Elon Musk and Friends in the Oakland Den Literary Lion
Elon Musk is developing 21st century technology while promoting 19th century racial politics. He is richer than the whole earth, and yet he always hungers for more. He dreams of Mars and despises empathy.
It’s complicated, sure. But can it be art?
Mr. Musk came to Oakland, California, a few weeks ago to crush his nemesis Sam Altman, the chief marketer for the artificial intelligence boom. As the tech world anxiously awaits the conclusion of the trial of the AI company the tycoons co-created, Ishmael Reed is forming his own judgment a few miles from the courthouse.
Mr. Reed, a novelist, playwright and provocateur who has stirred opinion across the political spectrum for at least six decades, is aiming high with the new drama. “King Ludd’s Revenge” is a rare attempt to take on the tech moguls with more than just journalism.
“Instead of direct narration, I improvise,” said the 88-year-old writer. “It’s like Louis Armstrong singing ‘Stardust.’ It does not do as it is written.’
Oakland is poorer, blacker, and more sinister than San Francisco and Silicon Valley, both of which are just across the bridges that span the bay. The lawsuit here was haphazard — Mr. Musk’s lawsuit against Mr. Altman and the company they co-founded, OpenAI, was filed in San Francisco and assigned to federal court in Oakland — but it feels a bit like one of those episodes where the Greek gods descend on mundane Earth to settle a dispute.
Mr. Reed, an Oakland resident who has celebrated and defended the city for decades, may be the only one in town who noticed who was here. “Everybody’s focus is on the NBA playoffs,” he explained.
The name “King Ludd’s Revenge” is derived from the legendary leader of the workers’ rebellion in England in the early 19th century. With the advent of artificial intelligence, Luddites came back into vogue. The game begins with Mr. Musk receiving a pedicure from a robot. Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who endorsed President Trump in 2016, bursts into the room. “I think I’ve identified the leader of the Anti-Christ Syndicate,” he says.
Mr. Musk: “Who can it be?”
Mr. Thiel: “Greta Thunberg.”
Mr. Musk: “The girl who leads the environmental movement? That’s ridiculous. The Bible says the Antichrist is a beast with seven heads.”
Mr. Thiel: “It’s the most distinctive head, don’t you see? The heads represent hippies, multiculturalism, identity politics, awakening, the One World State, Barack Obama, and the 19th Amendment. This is the animal that has slowed our progress. This is why there is no cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s disease.”
Adolf Hitler will appear next on a two-day pass from hell. The game is unfinished.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s taken from news accounts. Mr. Reed can improvise, but he also keeps an eye on what’s really going on. He listens to the news all day, starting on the iPad in the living room when he gets up at 5:30 a.m., then migrates upstairs to the study, where he works under a photo of himself and Malcolm X.
“The news follows me around the house,” he said. “I don’t want to miss anything.
“He loves to fight,” said his wife and onetime co-worker, Carla Blank, who met Mr. Reed in 1965 and married him five years later. “He is full of anger.
Mr. Reed disagreed. “Not anger. Resentment,” he said. “That’s a more civilized way of putting it.
Ms. Blank, 84, a theater historian and director, introduced Mr. Reed to a format called Living Newspapers, which he found useful. Live Newspapers, a short-lived federal arts project during the Great Depression, aimed to employ journalists and theater people to present current events in multimedia form. Among the programs was “The Order Given,” which championed the workers over the capitalists. Republicans gave the Living Newspaper bad reviews, and Congress defunded it in 1939.
Mr. Reed’s most successful play was “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda,” about the popular musical “Hamilton.” Mr. Reed felt that the Founding Father was not too bored to own slaves. The game upset a lot of people, which was fine with Mr. Reed.
A more recent effort, “The Amanuensis” is an examination of racism in Walt Disney’s notorious 1946 film “Song of the South.” Mr. Reed and Mrs. Blank held a reading in San Francisco last fall. He’s also busy with fiction, poetry and various other endeavors, including serving as editor-in-chief of the new magazine Tar Baby, published by Toni Morrison’s son Ford.
At the dawn of the tumultuous 1960s, Philip Roth lamented the difficulty of capturing the nastiness of American life. “It intoxicates, it disgusts, it enrages,” he wrote. And it’s very hard for novelists to compete.
At this trial, for example, it appeared that Mr. Musk sent an SMS to the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockmananother defendant, in settlement negotiations. “By the end of this week,” Mr. Musk wrote, “you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so be it.”
If you insist on it, it will be. Those are sentences from a bad script.
Mr. Reed does not share Mr. Roth’s view that his task is nearly impossible. “It’s such a cliché that American life is too bizarre,” he said. “The artist’s job is to come up with an original angle.”
It must have been his work. Mr. Reed began writing a series of satirical japes in the late 1960s, including “Mumbo Jumbo” and “The Free-Lance Pallbearers.” These books didn’t sell well at the time, but they earned a reputation: This is a writer who knows things about America that America would rather you didn’t know. Thomas Pynchon welcomed Mr. Reed in his 1973 novel “Gravity’s Rainbow.” “Look at Ishmael Reed,” Mr. Pynchon advised in a parenthetical aside.
“Ishmael Reed has earned the rare distinction of revolutionizing the way writers tell stories about black people,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African American Studies, wrote in an email.
However, being a satirist is a complicated business these days. Jokes aimed at the powerful are dangerous. In 2013, Mr. Thiel secretly funded a lawsuit against the disrespectful website Gawker. Gawker lost the case and went out of business. (Mr. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Mr. Musk.)
Mr. Reed isn’t worried. “I fly under the radar,” he said.
The scales are certainly unequal here. Mr. Musk has 240 million followers on Platform X, his social network, and is worth close to $1 trillion. Mr. Reed’s main publisher is now in Canada. His greatest asset is his house, which is pleasantly stuffed with books. There used to be several drug dens on the street; now it’s upper middle class.
“I’m a black man living in North Oakland and I write about the Titans — the people who live on Mount Olympus,” he said. He listened to part of the trial on the audio channel. He was thinking of Shakespeare, specifically “Titus Andronicus”.
“The game is about revenge,” said Mr. Reed. “And cannibalism. These tech people want to eat each other.”
Mr. Altman may be the man who controls the most prominent artificial intelligence company, but Mr. Reed feels somewhat flat as dramatic material.
Mr. Musk is different.
“I don’t find him funny in real life, but he’s funny in my game,” Mr. Reed said. “I started it because I read it Maybe 14 million people will die because Elon Musk quit USAID It took the Nazis maybe five or six years to do that.” Mr. Reed acknowledged that his humor is very dark.
The author is not interested in AI. He uses a grammar program to remove extra commas, but finds that the new AI-enhanced version wants to be creative. “I used ‘hopped up,’ which means high on drugs. The AI wanted me to use ‘sedative,'” he said. “It seems intolerant of idioms.”
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging copyright infringement on news content related to AI systems. Both companies denied the claims.)
In Mr. Reed’s early novel “Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down,” a parody of the Old West, a group of drifters see “a really gaudy schmaltzy super-technological anarcho-paradise” in the distance.
Most are headed for it, and why not? All comfort and splendor are free. However, some are heading in a different direction, towards freedom.
That’s a clue. Like many cold-blooded satirists, Mr. Reed has a hopeful heart.
“I would give the human species another 500 years to get it right,” he said. “I think we can grow from that.