If there are great eras of music in my life, one of them happens to be the one that coincides with the rise of Pandora (and, later, Spotify). In Austin in the last few years before 2010, I remember finding Tift Merritt, the First Aid Kit, the deeper solo work of Peter Murphy on Pandora. After we returned to San Francisco in 2010, it seemed every playlist and algorithmic guess from the music machines had one entry in common: Phoenix’s “Lisztomania.”

Where’d they go? I mean Phoenix as I ask that, but I also, come to think of it, mean Pandora. And why? Was there some cultural moment that they were a part of that is now dust?

In 2001, my first Mac, the iMac, embodied computing as furniture. Its translucent white half-dome base housed a DVD drive that melded seamlessly into the surface, like some protean sci-fi spaceship.

From the dome’s apex rose a silver articulating arm suspending the screen - substantial enough to grab and adjust. You could pivot it down during afternoon slumps or angle it to show a friend iTunes visualizations. Light enough to carry, it could migrate to the living room to DJ parties. Encountered in le boudoir, it suggested taste, restraint, and an acceptable level of geekery in a way that wouldn’t make a guest think about doing a 180. Add on a slim, clicky keyboard; a one-button mouse; and surprisingly punchy spherical speakers and you had a computer that could be, as CEO Steve Jobs vision-cast, the hub of your digital life.

Heck, I started this blog on that machine.

This was computing’s last public era, before it retreated into the private universes of our misnamed “phones.” While this openness lived in the hardware’s noteworthy physical design, it was equally present in OSX’s Aqua interface. Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of nostalgia for Aqua’s aesthetics. I think these various nostalgia projects:

• a bag
• historical research
• a recreation of the Aqua UI as open source project

suggest a lament in our hearts:

Computers (phones) today make my heart sad. I want to remember computing when it didn’t make my heart sad. I want to see computers like that again.

Laid up in bed with a fever, too sick to code or read, I found myself watching Serial Experiments Lain, a philosophical anime from the late 90s.¹ When the show started dragging, I opened up Claude.ai for what I thought would be a quick review check. What emerged instead was something closer to those late-night philosophy-student house parties from college - the ones where, three Shiners in, you’d suddenly find yourself debating the nature of the nature of philosophy itself. That is, blissfully ignoring Nietzsche and playing “Bloody Mary” as we dared the abyss to stare back at us.

While not my first experiments with AI, all the others have been very bounded: Do this thing in Python, Change this function in a web server. This was much more exploratory and thus, for me, suggests a different kind of AI interaction. Let me first provide my key take-aways from this experiment in a tl;dr format.

Exploratory discussions with GenAI

1. Provide value by helping build better questions and tensions for their human interlocutor»
2. Permit widening across disciplines with casualness and speed that is hard to find and/or taboo in human society»
3. Provide psychological comfort, especially for undiagnosed ASD, and even more so for under-diagnosed women with it

More details after the jump.