Watch Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924)

in Animation, History | February 7th, 2024

Dzi­ga Ver­tov is best known for his daz­zling city sym­pho­ny A Man with a Movie Cam­era, which was ranked by Sight and Sound mag­a­zine as the 8th best movie ever made. Yet what you might not know is that Ver­tov also made the Sovi­et Union’s first ever ani­mat­ed movie, Sovi­et Toys.

Con­sist­ing large­ly of sim­ple line draw­ings, the film might lack the verve and visu­al sophis­ti­ca­tion that marked A Man with a Movie Cam­era, but Ver­tov still dis­plays his knack for mak­ing strik­ing, pun­gent images. Yet those who don’t have an inti­mate knowl­edge of Sovi­et pol­i­cy of the 1920s might find the movie — which is laden with Marx­ist alle­gories — real­ly odd.

Sovi­et Toys came out in 1924, dur­ing Lenin’s New Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy (NEP), which gave some mar­ket incen­tives to small farm­ers. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the farm­ers start­ed pro­duc­ing a lot more food than before, and soon a whole new class of mid­dle­man traders formed — the reviled “NEP­men.”

The movie opens with a NEP­man — a bloat­ed car­i­ca­ture of a Cap­i­tal­ist (who coin­ci­den­tal­ly looks vague­ly like Niki­ta Khrushchev) — devour­ing a mas­sive heap of food. He’s so stuffed that he spends much of the rest of the movie sprawled out on the floor, much in the same way one might imag­ine Jamie Dimon after Thanks­giv­ing din­ner. Then he belch­es rich­es at a woman who is can-can­ning on his dis­tend­ed bel­ly. I said this film is odd.

Lat­er, as a cou­ple of squab­bling Russ­ian Ortho­dox priests look on, a work­er tries to extract mon­ey from the NEP­man by cut­ting his gut with a huge pair of scis­sors. When that fails, the work­er and a pass­ing peas­ant fuse bod­ies to cre­ate a two-head­ed being that stomps on the Capitalist’s bel­ly, which pops open like a piña­ta filled with cash. Then mem­bers of the Red Army pile togeth­er and form a sort of human pyra­mid before turn­ing into a giant tree. They hang the Cap­i­tal­ist along with the priests. The end.

Some of the ref­er­ences in this movie are clear: The work­er’s use of scis­sors points to the “Scis­sors Cri­sis” – an attempt by the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment to cor­rect the price imbal­ance between agri­cul­ture and indus­tri­al goods. And the phys­i­cal meld­ing of the peas­antry and the pro­le­tari­at is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the nev­er quite real­ized dream of the Bol­she­viks. Oth­er images are as obscure as they are weird — the leer­ing close ups of the Cap­i­tal­ist, the NEP­man’s girl­friend who dis­ap­pears into his stom­ach, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary film­mak­er who has the eyes of a cam­era lens and the mouth of a cam­era shut­ter. They feel like some­thing out of a Marx­ist fever dream.

Sovi­et Toys can be found in the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, Named the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

A Sovi­et Ani­ma­tion of Stephen King’s Short Sto­ry “Bat­tle­ground” (1986)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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A Cultural Tour of Istanbul, Where the Art and History of Three Great Empires Come Together

in Art, History, Travel | February 7th, 2024

Imag­ine a grand tour of Euro­pean muse­ums, and a fair few des­ti­na­tions come right to mind: the Rijksmu­se­um, the Pra­do, the Uffizi Gallery, the Lou­vre. These insti­tu­tions alone could take years to expe­ri­ence ful­ly, but it would be an incom­plete jour­ney that did­n’t ven­ture far­ther east — much far­ther east, in the view of Great Art Explained cre­ator James Payne. In his lat­est Great Art Cities video, he makes the case for Istan­bul, adduc­ing such both artis­ti­cal­ly and his­tor­i­cal­ly rich sites as the İst­anb­ul Archae­o­log­i­cal Muse­um, the Basil­i­ca Cis­tern, the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, Istan­bul Mod­ern, and of course — as pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture — the unig­nor­able Hagia Sophia.

Payne intro­duces Istan­bul as hav­ing been “the cap­i­tal of three great empires, Roman, Byzan­tine, and Ottoman.” In the con­ti­nent-strad­dling metrop­o­lis as it is today, “both ancient and mod­ern art blend ele­ments from Europe, Asia, and the Mid­dle East, reflect­ing its geo­graph­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal posi­tion­ing as a bridge between the East and the West.”

The works on dis­play in the city con­sti­tute “a visu­al embod­i­ment of its com­plex his­to­ry,” from the Hel­lenis­tic to the Roman to the Islam­ic to the styles and media of the twen­ti­eth and twen­ty-first cen­turies, with all of which “mod­ern-day Turkey is now cre­at­ing its own artis­tic lega­cy.”

That lega­cy is also deeply root­ed in the past. Vis­it the Archae­o­log­i­cal Muse­um and you can see the Alexan­der Sar­coph­a­gus from the fourth cen­tu­ry BC, whose aston­ish­ing­ly detailed carv­ings include “the only exist­ing depic­tion of Alexan­der the Great cre­at­ed dur­ing his life­time.” The under­ground Basil­i­ca Cis­tern, built in the sixth cen­tu­ry, counts as much as a large-scale work of Byzan­tine art as it does a large-scale work of Byzan­tine engi­neer­ing. From there, it’s a short tram ride on the Gala­ta Bridge across the Gold­en Horn to the brand-new, Ren­zo Piano-designed Istan­bul Mod­ern, which has paint­ings by Cihat Burak, Fahrel­nis­sa Zeid, Bedri Baykam. You may not know those names now, but if you view their work in the unique cul­tur­al con­text of Istan­bul — in which so many eras and civ­i­liza­tions are man­i­fest — you’ll nev­er for­get them.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ancient World Comes to Life in an Ani­ma­tion Fea­tur­ing Istanbul’s Islam­ic, Ottoman, Greek & Byzan­tine Art

Istan­bul Cap­tured in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Hagia Sophia, Top­ka­ki Palace’s Impe­r­i­al Gate & More

Watch Dig­i­tal Dancers Elec­tri­fy the Streets of Istan­bul

An Intro­duc­tion to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Muse­um, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

How Lon­dini­um Became Lon­don, Lute­tia Became Paris, and Oth­er Roman Cities Got Their Mod­ern Names

Great Art Cities: Vis­it the Fas­ci­nat­ing, Less­er-Known Muse­ums of Lon­don & Paris

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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A 500-Page Book Explores the Ghosts & Monsters from Japanese Folklore

in Art, Books, History | February 1st, 2024

West­ern­ers tend to think of Japan as a land of high-speed trains, expert­ly pre­pared sushi and ramen, auteur films, bril­liant ani­ma­tion, ele­gant wood­block prints, glo­ri­ous old hotels, sought-after jazz-records, cat islands, and ghost towns. The last of those has, of course, not been shown to har­bor lit­er­al wraiths and spir­its. But if that sort of thing hap­pens to be what you’re look­ing for, Japan’s long his­to­ry offers up a wealth of mytho­log­i­cal chimeras whose form, behav­ior, and sheer num­bers exceed any of our expec­ta­tions. Wel­come to the super­nat­ur­al realm of the shapeshift­ing, good- and bad-luck-bring­ing, trick-play­ing yōkai.

“Trans­lat­ing to ‘strange appari­tion,’ the Japan­ese word yōkai refers to super­nat­ur­al beings, mutant mon­sters, and spir­its,” writes Colos­sal’s Grace Ebert. “Mis­chie­vous, gen­er­ous, and some­times venge­ful, the crea­tures are root­ed in folk­lore and expe­ri­enced a boom dur­ing the Edo peri­od when artists would ascribe inex­plic­a­ble phe­nom­e­na to the unearth­ly char­ac­ters.”

Hiroshi­ma Pre­fec­ture’s Miyoshi Mononoke Muse­um, whose open­ing we announced here on Open Cul­ture in 2019, “hous­es the largest yōkai col­lec­tion in the world with more than 5,000 works, and a book recent­ly pub­lished by PIE Inter­na­tion­al show­cas­es some of the most icon­ic and bizarre pieces from the insti­tu­tion.”

Writ­ten by eth­nol­o­gist Yumo­to Koichi, a yōkai expert whose dona­tions con­sti­tute most of the Miyoshi Mononoke Muse­um’s col­lec­tion, the 500-page YOKAI offers “the rare expe­ri­ence of see­ing the brush­work of Edo-era painters like Tsukio­ka Yoshi­toshi,” whom we’ve fea­tured here as Japan’s last great wood­block artist. Poised between the human and ani­mal king­doms, reflect­ing the ways of the past as well as the forces of nature, yōkai would seem to belong entire­ly to the tales of a bygone age. But in fact, many of them have joined the canon since Tsukioka’s time, hav­ing emerged from haunt­ed-school rumors, the fer­tile imag­i­na­tions of man­ga artists, and even video games. Whether to accept these “mod­ern yōkai” has been a mat­ter of some debate, but as Japan­ese pop­u­lar cul­ture has long shown us, every age needs its own mon­sters.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed to Japan­ese Folk­lore Mon­sters Is Now Open

The Ghosts and Mon­sters of Hoku­sai: See the Famed Wood­block Artist’s Fear­some & Amus­ing Visions of Strange Appari­tions

When a UFO Came to Japan in 1803: Dis­cov­er the Leg­end of Utsuro-bune

Behold the Mas­ter­piece by Japan’s Last Great Wood­block Artist: View Online Tsukio­ka Yoshitoshi’s One Hun­dred Aspects of the Moon (1885)

Dis­cov­er the Ghost Towns of Japan — Where Scare­crows Replace Peo­ple, and a Man Lives in an Aban­doned Ele­men­tary School Gym

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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Pangea to the Present to the Future: Watch Animations Showing 500 Million Years of Continental Drift

in Environment, History, Maps, Science | January 29th, 2024

Things change…

Espe­cial­ly when you’re track­ing the con­ti­nen­tal move­ment from Pangea to the present day in 5 mil­lion years incre­ments at the rate of 2.5 mil­lion years per sec­ond.

Wher­ev­er you are, 350 mil­lion years ago, your address would’ve been locat­ed on the mega-con­ti­nent of Pangea.

Here’s a map of what things looked like back then.

Those who’ve grown a bit fuzzy on their geog­ra­phy may require some indi­ca­tions of where future land­mass­es formed when Pangea broke apart. Your map apps can’t help you here.

The first split occurred in the mid­dle of the Juras­sic peri­od, result­ing in two hemi­spheres, Laura­sia to the north and Gond­wana.

As the project’s sto­ry map notes, 175 mil­lion years ago Africa and South Amer­i­ca already bore a resem­blance to their mod­ern day con­fig­u­ra­tions.

North Amer­i­ca, Asia, and Europe need­ed to stay in the oven a bit longer, their famil­iar shapes begin­ning to emerge between 150 and 120 mil­lion years ago.

India peeled off from its “moth­er” con­ti­nent of Gond­wana some 100 mil­lion years ago.

Its tec­ton­ic plate col­lid­ed with the Eurasian Plate, giv­ing rise to the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, by which point, dinosaurs had been extinct for about 15 mil­lion years…)


Geog­ra­phy nerds may chafe at the seem­ing­ly inac­cu­rate sizes of Green­land, Antarc­ti­ca and Aus­tralia. Rest assured that the map­mak­ers are aware, chalk­ing it to the “dis­tor­tion of the car­to­graph­ic pro­jec­tion that exag­ger­ates areas close to the Poles.”

Just for fun, let’s run it back­wards!

But enough of the past. What of the future?

Those who real­ly want to know could jump ahead to the end of the sto­ry map to see PALEOMAP Project founder Christo­pher Scotese’s spec­u­la­tive con­fig­u­ra­tion of earth 250 mil­lion years hence, should cur­rent tec­ton­ic plate motion trends con­tin­ue.

Behold his vision of mega-con­ti­nent, Pangea Prox­i­ma, a land­mass “formed from all cur­rent con­ti­nents, with an appar­ent excep­tion of New Zealand, which remains a bit on the side:”

On the oppo­site side of the world, North Amer­i­ca is try­ing to fit to Africa, but it seems like it does not have the right shape. It will prob­a­bly need more time…

Not to bum you out, but a more recent study paints a grim­mer pic­ture of a com­ing super­con­ti­nent, Pangea Ulti­ma, when extreme tem­per­a­tures have ren­dered just 8 per­cent of Earth’s sur­face hos­pitable to mam­mals, should they sur­vive at all.

As the study’s co-author, cli­ma­tol­o­gist Alexan­der Farnsworth, told Nature News, humans might do well to get “off this plan­et and find some­where more hab­it­able.”

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Map Show­ing Where Today’s Coun­tries Would Be Locat­ed on Pangea

Find the Address of Your Home on Pan­gaea: Open Source Project Lets You Explore the Ancient Land Mass­es of Our Plan­et

Paper Ani­ma­tion Tells Curi­ous Sto­ry of How a Mete­o­rol­o­gist The­o­rized Pan­gaea & Con­ti­nen­tal Drift (1910)

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema: Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi & Beyond

in Film, History | January 25th, 2024


Oliv­er Her­manus’ lat­est film Liv­ing trans­plants the sto­ry of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa’s Ikiru to post­war Lon­don. Apart from its own con­sid­er­able mer­its, it has giv­en view­ers across the world rea­son to revis­it the 1952 orig­i­nal, a stand­out work even in a gold­en decade of Japan­ese cin­e­ma — the decade The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy co-cre­ator Lewis Bond (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here for oth­er explo­rations of Japan­ese cin­e­ma and ani­ma­tion) explains in the video above. In the nine­teen-fifties, “con­cen­trat­ed with­in a sin­gle coun­try were some of the great­est film­mak­ers to ever live, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly pro­duc­ing their great­est works. The result was a com­plete decen­tral­iza­tion of clas­sic cin­e­ma as the world was exposed to its new troupe of mas­ters.”

After World War II, the Japan­ese peo­ple were “left with the real­i­ty that they were an eth­ni­cal­ly homo­ge­neous and cul­tur­al­ly uni­fied unit that did not fit in with the new, demo­c­ra­t­ic world.” The Amer­i­can mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion “took con­trol of the entire Japan­ese film indus­try from 1945 until 1952,” forcibly remov­ing any image, theme, or line of dia­logue thought liable stoke recidi­vist pop­u­lar sen­ti­ment. With not just war movies but “feu­dal” peri­od pieces off the table, the only viable genre was what schol­ars have since labeled shominge­ki, the real­is­tic cin­e­ma of com­mon peo­ple in ordi­nary sit­u­a­tions. Even there, the cen­sors had their scis­sors out: on their orders, Masahi­ro Maki­no had to elim­i­nate a shot of the poten­tial­ly nation­al­ist sym­bol of Mount Fuji; Yasu­jirō Ozu had to cut a line from Late Spring about Tokyo being full of bomb sites.

These rules loos­ened toward the end of the occu­pa­tion. By 1951, Kuro­sawa could make a dar­ing his­tor­i­cal pic­ture like Rashomon, and even have it (with­out his con­sent) go on to screen at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val and win a Gold­en Lion, then an Acad­e­my Award. The West had acquired a taste for Japan­ese movies, and the Japan­ese film indus­try was only too hap­py to cater to it. The coun­try’s five major stu­dios “hired the best artists of the time and gave them the finan­cial back­ing and cre­ative free­dom that they need­ed. The result was that the stu­dios made a lot of mon­ey, the film­mak­ers cre­at­ed an abun­dance of mas­ter­pieces, and the gold­en age of Japan­ese cin­e­ma meant that peo­ple filled the the­aters.”

The nine­teen-fifties brought world­wide acclaim to a Mount Rush­more of Japan­ese auteurs. Kuro­sawa, who revived the samu­rai film, “did for cin­e­ma as a whole was what most film­mak­ers hope, at some point, to do”: bridg­ing “the gap between one’s artistry and main­stream appeal.” Uget­su direc­tor Ken­ji Mizoguchi looked on all real­i­ty — and espe­cial­ly women — with a tran­scen­den­tal gaze. “Although not as grandiose as Kuro­sawa, nor as spir­i­tu­al as Mizoguchi, Ozu epit­o­mizes a sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty that, per­haps, has not been as well achieved by any oth­er film­mak­er to this day.” Mikio Naruse, Masa­ki Kobayashi, Teinosuke Kin­u­gasa, Hiroshi Ina­ga­ki: one could enjoy a rich cin­e­mat­ic life with only the works of Japan­ese film­mak­ers of the fifties. It shows us “the pin­na­cle of what cin­e­ma can achieve, and the stan­dard we should con­tin­ue to strive for,” as Bond’s puts it in his clos­ing line, speak­ing over a shot from Ikiru.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Essen­tial Japan­ese Cin­e­ma: A Jour­ney Through 50 of Japan’s Beau­ti­ful, Often Bizarre Films

How Did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Make Such Pow­er­ful & Endur­ing Films? A Wealth of Video Essays Break Down His Cin­e­mat­ic Genius

The Aes­thet­ic of Ani­me: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tra­di­tion of Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

How One Sim­ple Cut Reveals the Cin­e­mat­ic Genius of Yasu­jirō Ozu

A Page of Mad­ness: The Lost, Avant Garde Mas­ter­piece from Ear­ly Japan­ese Cin­e­ma (1926)

Wes Ander­son & Yasu­jirō Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unex­pect­ed Par­al­lels Between Two Great Film­mak­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: The First Sci-Fi Novel Written By a Woman (1666)

in Books, History, Literature, Sci Fi | January 24th, 2024

For a vari­ety of rea­sons, sci­ence fic­tion has long been regard­ed as a most­ly male-ori­ent­ed realm of lit­er­a­ture. This is evi­denced, in part, by the eager­ness to cel­e­brate par­tic­u­lar works of sci-fi writ­ten by women, like Ursu­la K. LeGuin’s Earth­sea saga, Octavia But­ler’s Para­ble nov­els, Joan­na Russ’ The Female Man, or Mar­garet Attwood’s The Hand­maid­’s Tale (uneasi­ly though it fits with­in the bound­aries of the genre). But those who pre­fer the ear­ly stuff can go all the way back to the mid-sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, where they’ll find Mar­garet Cavendish’s The Blaz­ing World, read­able and down­load­able in all its strange glo­ry free online.

“The Blaz­ing World was first pub­lished in 1666 and is often con­sid­ered a fore­run­ner to both sci­ence fic­tion and the utopi­an nov­el gen­res,” writes book blog­ger Eric Karl Ander­son. “It’s a total­ly bonkers sto­ry of a woman who is stolen away to the North Pole only to find her­self in a strange bejew­eled king­dom of which she becomes the supreme Empress. Here she con­sults with many dif­fer­ent animal/insect peo­ple about philo­soph­i­cal, reli­gious and sci­en­tif­ic ideas. The sec­ond half of the book pulls off a meta-fic­tion­al trick where Cavendish (as the Duchess of New­cas­tle) enters the sto­ry her­self to become the Empress’ scribe and close com­pan­ion.”

In the video just below, Youtu­ber Great Books Prof frames this as not just a work of pro­to-sci­ence fic­tion, but also a pio­neer­ing use of the “mul­ti­verse” con­cept that has under­gird­ed any num­ber of twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry block­busters.

The Blaz­ing World con­tin­ues to inspire: actor-direc­tor Carl­son Young put out a loose cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion just a few years ago. Cavendish her­self described the book as a “her­maph­ro­dit­ic text,” pos­si­bly in ref­er­ence to its engage­ment with top­ics then addressed almost exclu­sive­ly by men. But it also occu­pied two cat­e­gories at once in that she orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished it as a fic­tion­al sec­tion of her book Obser­va­tions upon Exper­i­men­tal Phi­los­o­phy, one of six philo­soph­i­cal vol­umes she wrote. In fact, her work qual­i­fied her as not just philoso­pher and nov­el­ist, but also sci­en­tist, poet, play­wright, and even biog­ra­ph­er. That last she accom­plished by writ­ing The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puis­sant Prince William Cavendish, who hap­pened to be her hus­band. Let her life be a les­son to those young girls who simul­ta­ne­ous­ly dream of becom­ing a princess and a writer whose books are read for cen­turies: some­times, you can have it all.

Relat­ed con­tent:

100 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Women Writ­ers (Read 20 for Free Online)

The First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion: Read Lucian’s 2nd-Cen­tu­ry Space Trav­el­ogue A True Sto­ry

When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion, The Dream (1609)

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Every Pos­si­ble Kind of Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ry: An Exhaus­tive List Cre­at­ed by Pio­neer­ing 1920s Sci­Fi Writer Clare Winger Har­ris (1931)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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Before ChatGPT, There Was ELIZA: Watch the 1960s Chatbot in Action

in History, Technology | January 22nd, 2024

In 1966, the soci­ol­o­gist and crit­ic Philip Rieff pub­lished The Tri­umph of the Ther­a­peu­tic, which diag­nosed how thor­ough­ly the cul­ture of psy­chother­a­py had come to influ­ence ways of life and thought in the mod­ern West. That same year, in the jour­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions of the Asso­ci­a­tion for Com­put­ing Machin­ery, the com­put­er sci­en­tist Joseph Weizen­baum pub­lished “ELIZA — A Com­put­er Pro­gram For the Study of Nat­ur­al Lan­guage Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Between Man and Machine.” Could it be a coin­ci­dence that the pro­gram Weizen­baum explained in that paper — the ear­li­est “chat­bot,” as we would now call it — is best known for respond­ing to its user’s input in the non­judg­men­tal man­ner of a ther­a­pist?

ELIZA was still draw­ing inter­est in the nine­teen-eight­ies, as evi­denced by the tele­vi­sion clip above. “The com­put­er’s replies seem very under­stand­ing,” says its nar­ra­tor, “but this pro­gram is mere­ly trig­gered by cer­tain phras­es to come out with stock respons­es.” Yet even though its users knew full well that “ELIZA did­n’t under­stand a sin­gle word that was being typed into it,” that did­n’t stop some of their inter­ac­tions with it from becom­ing emo­tion­al­ly charged. Weizen­baum’s pro­gram thus pass­es a kind of “Tur­ing test,” which was first pro­posed by pio­neer­ing com­put­er sci­en­tist Alan Tur­ing to deter­mine whether a com­put­er can gen­er­ate out­put indis­tin­guish­able from com­mu­ni­ca­tion with a human being.

In fact, 60 years after Weizen­baum first began devel­op­ing it, ELIZA — which you can try online here — seems to be hold­ing its own in that are­na. “In a preprint research paper titled ‘Does GPT‑4 Pass the Tur­ing Test?,’ two researchers from UC San Diego pit­ted Ope­nAI’s GPT‑4 AI lan­guage mod­el against human par­tic­i­pants, GPT‑3.5, and ELIZA to see which could trick par­tic­i­pants into think­ing it was human with the great­est suc­cess,” reports Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Benj Edwards. This study found that “human par­tic­i­pants cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fied oth­er humans in only 63 per­cent of the inter­ac­tions,” and that ELIZA, with its tricks of reflect­ing users’ input back at them, “sur­passed the AI mod­el that pow­ers the free ver­sion of Chat­G­PT.”

This isn’t to imply that Chat­G­P­T’s users might as well go back to Weizen­baum’s sim­ple nov­el­ty pro­gram. Still, we’d sure­ly do well to revis­it his sub­se­quent think­ing on the sub­ject of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Lat­er in his career, writes Ben Tarnoff in the Guardian, Weizen­baum pub­lished “arti­cles and books that con­demned the world­view of his col­leagues and warned of the dan­gers posed by their work. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, he came to believe, was an ‘index of the insan­i­ty of our world.’ ” Even in 1967, he was argu­ing that “no com­put­er could ever ful­ly under­stand a human being. Then he went one step fur­ther: no human being could ever ful­ly under­stand anoth­er human being” — a propo­si­tion arguably sup­port­ed by near­ly a cen­tu­ry and a half of psy­chother­a­py.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A New Course Teach­es You How to Tap the Pow­ers of Chat­G­PT and Put It to Work for You

Thanks to Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, You Can Now Chat with His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures: Shake­speare, Ein­stein, Austen, Socrates & More

Noam Chom­sky on Chat­G­PT: It’s “Basi­cal­ly High-Tech Pla­gia­rism” and “a Way of Avoid­ing Learn­ing”

What Hap­pens When Some­one Cro­chets Stuffed Ani­mals Using Instruc­tions from Chat­G­PT

Noam Chom­sky Explains Where Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Went Wrong

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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The Roman Author Pliny the Younger Gets Ghosted by a Friend, and Goes on a Rant: Hear It Read by Actor Rob Delaney

in History, Letters | January 22nd, 2024

Pliny the Younger may be best remem­bered for writ­ing the only eye-wit­ness account of the destruc­tion of Pom­peii in 79 AD. It’s a mem­o­rable let­ter still found in mod­ern col­lec­tions of Pliny the Younger’s cor­re­spon­dence. There, you can also find a sim­ple let­ter authored by Pliny, one that reflects not on a shat­ter­ing his­tor­i­cal event, but rather some­thing we can all relate to: the anger the author felt upon get­ting ghost­ed by a friend. To set the scene, Pliny had invit­ed Sep­ti­cius Clarus to join him for some food, wine, and con­ver­sa­tion. But his friend nev­er showed up, and so Pliny fired off a snub let­ter, which actor and come­di­an Rob Delaney reads above at a Let­ters Live event. You can fol­low along with the text below:

Shame on you! You promised to come to din­ner, and you nev­er came!

I’ll take you to court, and you will pay to the last pen­ny for my loss­es, and quite a sum! Ready for each of us were a let­tuce, three snails, and two eggs, bar­ley water with hon­ey wine cooled with snow (you must add the cost of snow as well, in fact the snow in par­tic­u­lar, as it melts in the dish). There were olives, beet­root, gourds, onions, and count­less oth­er del­i­ca­cies no less ele­gant. You would have heard per­form­ers of com­e­dy, or a read­er, or a lyre-play­er, or even all three, such is my gen­eros­i­ty!

But you pre­ferred to dine at some nobody’s house, enjoy­ing oys­ters, sow’s tripe, sea urchins, and per­form­ing-girls from Cadiz. You’ll be pun­ished for this, I won’t say how. What boor­ish­ness was this! You begrudged per­haps your­self, and cer­tain­ly me – but yes, your­self as well. What jok­ing and laugh­ter and learn­ing we would have enjoyed!

You can dine in many hous­es on more elab­o­rate fare, but nowhere more genial­ly, inno­cent­ly, and unguard­ed­ly. Farewell!

In the end, Pliny for­gave his friend. For Pliny ded­i­cat­ed the first of his let­ter to Sep­ti­cius, stat­ing: “You have con­stant­ly urged me to col­lect and pub­lish the more high­ly fin­ished of the let­ters that I may have writ­ten. I have made such a col­lec­tion… I can only hope that you will not have cause to regret the advice you gave, and that I shall not repent hav­ing fol­lowed it.” You can read the col­lec­tion online here.

Relat­ed Con­tent

The Only Writ­ten Eye-Wit­ness Account of Pompeii’s Destruc­tion: Hear Pliny the Younger’s Let­ters on the Mount Vesu­vius Erup­tion

The Lit­tle-Known Bomb­ing of Pom­peii Dur­ing World War II

What the Romans Saw When They Reached New Parts of the World: Hear First-Hand Accounts by Appi­an, Pliny, Tac­i­tus & Oth­er Ancient His­to­ri­ans

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