I’ve been reading, watching, or listening to. Thanks again to everyone who subscribes and shells out $6 a month or $60 a year to make this writing, as well as much of the above, possible.

First of all, this is a hands-down great film. There’s really nothing else like it. Second,