What's up, it's Major. Today's episode is guest-hosted by the poet Jason Schneiderman,

Hangtite, and I'll be back on June 12th.

I am Jason Schneiderman, and this is the slowdown.

As a kid, I loved science fiction. I grew up reading short stories by Ray Bradbury,

and Isaac Asimov, and watching Doctor Who in the Twilight Zone.

I saw science fiction as a series of thought experiments, a way to talk about the world's problems

at an emotional remove. Star Trek addressed race in America in the 1960s so powerfully

that when Nishal Nichols, who was playing science officer Lutendora, told Martin Luther King Jr

that she wished she could be marching with him, he replied, you are marching. You are reflecting

what we are fighting for. He convinced her to stay on the show, so that millions of Americans would

tune in each week to see a black woman on the bridge of a utopian and egalitarian future.

But lately, it feels like those liberating thought experiments designed to help us toward a

better way of being in the world have calcified into something dystopian and cruel.

When the Matrix first came out, I understood it as a film about refusing forms of dehumanizing

technology in order to embrace a spirit of loving engagement and community.

Now, the Matrix has become shorthand for the inevitability of a dystopian future, and the phrase

red pill is code not for critically rethinking our society, but a kind of wholesale embrace of a

cruel form of groupthink that masquerades as individuality. At the center of the Matrix is the idea

that the contemporary life is actually a computer simulation, and today's whipsmart poem takes

that idea as its starting point. Its observations are delivered in a style that is as

trenchant as it is funny, while the speaker's voice remains conversational and charismatic.

The speaker looks at the oddly contemporary problem of people who can't tell the difference

...