As they zip and bobble down the sidewalk, they turn heads. Little coolers on wheels, food delivery robots from Coco appear like colorful automated coolers, their standard design subconsciously evoking the classic toy little red wagon for Radio-Flyer. The net effect might be—here’s a friendly bot straight out of Pixar’s WALL-E.

They also can nearly impede first responders. A few months ago, as an ambulance and police car—sirens blaring—advanced along Olympic Boulevard in West LA, motorists pulled over to allow the emergency vehicles to proceed. But the Coco crossing the street? It kept going across a crosswalk — nearly striking the police car as it approached the intersection.

Outside of the radar-spinning Waymo driverless taxis, food delivery robots are the most visible sign of Los Angeles at the forefront of being a Clanker City. But it’s important to note that many of these robots aren’t actually autonomous. Assisted by remote operators, they’re more akin to drones.

That hasn’t stopped the general feeling of amusement around the robots’ whimsical design. Once I encountered a group of children “bullying” a Coco robot, surrounding it so that it could not continue on its journey. (This may be prove to be bad juju for Judgment Day, when Skynet becomes self-aware and the robot revolution commences.)

Some of these robots (including from Coco’s competitor, Serve) feature product placement — topical ads for Prime Video’s apocalyptic video game adaptation Fallout, Netflix’s The Electric State (a sci-fi film about robots), and, well, TNT Sports.

And that ad placement comes with wide coverage. According the Los Angeles Times, Coco has completed more than 500,000 deliveries and plans to expand from its current field of operations in Chicago, Miami, and L.A., launching 10,000 more robots to service in 2026.

But Coco is a L.A.-specific project, founded by a UCLA student in his dorm room, and headquartered in Santa Monica. Notably, Coco robots only have about a 2-mile range, and they partner with specific restaurants that use them as an alternative and supplement to human delivery drivers from DoorDash or Uber Eats.

One wonders if food delivery robots may face the growing pains of other efforts to “disrupt” the sidewalk. When Lime scooters launched in 2018 in Northern Nevada, they were faced with a cease-and-desist for violating state law, and had to pull out of the market. And given Los Angeles’ large unhoused population, it seems like only a matter of time before desperate people start cracking them open for the hot dinners inside.

The frequent obstructions on L.A. sidewalks — like construction and homeless encampments — might also impede Cocos from fulfilling their deliveries. Then there’s the inclement weather that might prevent the success of Cocos in colder climates. But, in a landscape often choked with traffic, there are cases where robots might be speedier on the sidewalks than human-piloted cars on the roads.

If you want to order to receive food from a Coco specifically (as I did for the purpose of this post), that’s a little bit harder. Coco partners with existing food delivery apps like Uber Eats, so you have to select a restaurant that you know uses Cocos, and roll the dice hoping the restaurant will enlist a Coco rather than a human driver. The economic benefit to the consumer (but not to the delivery driver)—is that a Coco doesn’t expect a tip.

For my experiment, I ordered from a nearby burger joint I knew used Cocos, because I had seen Cocos parked outside their storefront.

To my great fortune, my Uber Eats order was met with the notification that a Coco would handle my delivery. Like a conventional ride-share situation, the robot’s progress and route were displayed on my phone, as well as its ETA.

When the Coco arrived at my apartment, the app asked you to unlock the Coco by pressing a button. And voila, the Coco’s lid opened, my now-lukewarm burger inside. Once I had done that, the compartment closed and the Coco waited for commands for a moment before it returned, presumably, whence it came.

Coco seems to make sense for the college campus market, as the hungry college student might be the most likely customer of fast-food on delivery.

But, not unlike a debate inspired by robotaxis, if we as a society can’t give bad jobs to people (like being an Uber driver), what are the societal costs of automating food delivery? Surely, there must be maintenance teams for the bots and people to clean their interiors when a food container inevitably spills. We may be trading one form of labor for another, with benefits that are hard to perceive.

One thing is for certain. At present time, food delivery bots are not the correct shape to transport a standard-sized pizza. So the pizza delivery guy can rest assured his or her job is safe for at least a little while longer.

In July 2025, a curious attraction opened on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, California, mere blocks from landmarks like the TCL Chinese Theater. That venue was the Tesla Diner, a vision of the retro-future from America’s most controversial tech billionaire.

Elon Musk conceived of the diner in 2018, back when he was a darling of the media and a seeming leader of a green, high-tech future. Now, of course, his star has fallen under his laissez-faire (except when the insults were directed at him) stewardship of Twitter (rechristened X in 2022), the overall market failure of Tesla’s Cybertruck, his participation in the incompetent and calamitous “Department of Government Efficiency” (D.O.G.E.) at the outset of the 2nd Trump Administration, and his apparent fascist overtures, including his seeming Nazi salute at the 2025 presidential inauguration.

All of the fresh, Trump-Musk chaos didn’t exactly stall the Tesla Diner’s rollout last July, when hundreds queued up in lines that snaked around the block to sample the diner’s cuisine, buzzy for the involvement of local star chefs like Bill Chait (of popular L.A. French restaurant République) and Eric Greenspan (who created the formerly James Beard-honored The Foundry). Diners were greeted by a parking lot dressed as a drive-in movie theater, playing old movies and Jetsons cartoons, (though the spots were reserved for Tesla charging only, of course) and even a popcorn-serving robot, one of Musk’s Optimus models which began development in 2021, according to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 Musk biography.

The D.O.G.E. protesters were quick to join the party — including an inflatable Musk giving the Nazi salute, reminiscent of union rat-inflatables during picket lines — but in the months that followed the diner’s buzzy launch, the restaurant faded into the rest of the sun-cooked L.A. landscape. Greenspan disassociated himself from the restaurant, and even the protesters vanished. So too did the popcorn-serving clankers.

I came to visit the Tesla Diner in the spirit of understanding Los Angeles’ status as a Clanker City, but the only Tesla robots I saw on my visit in January 2026 were behind glass, as the popcorn-serving Optimus had been already retired.

Instead, what I did find was basically a glorified, overpriced Shake Shack. After you order and pay on a tablet screen, browsing through a menu of standard café and fast food fare, — i.e., Shake Shack — you wait to pick up your drink and order on the counter. Reminiscent of a Happy Meal, the food is served in Cybertruck-shaped boxes. What did Yoda say? “Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is.”

A single soda, smashburger and fries will cost you $25, before California taxes and tip. While the burger was solid, the fries I found bland, making the meal wildly overpriced. Remember, the commensurate product — an In-N-Out combo — still goes for about $7.50.

Now, the reason you might want to tip is because there’s a literal army of people working at Tesla Diner. They are constantly scrubbing the circular glass doors, which would otherwise be coated in L.A. dust and water-spots, another sign of the inefficiency of the design. The retro-future styled booths and tables are intriguing, and to give credit where credit is due — they are clean.

On my visit, most of the people at the diner were Japanese tourists, families with small children, and even a man who asked for non-iced water, a request that the staff-member behind the counter fulfilled. But the main business they might be doing is selling merch, including an In-N-Out-styled t-shirt and a $150 Tesla Optimus action figure — selling the image of a robot that isn’t even currently functioning in the store.

I wondered why Tesla Diner was located here, in Hollywood. On the one hand, it had a Universal Studios / Disney quality — here was a novelty branding exercise, in a neighborhood completely defined by billboards pretending that people still watch movies in theaters. On the other, here was a burger joint in the literal land of burger joints, in a neighborhood at the center of the SoCal freeway vortex, making it extremely inconvenient to reach for anyone living in any of L.A.’s satellite cities of the megalopolis.

Come to think of it, Tesla Diner would make much more sense in the Bay Area, where techies would eat up the design and strange virtue-signaling. (Inside, a Tesla banner advertised the slogan: “Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable abundance,” an idea that seems more aligned with Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s 2025 Abundance book than the current Musk doctrine.)

At present, Tesla Diner seems destined to a slow death or — depending on the billionaire’s hot-and-cold relationship with President #47 — open up a kiosk within the forthcoming White House ballroom. Say what you will about the powerful pair — they both have a keen sense of tastelessness.

CLANKER CITY is a new miniseries from THE USONIAN. Consider supporting the Substack to receive monthly essays exclusive to paid subscribers.

A couple of years ago, when ChatGPT was just getting started in the public eye, I ran a little experiment. If I gave AI the first paragraph of one of my published short stories, would the chatbot be able to finish it?

The result was sort of compelling. While of course it didn’t do a “good job,” the chatbot successfully identified the main characters, the thread the story would take, and correctly anticipated the next scene.

This year I thought I’d try a different AI experiment. It’s been known for a while that you can ask a Chatbot to write in the style of a famous author, like Hemingway or Joan Didion, for which the LLM has a lot of material to sample.

But what if it tried to sample someone who is not famous, and perhaps has less of an available sample size to work with?

That is to say—what if it tried to imitate me?

So I asked it to. And this is what it came up with:

Here is an original short story in the style of Harrison Blackman—a blend of atmospheric detail, psychological tension, and speculative unease, without copying any copyrighted material:1

The Cartographer’s Error

When the drone returned without its camera, the team pretended not to notice. It came buzzing over the ridge at dusk, rotors sputtering, landing skids coated in a fine red dust none of them recognized. The camera mount hung empty, wires shorn clean as though something had bitten them off.

Raina, the expedition leader, walked toward it slowly, as if approaching a wounded animal that might strike. “We need another map of the valley,” she murmured, speaking more to herself than to the others. “Without visuals we can’t confirm the fault line.”

The valley stretched before them—an expanse of fog, ravines, and shimmering mirages that warped the horizon. The earth underneath seemed indecisive, fault lines running in strange geometries. Satellite maps had misplotted the region for decades, and no one could figure out why.

Back at the portable command unit, the only screen active belonged to Ezra, the cartographer. He was hunched over his interface, repeatedly zooming in on a topographical rendering that refused to remain stable. Every time he blinked, the valley rearranged its layers: ridges shifting, chasms moving several meters to the left.

“It’s doing it again,” Ezra said, voice thin. “Terrain is updating without input.”

“Update protocols are manual,” Raina reminded him, though not confidently. “Terrain doesn’t just—move.”

Ezra pointed at a jagged contour line blinking at the map’s edge. “This wasn’t here ten minutes ago. It’s like the valley is correcting me.”

Raina suppressed a shiver. “Double-check the baselines. Your instruments might be miscalibrated.”

Ezra wanted to protest, but he saw the tension in her jaw. She wasn’t dismissing him—she was afraid to believe him.

Hours passed. Night settled deeper. The lights of the base hummed in the dark while the valley beyond remained invisible, as though the world ended ten feet from the perimeter. Ezra refused to sleep until the map stabilized.

By 3 a.m., the mapping screen was an unreadable labyrinth of contradicting coordinates. Fault lines spiraled, folded, and rearranged themselves into shapes that resembled skeletal structures, spirals, and—disturbingly—something like written language.

Ezra stared slack-jawed. “Raina… I think it’s communicating.”

Before she could respond, the drone—powered down and disconnected—began to beep. Its transmitter blinked an error message: LOCATION NOT FOUND. REPLACE MAP.

Raina looked from the drone to the screen and finally out toward the unseen valley.

“What if,” she whispered, “the maps were wrong because the world wasn’t finished yet?”

Ezra swallowed hard. “Or because it’s still being rewritten.”

Neither of them spoke after that. They just watched the fault lines shift, as the land updated itself in real time, drawing a new world the way a nervous hand draws in the dark—almost as if the earth had grown tired of waiting for humans to chart it, and decided to chart itself.

[THE END]2

Let’s unpack this

Last month Sam Kriss wrote an essay in the New York Times Magazine expertly identifying the tells of AI writing. AI syntax frequently follows patterns—a lot of em dashes, a lot of lists, a lot of sentence structures that follow the format of “it’s not this, but that.”

“The Cartographer’s Error” follows these tells pretty closely:

• “Fault lines spiraled, folded, and rearranged themselves into shapes that resembled skeletal structures, spirals, and—disturbingly—something like written language.” Em dash, check.

• “Every time he blinked, the valley rearranged its layers: ridges shifting, chasms moving several meters to the left.” List, check.

• “She wasn’t dismissing him—she was afraid to believe him.” It’s not this—it’s that!

Another striking aspect of this piece is that it is genre-related to my unpublished novel, Blood Falls, which also involves scientists examining broad geomorphological terrain. Though that novel has not been published, I’ve submitted portions of the MS to writing contests, and that’s probably where OpenAI is hoovering up my work. Disturbing, yes, but not inexplicable.

But is this truly written in “my style?” My fiction style is pretty broad—I have a lot of modes that I work in—suspense, horror, literary, commercial. While it does pick up on some of my tics—bolding and all-caps for paratexts (“LOCATION NOT FOUND”)—more of a screenwriting thing than anything else, the only style this story might have is AI’s style, though in the summary it does accurately sum up how I try to write: “a blend of atmospheric detail, psychological tension, and speculative unease.”

Then I was thinking—a lot of my available writing is journalistic. What, then could AI do with that? How would it write a journalism story by me?

Here goes nothing—and this time, I mean it:

The Town That Keeps Moving: A Quiet Community Faces a Shifting Landscape

Here is an original journalism-style article in the stylistic vein of Harrison Blackman—measured, atmospheric, deeply reported, with an undercurrent of speculative unease, without copying any real copyrighted text:

Raventon, TX — At first, residents treated it as a curiosity—hairline cracks in sidewalks that seemed to change direction overnight. A fence that no longer lined up with a property boundary. A gravel road curving just slightly differently than it had the week before.

But by late spring, the phenomenon had become impossible to ignore.

“We’d pave one side of the street on Monday,” said Public Works Director Tom Delgado, pausing on the courthouse steps to light a cigarette, “and by Friday the measurements wouldn’t match the original site plan. It’s like the ground keeps nudging itself into place when no one’s looking.”

Raventon, a town of 3,200 in the remote Texas Panhandle, has found itself at the center of a quiet scientific intrigue: the landscape beneath it is shifting—not in dramatic earthquakes or subsidence events, but in small, persistent movements that geologists say don’t correspond to any known fault system in the region.

A Puzzle of Millimeters

Texas Tech geologist Dr. Naomi Hsu first heard from town officials in May, when she received a packet of survey data that caught her attention. “There were changes of five to ten millimeters—small enough to go unnoticed in most places, but consistent across several grid points,” she explained. “What was striking wasn’t the size. It was the pattern.”

Hsu deployed a grad student and a set of ground-based LIDAR units. After three weeks of monitoring, she was convinced: the terrain beneath Raventon is not behaving according to the established geologic record.

“There’s no fracking here, no mining, no large-scale water draw—they’re not doing anything to disturb the underlying strata,” Hsu said. “It’s as if the bedrock itself is… reorganizing.”3

She hesitated over the final word, as if aware of its implications.

A Town With a Long Memory

Residents, many of whom have family histories stretching back to the town’s founding in 1889, have begun combing local archives for clues. Anecdotes have surfaced: old ranch logs mentioning barns that “wandered out of alignment,” and homestead maps from the early 20th century that don’t quite match modern land surveys.

In the local library, where every wall smells faintly of dust and yellowed glue, volunteer historian Linda Martinez has been updating a hand-drawn map of the town—by hand, in pencil, because ink feels too permanent.

“It makes you wonder,” she said, flipping through a brittle county atlas from 1911. “Did the settlers know something we forgot? Or did the ground only start changing after we did?”

Human Problem, Human Adaptation

For now, the town has taken a practical approach. Survey benchmarks are being updated monthly. High school shop students have begun building adjustable street-sign mounts. Contractors now carry both tape measures and GPS receivers.

Everyone seems to be adapting—because what else is there to do?

Mayor Denise Alvarez shrugged when asked whether the town was worried. “It’s not flooding us, and it’s not dropping us into a sinkhole. The world is alive. Always has been. Maybe this town just has a more talkative piece of land beneath it.”

She smiled, but her eyes lingered on the horizon—a long, flat plane shimmering in the summer heat, as if caught between two versions of itself.

What Comes Next

Dr. Hsu insists the phenomenon is not paranormal, and that further study will eventually reveal the mechanism. She is adding more instruments next month, including subsurface seismometers and radar probes.

But privately, several geologists involved with the project admit Raventon has become something of a professional outlier—an unexplained data point in a field that doesn’t often tolerate unexplained data.

Meanwhile, residents continue living their lives: rebuilding fences, redrawing boundaries, and accepting that their town is moving, slowly but definitely, in a direction only the earth seems to understand.

“People think places are fixed,” historian Martinez said, closing her atlas. “But maybe that’s just because we don’t usually watch closely enough.”

Um, let’s unpack this one, too

In this “piece,” well, ChatGPT decided to rewrite the fiction story as if it were truth. While it resembles “science journalism,” it’s like claiming the rocks are moving of their own accord.

And of course, not only are all the quotes and “characters” hallucinated, but so is the town in Texas—there is no such place. There are no such people as Naomi Hsu, Ph.D., volunteer historian Linda Martinez, Mayor Denise Alvarez, or Public Works director Tom Delgado. These people aren’t real. This isn’t JOURNALISM.

Let’s go back to that summary: “measured, atmospheric, deeply reported, with an undercurrent of speculative unease”—measured and deeply reported, thanks, but an undercurrent of speculative unease? Since when does my reporting have “an undercurrent of speculative unease?”

Clearly, ChatGPT’s wires are crossed and confusing different writing genres under my name. Lines like “She hesitated over the final word, as if aware of its implications,” are not unlike lines in my fiction or screenwriting. They are not in my journalism.

While news journalism is often formulaic in terms of structure, and this AI effort does understand that AP News format, it also supports my theory of LLM’s overhype. Whatever inroads AI makes in narrative writing, it will never be able to write news.

News is information that is new. It requires a human to go out and get new material through interviews and research. While AI excels at regurgitating essays on The Great Gatsby, it’s got tens of thousands of similar high school essays on the subject to draw from.

At base level, LLMs are plagiarism machines. Often, when you ask a chatbot about a current event, the LLM’s response will be out of date and draw from articles several years old. It can’t generate anything from scratch. It needs a pool of human-generated information to cull from. Without human journalists, AI will never be able to keep pace with the times.

So, what do you think? Are clankers going to eliminate all human writing? If they do, you’d better like AI’s “it’s not this, it’s that” structure.

There’s a scene in the mostly forgotten 2004 sci-fi film, I, Robot, when Will Smith’s luddite, anti-robot cop character turns on the “manual override” setting of his self-driving car, and a steering wheel emerges from the console for him to take control. In the passenger seat, Bridget Moynahan, who plays Smith’s love interest/the film’s “robotics scientist” (i.e., exposition mouthpiece), turns to him and says, “You can’t be serious. Not at these speeds!”—suggesting that Will Smith is being brazen for literally doing what just about every American ends up doing every day—driving a car.

This scene was amusing in 2004. Now that there are cars that can actually drive on their own, this scene may now be thought of as… prescient?

For the better part of the first two decades of the 21st century, the self-driving car has been a big-ticket Silicon Valley goal. As early as 2014, Apple was trying to make its own electric, self-driving car, but killed the project in 2024 to focus more on AI.

Meanwhile, part of Uber’s grand strategy (one that contributed to former CEO Travis Kalanick’s downfall) involved recruiting Google’s former self-driving car team, led by Anthony Levandowski, who was later convicted of stealing Google’s self-driving trade secrets. (Trump pardoned him in 2021). According to Mike Isaac’s 2019 book Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Kalanick and Levandowski envisioned a world where Uber wouldn’t just receive a company cut of driver fare—with a self-driving car, they could receive the entire fare.

However, with Uber’s efforts in that arena flailing after Google made sure the company was held accountable for stealing its technology, Google’s self-driving efforts have taken the lead. In 2016, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, spun out Waymo as its own company, its name a play on the concept that it was a “way forward in mobility,” per Isaac.1

First, the Waymos were only in beta in Phoenix, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, where they were barred from getting on the freeway.

But now, they’re fully available for riders in those cities—and as of November 2025, Waymos can now drive on the highway, and soon they’re scheduled to be active in six more U.S. cities.

Waymo is not without its problems, just another example of self-driving cars leading to accidents, from Tesla to Uber to GM’s “Cruise” project. Some incidents have included:

• Multiple occasions where Waymos have failed to stop for school buses, prompting a software recall.

• A Waymo was recently recorded driving through the scene of a police standoff in Los Angeles. Crime—and the law—just doesn’t scare a Waymo.

• Life finds a way—a California woman just gave birth in a Waymo.

What makes these incidents even more absurd is that in California, until a legal fix that takes effect next year, Waymos can’t be cited for traffic violations because according to state law, only people can be cited for violations.

But Waymos and their ilk do have a key advantage, particularly for women—there’s no chance of a creepy driver (or worse) when there is no driver.

On the other hand, no driver might mean there might be creepy stowaways in the trunk instead, as this recent piece in Futurism describes!

In the belly of the Waymo

I was reticent to take Waymo for a long time. One Waymo would almost always lurk on one of the cross streets from my apartment, like a video game character respawn point, waiting for its next call, its radar shifting.

Plus, Waymos have had a curious effect on traffic as experienced in Los Angeles. Most L.A. drivers exceed the speed limit, but Waymos do not, slowing down the pace of traffic around them.

Moreover, Waymos not moving when there are obstacles can cause issues. For example, in L.A. rush-hour, the traffic box is often congested with overeager drivers trying to make it through a cycle, with their cars’ rear-ends sticking out into the right-most lane, blocking traffic that could otherwise proceed in this lane. Faced with a driver blocking the box, the Waymo will not proceed. A human, however, might wait for an opening and steer around the car in the way. But if you get caught behind a Waymo in this scenario, you may never escape the cycle… the Waymo just won’t move.

And because Waymos are equipped with all manner of sensing equipment, pedestrians have often taken a cavalier attitude toward stepping in front of them. I’ve seen people jaywalk straight in front of approaching Waymos on the assumption they’ll stop for them. While the Waymo may stop, the other drivers in the road may not. I live in fear for how many accidents and injuries this practice might cause.

Despite all my reservations, for the purposes of this post and in the spirit of “gonzo” journalism, I did take my first ride in one.

My target was modest—could Waymo take me to the community pool for my evening workout and back? The answer is yes.

Much like Uber or Lyft, you hail a Waymo from the company’s app. When the car arrives, it idles outside the pickup point, and the whirring radar device at the top projects an icon that indicates the vehicle is in the process of picking-up.

As you approach the car, you push a button on the phone app to unlock the car, after which you can open the door. Once you’re in the backseat, the car greets you by name in a silky robotic, subway-style voice (this was weird) and a touch-screen on the console feeds you instructions—as well as the spookiest aspect of all—a live radar screen of your surroundings. Within the radar’s all-seeing vision, physical obstacles are outlined, as well as humans and other ambulant creatures, such as dogs, in motion. Police and emergency vehicles get their own color and stand out from the rest.

It’s basically like the viewscreen of malicious aliens/robots in films like Predator or Terminator, but I suppose the point is to reassure the rider that the Waymo sees all, even better than a human driver.

And this may be true for the driving. When the car dropped me off at the pool, a young man was trying to hail my robot cab. The Waymo ignored him and drove off. When the man logged the request in the app, only then did the robotaxi circle back to open the doors for him. Sometimes, a human touch is required to efficiently secure the next fare.

A wanderer advances through a desert—well, on a treadmill—to the synth-pop tune of “Alone in Kyoto” by the French band Air.

The performer sports a Bedouin-esque costume, an example of the vaguely Orientalist-meets-Mad Max theme of The Cortège, an utterly singular show currently presented on weekend evenings at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank, California.

The Cortège is a little hard to explain. Its name refers to a funeral procession, and the show’s marketing describes the show as a “festive funeral for our times.” Conceived by artist Jeff Hull, a pioneer of participatory experiences, as an ebullient expression of grief, the procession synthesizes a variety of styles that makes it feel oddly timeless.

Combining New Age, jazz and New Orleans-styled marching band music with contemporary street dance, the show’s visual language is equally stunning. Performers wear extravagant costumes that seem pulled from the wardrobe of a Dune movie against a backdrop of drone light shows, fog machines, animatronics, and Waterworld-esque scaffolding. The show follows the aforementioned wanderer through his life—as he finds love, is imprisoned, breaks free, and is eventually hunted own by an oppressive regime, before the titular Cortège honors his memory—featuring fuzzy Muppet-like creatures, a Santa Muerta figure, and Dune-esque mandarins.

This story is completely told in pantomime—and did I mention everyone in the audience, sitting on the grass or the grandstands, is wearing a headset? The show culminates in a silent disco where the audience joins in the procession, before being invited into a neo-Arabesque big tent to place a flower on the deceased and reflect on the experience over herbal honeybush tea. While dark, the tone of the story and performance, as LA Times critic Todd Martens wrote, is thoroughly jubilant. In the climax of the performance, the announcer reads from the names of recently deceased loved ones submitted by the attendees (though celebrities like Robert Redford also made the list).

I was dazzled by The Cortège, but what I found most fascinating about it was its incorporation of robotics. When the hero of the story is pursued by the villainous authorities, he is hunted down by soldiers and their robot dogs—whose “heads” are formed by screens broadcasting the images right in front of them. The quadrupedal robots are ominous at first, but in the show’s final movement—the silent disco involving the audience—the dogs become a source of joy, and audience members can dance “with” the robot dogs, accompanied by their human operators.

The Cortège’s robot dogs thus form an apt metaphor for humanity’s ambivalence to the rise of automation. On the one hand, robots and other automated machines represent a threat to humankind. On the other, they might be useful, and in The Cortège’s final act, they form a wellspring of jubilance.

The fact The Cortège debuted in Los Angeles County is even more telling, but not exactly surprising. Whereas Silicon Valley comes up with these technologies, Los Angeles is often the tech giants’ experimental proving ground. In LA, we have self-driving cars from Waymo and automated food delivery robots from Coco. We have a Tesla Diner (in which robots are involved), and it’s here, like Austin or San Francisco, that we see changes that will shape the rest of the world soon. As a friend from Cyprus told me when I tried to explain Waymos to him—“we’ll see all that stuff on the island in five to ten years.”

So, in that vein, I’d like to introduce The Usonian’s latest miniseries—Clanker City—an exploration of how automation is impacting urban life in Los Angeles. “Clanker” is a satirical derogatory term for robots that was first introduced in Star Wars, and recently the term has become an online meme.

Given that the sci-fi film Blade Runner anticipated Los Angeles would become a hub of robotics in the year 2019, it’s only fitting to explore the automated world of LA in 2025. Over the next few months, we’ll take a look at how automation is rubbing up against America’s most unusual, multipolar megalopolis.

Welcome to Clanker City. Hope you enjoy the ride.

This is the first post in a new Usonian miniseries— “Clanker City.” New posts will come out on about a monthly basis. Become a paid subscriber to support this initiative and our other feeds, plus receive one exclusive Usonian+ article per month. Thanks again, and cheers!

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