Around the corner from my home in Tyler, TX, the Liberty Theater is screening Metropolis. Fritz Lang set his dystopian epic in the year 2026, and now that the calendar has caught up, the film is making the rounds again. Nearly a century ago, Lang imagined this year as an industrial future defined by towering skylines, vast machinery, rigid class division, and workers reduced to components in a system too large to comprehend.
As I write this, I am sipping hot coffee at Caffè Dante in an extremely cold New York City. I flew in from Tyler, TX—which got its own battering—and the severe cold lingering here is a remnant of Winter Storm Fern, the system that covered much of the country in snow and ice. The purpose of the trip is to give a poetry recital at the Amant Foundation in Brooklyn, of all things. Outside, people hurry past with their heads down, powering through what’s left of the storm. It’s a fitting image for the gear industry in 2026: heads down, pushing through conditions not of their own making, waiting for a break in the weather.
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