The Man Machine
- jwoodman57
- Jan 18
- 10 min read
On Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
Hello everyone! This one is coming straight from co-editor Jimmy. Paulie got one with his excellent Fake History, and now it’s my turn - some thoughts, feelings, ideas, concepts, etc. on Thomas Pynchon’s latest and probably last novel, Shadow Ticket.
***Some Spoilers ahead for Shadow Ticket ***
“Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!”
Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, 1941
All of us are familiar with stories of seemingly mundane household objects who come to life and go on happy little adventures, usually when we aren’t looking. Toy Story is the obvious example but this micro-genre can also boast the Herbie franchise, originating with 1968’s The Lovebug, about a wilful VW Beetle that drives itself, or The Brave Little Toaster, who I first saw in trailers on a VHS of Hercules (1997), which follows 5 mid-century appliances on their journey to the very precipice of death and then, in the third one, to Mars. And all of us have been initiated in the ways of the thinking machine and the feeling machine since childhood, taking within our hearts the lesson that our household objects are rosy-cheeked, good-humoured little fellows who want nothing more than to please us even when we treat them like disposable junk.
This is why even though I know I hate them for good reason, I can’t help but feel a tinge of sympathy looking at the six-wheeled Uber Eats robots that have been popping up around Leeds and Headingley in 2025. If Wall-E was a psyop to get us to tolerate corporate robots taking jobs from the poor and precariously employed, then it was a very effective one. It cannot help but to imagine these droids beleaguered and sighing from under their labour, spinning their wheels on mud and ice with gritted teeth, squeaking out diminutive and appreciative noises at passing humans - in short, acting like small creatures with small minds and small souls. Large techno-corps, especially those involved in the gig economy, can design their products with a sort of rough humanity to make them more palatable to consumers, while submitting their human workers to ever-greater indignities for the sake of ever-greater profit.
