Want To See Chomsky, Rand, Marx And Musk Argue About Technology? Now You Can — In A Puppet Show

Image by SASCHA SCHUERMANN/AFP/Getty Images
If you have ever sat in a critical theory lecture and wished that your professor would be replaced by a group of dapper, miniaturized historical figures who sometimes rap, there’s now a puppet show to satiate that desire.
Mexican artist Pedro Reyes will debut a goofy new production, “Manufacturing Mischief,” on April 26 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The puppet show — which, he told the The New York Times’s Jennifer Schuessler, “grew out of an artistic residency” at MIT — features tiny, adorable versions of controversial thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand and Elon Musk. The puppets might be cute, but their ideas definitely aren’t; in “Manufacturing Mischief,” Chomsky serves as a judge in a contest hosted by Elon Musk to determine “The Terrifying New Gadget Which Might Kill Us All.” Rand and Marx, meanwhile, appear later on, after Musk brings out a “print a friend” machine which can bring historical and literary figures to life. Unsurprisingly, they yap about their ideologies.
Reyes told Schuessler that the project pokes fun at M.I.T. for its institutional predilection towards “techno-optimism,” or the belief that the world’s problems can be solved through technology alone. It makes some sense, then, that its title, “Manufacturing Mischief,” winks at Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” (1988), an academic polemic in which Chomsky argues that U.S. news media, disseminated using broadcast and print technologies, serves a propagandic function in American society. (Chomsky, upon being shown the show’s script and his Bunraku-style puppet likeness, gave Reyes his approval, according to Schuessler.) Then again, for all that “Manufacturing Mischief”’ apparently analyzes the social influence of technology, it’s also a goofy puppet show for kids: As Schuessler writes, it features a “21st century rap update of ‘the Communist Manifesto’” performed by puppet-Marx and a “surprise visit by Donald Trump.”
If you’re looking for a taste of the show, Marx, the puppet, appears in an earlier YouTube series by Reyes entitled “Baby Marx.” In one scene, he and a puppet version of the English economist Adam Smith talk about workers’ alienation over lunch. Marx rails against Starbucks’s wall paintings: “No artist made that … It was some guy, sitting on a line in a factory, pulling a lever!” Later, he admonishes Smith for calling him “comrade” to convince him to share a cookie. No, the kids won’t get it. But they might love it, nonetheless.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 3
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 4
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
In Case You Missed It
-
News Who would protect New York Jews better? Cuomo and Lander trade attacks on the campaign trail
-
News Rabbis revolt over LGBTQ+ club, exposing fight over queer acceptance at Yeshiva University
-
Opinion In Qatargate fiasco, Netanyahu’s ‘witch hunt’ narrative takes cues from Trump
-
Yiddish די הגדה ווי אַ לעבעדיקער דענקמאָל פֿון אַשכּנזישער פּאָעזיעThe Haggadah as a living monument to Ashkenazi poetry
אַמאָל זענען די פּייטנים, מיסטישע דיכטער־וויזיאָנערן, געווען אויבן־אָן בײַ די פֿראַנצויזישע און דײַטשישע ייִדן.
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.