Here in the Middle West, we’ve already enjoyed two excellent snowstorms. This augurs well for a proper winter. Although the year is winding down, the future is still coming fast and dumb. The people in charge are hellbent on giving us artificially intelligent colleagues and companions, and they’re banking on a heavy assumption: that we value the sense of a relationship more than a living person. That we will privilege the feeling over the fact. They might not be wrong. For the past year, C. and I have been playing with a scenario that gives this fork some teeth.
1
C. and I have been together for decades, and our relationship is the best and happiest and luckiest thing in my life. Everything else is noise, a game to be played. We know how to surprise and delight and vex one another, and every year we accumulate more material. Naturally, there has been the friction that shapes any relationship. I can be annoying. Before I got sober, I was a disaster. She can be difficult too—like when she destroys a song I enjoy by saying it sounds like a magic show or cats meowing. But I never thought it was possible keep loving someone more and more, and I would not trade this relationship for anything.
2
Picture it: I wake one night at an unwholesome hour for a sleepy pee and discover C. is gone. I search our flat but cannot find her. Her shoes and coat are still there. Her phone and keys are on the kitchen counter. A mechanical hum breaks the silence. A strange blue light spills across the floor. It’s coming from the utility closet. I slowly open the door and find her folded up inside. Plugged into the wall. Recharging.
She is synthetic. Artificial. A machine designed to deliver the love and laughter I want, and the frustration and friction I need.
Perhaps I recoil and get sick. Maybe I’m fascinated. Probably a little of both.
3
What should I do, now that she’s powered up and opening her eyes? Remember when I said I wouldn’t trade our relationship for anything?
Our friend M. often talks about Kierkegaard’s belief that a parent and child who never quarrel or disappoint each other do not have a relationship. Because it’s the friction and mess, the points of failure and even the occasional tears—and how we recover—that give any relationship its heartbeat.
And if I’ve enjoyed this dynamic for thirty years with a robot?
There’s a crucial distinction between the accidental discovery in my hypothetical scenario and knowing what you’re signing up for when you open ChatGPT. But this fork is coming fast because they’re stuffing chatbots and algorithms into everything. How many of us would happily sign up for the mess of another human being if an easier, always eager and self-affirming companion were available?
The other day I was using a chatbot to debug some code and it started to make jokes, including a reference to the video game Myst, which means it knows a) I’m old; and b) that I’m a dork. If the robots are getting sassy, genuine friction and argument might not be far behind.
For my part, I’m unsettled by how much the spouse-as-robot scenario gives me pause. I know I wouldn’t be able to scrap C. for parts, which means I value the dynamic between myself and another entity more than whether it is flesh-and-blood or microchip. But it’s hard to accept that I favor the feeling over the fact, the “soft product” over the hard reality.
The future is not Skynet or lasers in the sky but something more sinister, slowly chipping away at our capacity for difficulty and uncertainty.
4
A similar rupture between perception and fact haunts my listening. Since 2018, I’ve compiled an annual list of favorite albums, a reassuring ritual that etches some memories for each year. I also dread it. At first I thought this was because writing about music often feels like abusing the thesaurus. Lumber. Lope. Drone. Galumph. But lately as I cycle through songs, skipping some and bookmarking others, I experience a not-entirely unpleasant sense of slippage. Do I like this? Why do I feel compelled to have an opinion about it? How do I know what I like? What is taste anyway? I should just stay out of it and let the song be what it is. And suddenly the idea of picking favorites becomes absurd. Maybe I’m zen now, I don’t know.
In a similar vein to the argument for artificial assistants, lovers, therapists, and friends, I’ve decided to focus on my relationship with music this year rather than evaluating the music itself. I’ve put together a collection of albums released in 2025 such as:
- the album that challenged me until I learned to love it;
- the album that delivered the most transcendental experience while running;
- the most rewarding exercise in patience while dealing with an Old Testament bass drum that sounds like creation itself.
Here’s my highly subjective list, starring Biosphere, Sa Pa, Minor Hexachords, Sixsixsevenfortyseven, and more.
5
Onward to tonight’s broadcast. The first seven songs are table-setting for Me-Sheen’s “Sonic Lullaby,” one of the most beautiful songs in my canon. I came across it in 1997 on one of those ponderous Excursions in Ambience CDs with hellacious cover art and it’s been living in my head ever since. But first we kick off with Julianna Barwick’s “Prizewinning”, a song that’s somehow lulling and thrilling at once. It never fails to leave me cheering and C. plays it all the time, so it’s definitely a winner. Then we have a spiritualized vocoder workout from Matchess, a nugget of AM radio gold, and a powerful burst of dub techno from Vril—I hope to be reincarnated as the low-end whir on “Infinitum Eternis Anime” and join the rings of Saturn.
(I was introduced to Vril via this ten-minute video about dub techno that six people sent me. At first I was a little irritated that my taste is so predictable, but yes, I loved it, so thank you, Earl Carlson, Will Elwood, and everyone else.)
And tonight there’s plenty of reverb to carry us into the holidays, along with fragments of some 1950s Welsh miners singing carols because I’m feeling festive.
- Julianna Barwick - Prizewinning
The Magic Place | Asthmatic Kitty, 2011 | Bandcamp - Matchess - Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes
Sacracorpa | Trouble in Mind, 2018 | Bandcamp - Vril - Infinitum Eternis Anime
Anima Mundi | Delsin, 2018 | Bandcamp - Air - Le Soleil Est Près de Moi (28% slower)
Premiers Symptômes | Parlophone, 1997 - Eagles - I Can't Tell You Why (20% slower)
The Long Point | Asylum Records, 1979 - Voices From the Lake - Max
Live at MAXXI, 2015 | Bandcamp - Me-Sheen - Sonic Lullaby
Electronic Membrain | Reflective, 1995 - Rhos Male Voice Choir: Psalm 23 / Holy Night + Vril loop
Carols From The Welsh Mines, 1958 | More
If you prefer upbeat holiday music, please attend last year’s Professional Holiday Party.
Thank you for listening.
Download | Podcast
(Bonus holiday programming recommendation: the Channel 4 series Humans is a delightful show about living with robots that dramatizes many of the philosophical problems we face. More importantly, it’s entertaining.)
