Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Culture (Page 1 of 23)

These are posts on culture from the blog Base and Superstructure. Mostly the focus is on American culture. But there might be a few posts on broader, international issues.

This is a photo of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan speaking in front of a Trump Vance sign, designed as a representation of the kayfabe presidency.

The Kayfabe Presidency

April 20, 2026 / / 0 Comments

We have no shortage of comparisons and metaphors for the Trump presidency! Let’s see how professional wrestling and kayfabe fit into that picture.

Many of these metaphors stem from the Great Fascism Debate, which I joined for some time before swearing it off. Among other problems, the “Trump as Hitler” and “Trump as Mussolini” move is lazy. Even worse, it commits the sin of lack of imagination.

But I’ve flirted with several comparisons myself. Entering the 2016 race as a media mogul using right-wing populism and a kayfabe personality to climb to the top, Trump looked remarkably similar to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

More interestingly, I compared Trump to trash TV character Al Bundy from Married with Children.

How’d that go? Bundy was a roughly middle class guy in suburban Chicago, so he’s not like Trump in terms of job or income. Rather, Bundy personified the Trump voter. He aired white male grievances at a variety of targets – a feminist neighbor, a woman boss, a Latina TV anchor, and so on.

However, these metaphors have all become tired. With that in mind, let’s return to that earlier word ‘kayfabe.’ Maybe it can offer us new clues.

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Sci-Fi and LLMs

March 23, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I recently re-read Cal, one of Isaac Asimov’s final short stories. It was published in the 1995 collection Gold, which is a hit-or-miss collection of unpublished Asimov stories sitting around near the end of his life, paired with essays on sci-fi as a genre and writing as a practice.

That’s enough by way of an intro. Here’s the point: In the story, Asimov lays out a scenario involving a robot that learns how to write. As the robot becomes more complex, its writing becomes better than the writing of its master. The master worries that the robot will come to overshadow him. In response, he calls a technician to dumb down the robot’s programming.

This produces a crisis in the first law of robotics.

Sound familiar?

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A photograph of an N99 respirator, used to represent Covid and masks in 2025.

Covid and Masks in 2025

December 8, 2025 /

A local guy named Mason (note: not his real name) goes to lots of local events – political events, activist meetings, festivals, and so on. He’s somewhat older, friendly but rather awkward, and overall a good natured person.

He also still wears a mask in 2025.

Sort of.

To put it more accurately, sometimes he wears a mask and other times he doesn’t. And there’s little discernible pattern to it. Whether or not he wears a mask doesn’t seem to follow any risk assessment related to Covid-19. It’s not just that he’s not at elevated risk – though he almost certainly isn’t – but at times I even see him wearing a mask while he’s outdoors and not in a crowd and then taking the mask off or wearing it on his chin when he joins an indoor meeting.

I’m not trying to pick on Mason here. He’s a good guy. My point is that his behavior tracks a lot of what I see. I’ve seen a few dozen or so local characters who fit a similar profile during the pandemic. Most of them gradually reduced or cut out their mask usage by last year.

A few remain holdouts.

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A photo of 7 Gen Z teenagers wearing loud fashion.

Gen Z and Risk Aversion

September 22, 2025 /

Every generation criticizes the generation after it. We all know it. We have evidence of it dating back to antiquity. To boot, the criticism follows the same rough outline: the kids these days don’t respect their elders, tradition, or society, etc.

But the world has changed in historically unique ways over the past few generations. The rise of the Internet – and later social media – ushered in changes that surely stretch beyond those of the radio or television. The neoliberal era brought finance capital to power in a way never before seen.

In other words, our everyday experience of the world is changing. And it feels like it’s changing faster than it used to.

Anyway, that’s the thought behind much of the generational critique. But we should get to the bottom of it.

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