Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

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Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his fellow Futurists were sexist and fascistic and militaristic, not unique to them in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. Some of their ideas were insane (sleep was to be abolished) and some neutral (tin neckties, after all, are no dumber than any other kind), but a few were worth thinking about.

One such political thought: The Futurists thought automation would eventually eliminate poverty and inequality, something that’s possible if not inevitable. A less-important though interesting cultural idea: Machines and industrial sounds should be be used to create dance music. It was very prophetic, if not initially appreciated. Their plan for reinventing boxing never came to fruition, however, as you can read in the following article about a Futurist exposition in Rome from the July 16, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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When they weren’t busy trying to establish a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Machines, F.T.Marinetti and his fellow perplexing Futurists of the early 20th century were thumbing their noses at whatever seemed conventional, even sleep and music. Two brief tales of their offbeat activities from articles which appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

From January 7, 1925:


F
rom October 26, 1913:

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Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was many things in Mussolini’s Italy: fascist, modernist, machine-lover and misogynist. As the leader of the Futurist Movement, he was a crackpot with an aluminum tie and tin books who deified machinery and automation and extolled the virtues of war (“the world’s only hygiene”). He not only favored violence being visited upon many institutions and people but also wished to legally protect technology, the kind that made Italo Balbo’s office hum. In the following article from the October 8, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, one of his minions, Signor Azari, proposes a society to guard machines as if they were family pets. Two interesting things: The question of robots having legal rights has come into vogue again in our time, and the idea that an autonomous society would eliminate economic inequality has proven false so far in our digital era.

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