2026 08 22 I Miss the Different Regional Cultures of America
As a toddler, growing up between Louisiana and Houston, I remember listening to the radio with my parents, and the announcers would tell me one critical fact about each band: where they were from. I remember learning, later, on MTV, that Journey was from San Francisco. And in the street garages of the Sunset, the docks and warehouses of South of Market and Mission Creek, in whatever it was that made them look tough despite the fact that Steve Perry had the voice of an angel, that told me something about San Francisco.
Likewise, growing up in Houston, it mattered to me that ZZ Top were Texas heroes. They were like me. They were like us.
This Is Not The Computer For You: An Appreciation of Struggle
Sam Henri Gold recently published a post about Apple’s new MacBook Neo: a lower-power, but decidedly not less-than, version of the Apple hardware I’ve been loving for almost two decades now. It comes in at $599, against the $3,000 to $7,000 you’d pay further up the line.
In a surprisingly touching, insightful piece, Gold makes the case: yes, the Neo’s underpowered, but for the person this machine is actually for, that doesn’t matter. Gold suggests that while Apple’s marketing team is making one pact with Wall Street and the computer hardware press, it’s making a different, and more sacred pact, with the computer engineers of tomorrow. The Neo is a gateway, the cheapest possible ticket, a promissory note to the theatre of high tech.
He recounts how, in his own early days, he pushed a secondhand Macintosh far past its limits, enduring interminable waits as it crunched through computations it had no business running but that he kept directing to it. But his curiosity carried him through the lag and drag and ultimately the little computer that could allowed him to play, to explore, and to discover.
I recognized myself in that story. I too lived something like it a generation or two earlier, on an underpowered PC of my own. Whatever capacity I’ve since found to make computing machinery dance and sing wasn’t stunted by starting on a modest machine. If anything, I may be better at making machines work because I started on such an underpowered machine.
The limitations inspired me.
The limitations were the point, and Apple has made an affordable, gentle ramp into that wonderful world of limitations.
Ziggy Stardust and Hypernormalization in the AI Era
A few posts back, I referenced Bowie’s opening track, “Five Years,” from “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972).”
In this song, humanity has been told Earth has 5 years left. This catastrophic message and the song’s minor-key, elegiac quality lay a foundation upon which the narrator describes ice cream parlors (hedonic commitment after the weighty news) and public weeping. Against the looming Big End, people keep doing what they do in the most bourgeois and pedestrian way because, well, in the words of Bowie’s fellow Englishmen Pulp: “there’s nothing else to do.”
I really feel like that sentiment connects to the current AI moment. Sometimes I’m elated and sometimes I’m horrified. After whipsawing back and forth I too want a milkshake like Bowie described.
This idea has been called “hypernormalization:” the way we all keep going through the motions we’ve always gone through, because this is the only way we’ve ever known how to conceptualize life, even though the ground is actually falling out from under our feet.
If AI pessimists are correct, we have fewer than “Five Years” before superintelligence remakes the world in a way we will either not be a part of, or not recognize.