Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
We explained our issue prompt to ChatGPT and asked it to recommend five books on the idea of progress. The results — which represent the return of an AI author to Jacobin’s pages, after a somewhat clumsy chatbot interview in issue 52 — were more banal than sinister.
For veteran music critic Simon Reynolds, the “avant-lumpen” sound captures how it feels to be alive today with raw voices and synthetic soundscapes.
Yesterday Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, oversaw the imprisonment of Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu. In jailing his political rival, Erdoğan has joined a global club of authoritarian leaders unwilling to tolerate challengers of any kind.
The sci-fi film Things to Come debuted just before World War II. It was all too prophetic in its portrait of a society destroyed and then rebuilt by advanced technology.
How Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s mournful portrait of Rome shaped the Enlightenment’s understanding of progress.
How two socialist science-fiction bestsellers invited nineteenth-century readers into a grand debate about progress.
A brief catalog of genre-changing moments in music history.
The billionaire is fueling a global panic about the fate of white South Africans and misrepresenting the real problems that plague his home country.
Niger has the opportunity to nationalize the uranium industry. Will it?
As Azerbaijan reclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh, its Armenian population faced a devastating choice: flee or risk death.
The people of Greenland don’t want to be subjects of Denmark or the United States — they want economic independence and freedom from foreign control.
Two decades of unprecedented infrastructure investments transformed China. Then the country hit a wall of debt.
The US president ran as an antiwar candidate. Now he wants to use American muscle to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.
Obama’s presidency promised a new era in America, but the failure of his landmark legislation, the Affordable Care Act, set the stage for today’s disillusionment.
Blind, alone, and reeling from the failures of the English Revolution, Milton wrote an epic reflection on political defeat and the possibility of hope.
Swedish social democracy’s relationship to eugenics is a reminder that socialist planning requires a bedrock commitment to human dignity.
In the 1960s, psychedelics seemed to promise social progress. Today their proponents are all about self-optimization under capitalism.
Like its twentieth-century predecessors, today’s far right longs for the purported glories of the ancient world, all while fetishizing modern technology.
The EU has been trailing the US economically for decades, and the COVID-19 pandemic only made its situation worse. Does Mario Draghi hold the secret to restoring Europe’s productivity?
