This Film About 2026 Was Made in 1927

Fritz Lang’s German expressionist masterpiece Metropolis was made 99 years ago. It features an out-of-touch ruling class, workers reduced to machine components, a manic inventor unleashing AI on an unsuspecting public, and a misaligned robot influencer tearing society apart. Y’know, 2026 stuff.

The broad themes of injustice, hubris and unintended consequences are timeless but some specifics in this film feel so contemporary that I wanted to share my thoughts on the following key scenes.

Machines

A montage at the opening of the film depicts machines in motion. In 1927, they symbolized industrialization hitting its stride at the expense of human dignity and values.

Today’s machine reflects that same logic carried to its globally “optimized” extreme. The underlying operating system of industrialization has been applied to subsequent revolutions — the internet, social media, and most recently AI — to create a kind of global meta-machine. Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine offers a clear-eyed diagnosis of what this machine has wrought and a thoughtful prescription for restoring our humanity in spite of it.

The workers

A familiar, dystopian image of workers so resigned to their pitiful station that they’ve lost their individuality and even their humanity.

After almost half a century of wage stagnation, rising costs, bullshit jobs, and spiraling wealth inequality, the plight of Metropolis’ workers feels less like allegory and more like documentary, especially for Gen Z. This analysis illustrates how Lang brilliantly used light and dark to signify humanity and its loss throughout the film.

In delightfully heavy-handed German expressionist fashion, the workers live in a subterranean city below the machines to which they are enslaved, which in turn sustain the higher classes of Metropolis above ground.

The garden

At the opposite end of this socioeconomic layer cake — at the highest point in Metropolis — is the garden, where bedazzled elites frolic among fountains, peacocks, and whatever those things are supposed to be.

It’s worth noting that following the postwar economic expansion, the income share of the top 1% has risen back to levels resembling 1927. Parallels everywhere!

This graph is deceptive in that it doesn’t reflect how dramatically the wealth share of the point one percent has absolutely exploded in recent decades.

Maria

We meet Maria when she brings a group of the workers’ Dickensian waifs up to the garden on a field trip. She occupies a space between the exploited workers and the decadent elites. She knows the score but responds with compassion and principled action rather than hopelessness or anger.

Maria embodies empathy, civic virtue, and a human-centered mindset. She works quietly but diligently to restore and sustain a more just, humane social order.

Freder

The playboy Freder is the prince who has everything but also a hole in his heart. He feels vaguely dissatisfied with his life of leisure and entertainment but when he comes face-to-face with authentic suffering (the waifs) and virtue (Maria), he falls head-over-heels and rushes down to the depths to pursue his new calling.

Who are the Freders of 2026? The obvious nominees — MacKenzie Scott, Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett — are dedicating immense treasure to addressing today’s polycrisis, but they’re writing checks from penthouses, not trading places with workers on the factory floor. Lang’s Freder actually descends. Whether we have anyone truly willing to do that today is an open question.

Freder sees the machine

In this indelible scene, Freder encounters one of the giant underground machines that have, unbeknownst to him, been sustaining his lavish lifestyle. He sees the workers, each toiling in a separate alcove — reduced to literal parts in the machine.

The parallels here are rich. The machine and its dehumanized human components have, until now, been hidden from Freder’s view — analogous to the externalized costs of the modern global supply chain that provides us with so much so cheaply. We may feel a twinge of unease about human rights violations in distant sweatshops or the carbon emissions upstream of that Costco run, but that unease seldom breaks through to cause behavior change.

The incisive writer and thinker Cory Doctorow recently coined a name for those workers plugged into this machine – reverse centaurs.

A centaur is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

The Amazon delivery driver is a textbook example. As Doctorow puts it, the driver is a peripheral for a van — and will be shown the door the instant a robotic alternative can be developed. The AI revolution is set to turn untold numbers of us centaurs into reverse centaurs in the months and years to come.

The machine explodes

A panicked worker sees that the machine is overheating. He understands the imminent danger but he is exhausted and collapses before he can prevent catastrophe.

This anonymous worker could be the patron saint of everyone who sees the unsustainability of our global meta-machine and tries to work within the system to avert crises produced by the system. We see the dangers and our hearts are in the right place but our efforts to pump the brakes are no match for the scale and momentum of the machine.

As you might expect, the machine explodes, the workers are blown from their alcoves and either killed or maimed.

Moloch

The carnage Freder witnesses in the aftermath of the explosion causes him to hallucinate the giant machine transforming into the pagan god Moloch, devouring ranks of workers who march passively into his mouth.

I’ve noticed Moloch surfacing in articles and podcasts recently, many on the subject of AI. After a little digging, a pattern became evident: Moloch seems to reemerge in the zeitgeist during techno-cultural upheavals. Industrialization gave us Cabiria (1914) and this film (1927). The countercultural revolution gave us Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1955). Pre-AI techno-dystopia gave us Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch (2014). And now, apparently, the AI revolution is summoning him again.

These days, it’s easy to see those workers marching into Moloch’s mouth as the swelling ranks of people being laid off en masse as companies leverage AI as “corporate Ozempic” to slash their payroll bill.

The city above ground

This bustling urban landscape — supported from below by the machines and in turn the workers — must have looked dazzlingly futuristic to audiences in 1927.

After a century of urbanization, it looks downright relatable to the majority of us. Skyscrapers, check. Elevated freeways, check. Traffic, check. Urban aviation — not so much.

Joh Fredersen, master of Metropolis

Joh Fredersen is the brooding master of Metropolis and also Freder’s father. We first meet him in his capacious penthouse office, pacing around making his minions in the Professional Managerial Class nervous. He wields great power but seems morally neutral — a technocrat hard at work solving problems, except the problems are so big and interrelated that he can’t fully grasp them. His furrowed brow lets us know this weighs on him.

In Joh, I see our corporate executives and government officials (the ones not engaged in wanton destruction). Now, as then, the Johs are inwardly overwhelmed by the complexity of their empires and terrified by the fragility of the systems they ostensibly run. Outwardly, they project confidence and competence. This, of course, is the entire job description.

Freder delivers inconvenient truth

A distraught Freder barges into his dad’s office to share his account of the horrors below and to plead for something to be done. Joh appears unmoved by his son’s account but is furious with his lackeys for keeping him in the dark about the catastrophe.

Freder here is every Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, or Gary Haugen passionately educating and petitioning the powerful at Davos, the COP conference, or the World Economic Forum. The powerful nod gravely, make hollow pledges then return to their schedules.

Freder puts his labor where his heart is

Not content to wait for dad to solve the problem, Freder goes below to trade places with one of the workers for a shift. This gives him a taste of the reverse centaur life and, unsurprisingly, it is deeply unpleasant and exhausting. I can imagine feeling much the same if I were to spend a day assembling iPhones at Foxconn and experience first-hand the negative externalities that underpin my privilege.

The machine Freder is operating morphs into a literal clock, moving glacially toward the end of his agonizing shift. Today, as the demands placed on us multiply and deadlines compress, many of us feel like time is racing rather than dragging — but this theme of living in tension with time seems, well, timeless.

Joh seeks a technical fix

This was the scene that prompted me to write this piece. Ever the technocrat, Joh goes in search of a technical rather than humanistic solution to the problem of the workers. He visits the inventor Rotwang, whose laboratory occupies what had once been a church but is now a forgotten ruin nestled among Metropolis’ skyscrapers. This naked symbology speaks to the secularization and scientism that was taking hold in the 1920s and is now fully baked into western culture. Lang even hammered the point home by putting an inverted pentagram on the wall behind the robot. Subtle, Fritz.

A manic Rotwang excitedly introduces Joh to his invention, the robot or Maschinenmensch. In a moment foreshadowing the launch of GPT, Joh recoils in wonderpanic. Rotwang is a true believer that technology (in particular, his technology) holds the key to humanity’s most pernicious challenges including toil, suffering, and even death itself. The robot is Rotwang’s attempt to resurrect his dead love, Hel, who broke his heart by choosing Joh. We immediately recognize the blinkered, egotistical, and deeply flawed Zuckermuskian archetype here.

Santa Maria

If Rotwang represents megalomaniacal, top-down disruption, Maria represents a bottom-up collective immune response. Deep beneath the city, a messianic Maria works tirelessly to restore hope and humanity to the exhausted workers. This tracks with contemporary evidence that rising socioeconomic stress and sliding living standards are strongly correlated with an erosion of trust in institutions, political fragmentation, deteriorating health and wellbeing, and an increase in religiosity. When systems fail, people turn to prophets.

Making Machine Maria

Another prescient scene unfolds as Rotwang captures Maria to transfer her likeness to the robot — in order to deceive and quell discontent among the workers who look to her for comfort and guidance. For the techno-zealot Rotwang and the slightly squeamish Joh, the ends (maintaining the status quo) justify the means (kidnapping, deception, manipulation).

It’s hard to overstate how well this maps onto our present moment, as the frontier AI labs greedily — and in many cases illegally — Hoover up the internet and fracked synthetic training data in an effort to make us trust the counsel of their benevolent and understanding robot.

Machine Maria gets to work

In her new career as an influencer, misaligned machine Maria starts racking up views and likes. She opens with a risqué (for 1927) striptease for the elites in the gentlemen’s club, who can’t look away and quickly abandon their morals and civility for more base instincts.

This is a pretty good summation of social media… and porn. The algorithms and dark patterns that drive the attention economy are irresistible by design. We can’t seem to look away either.

After instigating an all-out brawl at the gentlemen’s club, machine Maria heads down to the worker city to pick up where virtuous human Maria left off. But instead of affirming the workers’ dignity and advocating for solidarity among all residents of Metropolis, she stokes division and deep resentment, providing them with a crystal clear target for their anger: The elites! Up there!

This aptly describes another pillar of today’s attention economy, enragement equals engagement. The zone is now flooded with clickbait headlines, reductive sound bites, divisive short-form videos, and tribal tweets aimed at capturing eyeballs via manufactured outrage. It’s no wonder so many of us have bought into some form of a victim narrative and adopted a corrosive us vs. them posture. We’re getting our information through the distorted, amoral lens of machine Maria.

The workers go berserk

With her misalignment on full display, machine Maria fans the flames until the workers storm the machine level in a blind rage, destroying many of the critical machines that keep Metropolis running. A helpless Joh watches the lights of his city flicker while receiving only spotty information from below.

The present uptick in social unrest and political violence — the Capitol on January 6th being the most cinematic example — coincides neatly with the march of social media and the divisive rage bait the all-seeing algorithms pipe into our feeds. Lang called this one ninety-nine years early.

Human Maria saves the kids

The destruction of the machines not only cripples the city above ground, it triggers a catastrophic flood in the subterranean worker’s city where their children are trapped. In their frenzy, the workers are blind to the fact that they’ve imperiled their own kids. Fortunately, the saintly human Maria has escaped Rotwang’s clutches and gets to work rescuing the children and literally sounding the alarm as the water rises around them. She and Freder join forces and heroically get everyone to higher ground in time.

This is where the film’s allegorical aim shifts from the present to the future, and it stings. The selfish, shortsighted economic and technological decisions of recent decades are landing squarely on the youngest generations. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, deserves tremendous credit for raising awareness of the crippling effect social media is having on young minds. Meanwhile, as the U.S. national debt barrels toward $40 trillion 😳 it’s clear that Boomers and Gen X have put much of their own prosperity on upcoming generations’ credit cards. And now AI is racing to remove as many lower rungs from as many career ladders as possible. With all these headwinds, the Gen Z stare makes a lot more sense.

But headwinds can shift. Roughly 77% of U.S. classrooms now enforce phone bans of some kind. Young people are proving resourceful and creative as they navigate a grim economic landscape. Kyla Scanlon’s Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress provides a comprehensive and thoughtful look at their plight — and more than a little reason for hope.

The fever breaks

Much more drama ensues following the flood and the rescue but it culminates in the workers and the elites both realizing they’ve been deceived by machine Maria. They embark on a joint mission to apprehend her and burn her at the Art Deco stake.

The techlash now gathering momentum carries a similar energy. There is growing recognition of technology’s corrosive effects on mental health and social cohesion. Efforts to age-gate social media are gaining steam. Digital temperance is a thing now, with Luddite clubs springing up around the world. More people are rightly skeptical as their lived experience falls far short of the expectations set by their parents, Silicon Valley, and the marketing industrial complex. The recent PR self-immolation of prominent broligarchs bears more than a passing resemblance to unrepentant machine Maria going up in flames.

The resolution

In the final scene, Joh and the leader of the workers come together to resolve their differences and chart a more just course for Metropolis, but both men are too mistrustful and proud to cross the chasm on their own. Freder plays the diplomat and gets them to shake hands as Maria proclaims, “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart.”

It’s corny and saccharine, sure, but it’s also the most instructive line in the film.

In our time of perilous division between “coastal elites” and “the working class” — the archipelago of dense blue cities in a more sparsely populated sea of red — we could use a few more mediators willing to lead with heart rather than avarice or algorithm. Lang understood, ninety-nine years ago, that no amount of technical optimization can replace the messy, inefficient, irreplaceable work of giving a damn about each other.