Elon Musk develops 21st-century technologies while pushing 19th-century racial politics. He’s richer than entire countries and yet always hungry for more. He dreams of Mars and scorns empathy.
He’s complicated, sure. But can he be art?
Mr. Musk came to Oakland, Calif., a few weeks ago to crush his nemesis, Sam Altman, the chief salesman for the artificial intelligence boom. As the tech world waits apprehensively for the conclusion of the trial over the A.I. company that the tycoons created together, Ishmael Reed is fashioning his own judgment a few miles from the courthouse.
Mr. Reed, a novelist, playwright and provocateur who has been upsetting opinions across the political spectrum for at least six decades, is aiming high with a new drama. “King Ludd’s Revenge” is a rare attempt to take on the tech moguls with something more than mere journalism.
“Instead of a straight narrative, I improvise,” the 88-year-old writer said. “It’s like Louis Armstrong singing ‘Stardust.’ He doesn’t do it the way it’s written.”
Oakland is poorer, Blacker and more maligned than San Francisco and Silicon Valley, both of which are just across the bridges that span the Bay. Having the trial here happened at random — Mr. Musk’s lawsuit against Mr. Altman and the company they founded together, OpenAI, was filed in San Francisco and assigned to the federal court in Oakland — but feels a little like one of those episodes where the Greek gods descend to 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 noticing who’s here. “Everybody’s focused on the N.B.A. playoffs,” he explained.
“King Ludd’s Revenge” takes its title from the legendary leader of the workers’ revolt in England in the early 19th century. With the ascent of A.I., the Luddites have come back into fashion. The play begins with Mr. Musk receiving a pedicure from a robot. Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who backed 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 might that be?”
Mr. Thiel: “Greta Thunberg.”
Mr. Musk: “That girl who leads the environmental movement? That’s ridiculous. The Bible says the Anti-Christ is a beast with seven heads.”
Mr. Thiel: “She’s the most prominent head, don’t you see? The heads represent hippies, multiculturalism, identity politics, woke, one-world state, Barack Obama and the 19th Amendment. This is the Beast that decelerated our progress. This is why there has been no cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s.”
Adolf Hitler, on a two-day pass from Hell, shows up next. The play is a work in progress.
If some of this sounds familiar, it’s taken from news accounts. Mr. Reed might improvise, but he also hews closely to what is really happening. He listens to the news all day, starting with an iPad in the living room when he rises at 5:30 a.m. Then he migrates upstairs to a study, where he works under a photo of himself and Malcolm X.
“News follows me around the house,” he said. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
“He loves to fight,” said his wife and sometime collaborator, Carla Blank, who met Mr. Reed in 1965 and married him five years later. “He’s full of anger.”
Mr. Reed disagreed. “Not anger. Indignation,” 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 the Living Newspaper that he found useful. A short-lived federal arts project during the Great Depression, the Living Newspaper aimed to employ journalists and theater professionals to present current events in multimedia form. Among the programs was “Injunction Granted,” which championed workers over capitalists. Republicans gave the Living Newspaper bad reviews, and Congress abolished its funding in 1939.
Mr. Reed’s most successful play was “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda,” about the beloved musical “Hamilton.” Mr. Reed felt the founding father got off way too lightly for owning slaves. The play irked a lot of people, which was fine with Mr. Reed.
A more recent effort, “The Amanuensis,” is an examination of the racism in Walt Disney’s notorious 1946 film, “Song of the South.” Mr. Reed and Ms. Blank staged a reading in San Francisco last fall. He’s also busy with fiction, poetry and various other endeavors, including a stint as editor in chief of a new magazine, Tar Baby, put out by Toni Morrison’s son Ford.
At the dawn of the tumultuous 1960s, Philip Roth lamented the difficulty of capturing the outrageousness of American life. “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates,” he wrote. And it’s very hard for a novelist to compete with.
At this trial, for instance, it was revealed that Mr. Musk had texted OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, another defendant, during a settlement negotiation. “By the end of this week,” Mr. Musk wrote, “you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.”
If you insist, so it will be. Those are lines from a bad screenplay.
Mr. Reed does not share Mr. Roth’s view that his task is just about impossible. “It’s such a cliché, that American life is too bizarre,” he said. “The job of the artist is to come up with an original angle.”
It has certainly been his job. Mr. Reed started in the late 1960s writing a series of satirical japes, including “Mumbo Jumbo” and “The Free-Lance Pallbearers.” These books did not sell well at the time but gained a reputation: This is a writer who knows things about America that America would rather you not know. Thomas Pynchon hailed Mr. Reed in his 1973 novel, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” “Check out Ishmael Reed,” Mr. Pynchon advised in a parenthetical aside.
“Ishmael Reed has earned the rare distinction of revolutionizing the way authors tell stories about Black people,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, wrote in an email.
Being a satirist is a complicated business these days, though. Jokes directed at the powerful are dangerous. Mr. Thiel secretly funded a lawsuit against the irreverent website Gawker in 2013. Gawker lost the case and went out of business. (Mr. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did Mr. Musk.)
Mr. Reed is not worried. “I fly below the radar,” he said.
Certainly the scales here are unequal. Mr. Musk claims 240 million followers on X, his social media platform, and has a fortune approaching $1 trillion. Mr. Reed’s primary publisher is now in Canada. His biggest asset is his house, which is pleasantly stuffed with books. The street used to have several drug dens; now it is upper middle class.
“I’m a Black guy living in North Oakland, writing about titans — people who live on Mount Olympus,” he said. He listened to some of the trial on an audio feed. He thought of Shakespeare, specifically “Titus Andronicus.”
“That play is about revenge,” Mr. Reed said. “And cannibalism. These tech people want to devour each other.”
Mr. Altman may be the guy in control of the most significant A.I. company, but Mr. Reed finds him rather flat as dramatic material.
Mr. Musk is different.
“I don’t find him amusing in real life, but he’s amusing in my play,” Mr. Reed said. “I started this because I read that 14 million people will possibly die because Elon Musk ended U.S.A.I.D. It took the Nazis maybe five or six years to accomplish that.” Mr. Reed acknowledged that his humor is very dark.
The writer has no interest in A.I. He uses a grammar program to eliminate extra commas but found that a new A.I.-enhanced version wanted to get creative. “I used ‘hopped up,’ meaning high on drugs. The A.I. wanted me to use ‘sedated,’” he said. “It seems intolerant of idioms.”
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
In Mr. Reed’s early novel “Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down,” a parody of the Old West, a group of wanderers see off in the distance “a really garish schmaltzy super technological anarcho-paradise.”
Most head toward it, and why not? All the comforts and splendors there are free. But some head the other way, toward freedom.
That’s a clue. Like many coldblooded satirists, Mr. Reed has a hopeful heart.
“I would give the human species 500 more years before they get it right,” he said. “I think we can evolve out of this.”
