Happy Birthday Modern Times

February 5, 2026

Today’s the 90th anniversary of the premiere of Chaplin’s Modern Times, a story inspired by what the artist heard about Detroit’s industries and about young people suffering from nervous breakdowns after a few years on the assembly line.
As a movie, it’s not my cup of tea: I’m more of a Metropolis gal.
The general concept, though, is more than relevant and it’s often misunderstood as a satire on the role of industrialisation and the machine, while Chaplin’s grasp of the problem was far more profound.
The problem isn’t the machine.
The problem is an organisation of labour so fragmented and alienated that a machine can easily replace the human.

If you want to know how it all connects with us, our “modern times” and especially the role of artificial intelligence in playing the part of the machine in the contemporary fragmentation of creative labour, I’ll never stop recommending Matteo Pasquinelli‘s Eye of the Master. But maybe that’s worth exploring in more detail.

For now, happy birthday Modern Times.

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