It took me until Wednesday this week to recover from the technology conference I attended last week. I can’t help but feel like all the nutrients in the tech space are depleted right now—we are running on empty. I used to come out of these things inspired and with too many ideas.
I finished reading Tripping on Utopia, by Benjamin Breen on Margaret Mead, The Cold War this week. It pushed back the psychedelic story for me back a couple of decades, while nicely overlapping with compute, AI, cybernetics, and other areas I’m thinking a lot about right now.
The story of the man who rebuilds the last Inca bridge every year provided me with some much needed perspective right now as I work to live in the moment, and find ritual in my reading, writing, and riding.
Maren Deepwell had me over for a podcast, which both of us lost the recording for, so she wrote up a nice story to capture our discussion—I am up for a retry anytime Maren!
When Audrey is at ballet on Friday nights I always watch documentaries, and this week I watched Mr. Polaroid, which was a fascinating look at the history of the company and camera, but it was the adoption of the camera in the queer community because they could capture their love without getting arrested that grabbed me by the heart strings.
The rise and fall of Radio Shack caught my attention this week. My introduction to the world of compute was via electronics, so I have a fondness for memories in the store, but I also found it interesting that Radio Shack had been bought by Tandy, which was a leather company — Tandy was my second computer at home in the 1980s.
Audrey and I at at the Cafe Luxemborg for brunch this week. I had eggs benedict, and these cinnamon doughnut holes that were exactly what I needed after four times around Central Park on Poppy Patrol.
Coming out of reading Tripping on Utopia I am reading Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson, who was married to Margaret Mead for a bit. I am fascinated with this human side of the cybernetics realm right now, doing the work to better understand where we made a wrong turn and left some essential thinking behind when it came to technology. It is contrasting my fictional intake of Ray Bradbury nicely in this moment.
Poppy and I have had an excellent week riding in the park. We haven’t had any bike problems or any missed days this week. The weather almost didn’t cooperate, and we got caught in the rain, but we managed to get out and about every day.
This last fall, as well as this spring in NYC have lived up to expectations of what people talk about when they say how great NYC is these times of the year. I feel like last time Audrey and I lived here, we kind of got short changed. But not this time — this spring has been lovely.
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” ― Ursula K. LeGuin
