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.

Rob Harvilla recently covered M.I.A’s “Paper Planes” on his podcast and the discussion dropped me right square in 2004 Mountain View listening to San Jose State student radio. In an era of Hoobastank and Evanescence, her first song, Pull up the People hit like a ton of space invader bits with its originality and appetite for confrontation.

Pull up the people
Pull up the poor

Slang tang
That’s the that M.I.A. thang
I got the bombs to make you blow
I got the beats to make you bang bang bang

It felt like I was hearing the future. It was Marxist/insurgent/militant sentiment and resentment standing on top of an anti-capitalist and anti-globalist platform as described in Hardt & Negri’s Empire.¹ . The album art and her videos had a complete visual aesthetic: bright, garish, and adjacent to street art or 8-bit video games. Her fashion integrated the fast-fashion (bright, garish, produced in southeast Asia, petrochemical-laden, and cheap) demands of the slavering jaws of Western consumerism. She took Target basics like ugly t-shirts and bike shorts and crossed them with blingy hip-hop street style as ripped off the streets of Mumbai, Colombo, Delhi, or Rio. It was a whole declaration.

With its square beats and computer-inflected … noise you could feel the anger and the sense of how much of a fuck she did not give.

Said M.I.A. in Spin of the era: “I don’t just want to talk about coming from a war…I want to talk about…how the first world is collapsing into the third world.”

With New York and its skyline still reeling from the terror that third-world agents can unleash, this seemed prophetic and frightening. For Westerners who’d matured under the Pax Americana in the 70’s-90’s, it was hard to legitimately imagine what a collapsed Western society might look like. Surely not National Socialism, certainly not Shining Path socialism. What would that blighted end-state look like?

About that same time, the South African hip-hop/rave/wtf band, Die Antwoord raced onto my radar. They were 23 minutes into the future of where M.I.A. was seeing culture heading.

As part of their zef aesthetic, they would unite dated, shitty clothing, weed-whacker-delivered hair styles, daring tattoos, violence, outrageous sexuality, and horror film elements. Said Yo-Landi Visser, half of the duo: “[Zef is] associated with people who soup their cars up and rock gold and shit. Zef is, you’re poor but you’re fancy. You’re poor but you’re sexy, you’ve got style.” In short, nihilistic, sexy, tattooed, and pugnacious. I recall interviews with the duo: they stood in dusty roads amid modest, sun-scarred, cinderblock homes in Johannesburg. They looked and felt like the visual aesthetic to accompany Tom Friedman’s book Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

If M.I.A. was telling where we were going, Die Antwoord were a time capsule from the future sent back in time to help our stymied imaginations.