Tag Archives: music

Five for Friday

Five for Friday — August 2026

Reading

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow

I’m working my way through this one and trying to take the time to engage with each point as long as I need to internalize it. The point I’m currently at is that there is a core question one should ask about technology: who does it benefit and who does it operate upon. While that’s incredibly relevant to the discussion about AI, I give Doctorow a lot of credit for tying it back to cash registers and making the point that this is a fundamental question to ask of any technology.

Listening

Invisible Touch by Genesis

A lot of the songs I associate with Genesis are from Invisible Touch. I recently purchased a copy and have been listening to it in heavy rotation. It’s a bit of a trip down memory lane but also feels like an evergreen album.

Watching

Finally watched Life on the V and it was an emotional rollercoaster. V66 is a significant part of my memories of the 80s and it’s difficult to true that up with it only being on the air from 85 to 86. It was great to hear the memories of other people as well as see clips from the time.

One thing that struck me is the tension it presents between “everyone in Boston watches V66” and “V66 does not appear in the dataset advertisers use when deciding where to place ads.” While I’m sure it didn’t go down quite like this, I like to picture some local business magnate seeing V66 stickers on the back of every road sign, people wearing V66 shirts, and V66 boosting any number of popular bands into the limelight, puffing a cigar, and saying “yes, yes, that’s all well and good, but who should I trust? My own eyes or the TV Guide?”

I recommend it if you remember V66 or if you have a friend from New England who will rave about a TV channel from 40 years ago and you want some context.

Playing

PancitoMerge is a good end of day game to play. Just enough challenge to keep the mind from wandering while calming enough to wind out the day.

Mulling

The last time I did one of these posts was in November 2019 and I was evidently mulling how we humans have a tendency to build and use tools in ways that end up with said tools driving us. I think it’s fair to say that concern is only more relevant in 2026 and something I still ponder regularly. I’ll pull forward the quote I posted last time:

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Henry David Thoreau

Disclaimer: Five for Friday is the honey badger of blog posts: it doesn’t particularly care how many things it contains or what day it shows up.

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Five for Friday

Weekly Review 2019-11-08

This is an experiment with trying the format of Tim Ferriss’s 5-Bullet Friday newsletters. At a minimum, I’ll hopefully gain some perspective on what I’ve been up to over time; ideally, it will also help others find interesting things.

Reading

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman

Being a bit of a technophile, there are parts of this which are tough to absorb. That said, I also think that technology has taken society on some wrong turns along the way. Neil Postman gives a framework for thinking about how and why that happens. It’s a well thought out counterpoint to viewing all technological change as beneficial to humans.

Listening

The French Machine by Minitel Rose

I have fond memories of a PBS show from the 1980s which covered the Minitel system in France. At the time (and still many years later), it seemed far ahead of its time. I was trying to explain the fascination that episode engendered in me, went searching for the show, and instead found the RetroManCave episode on the Minitel. This led to further searching and, ultimately, the French electronic band Minitel Rose.

Mulling

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Henry David Thoreau

I’m unsure if I’m more worried or reassured that concern about tools using humans predates computers by this much. Probably a little bit of each — we’ve survived previous problems; but, it’s unfortunate that we still build tools in ways that end up driving us. I am trying to consciously think about the computer based tools I use regularly and who is in the driver’s seat during each interaction.

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