This post is mostly an excuse to talk about my latest playlist: Digital Animal. This one consists of about 200 songs across genres, all reflecting on our human relationship to science and technology, futurism, digital culture and the internet.

When I’m chewing over a big idea, I like to compile resources in and around that idea to help support my thinking. Embracing my angst about artificial intelligence, I started compiling songs that reach back to the early 20th century, tapping into prior generations’ anxieties about telephones, television and early networking technology, adding more contemporary concerns as I went. The playlist runs from David Bowie and Blue Öyster Cult and Kraftwerk to Zapp and Radiohead, then forward into modern takes on social media, cell phones, and the internet from Missy Elliott, Gillian Welch and Charli XCX.

I like a playlist because it’s convenient, and because songs are one place where meaning and feeling are created simultaneously, and because it’s easy to spot salient patterns across disparate sources. Scholars in interdisciplinary studies have long argued that you cannot fully understand a thing without understanding what it feels like to live with it, and that cultural analysis may get you there faster than surveys will anyway. Meanwhile most writing about technology separates feelings from form and function. Art and music compress all three, and have the potential to surface ideas that professional and institutional language can’t. Art and culture frequently peg an issue down before emerging best practices are formalized in business and academia.

For anyone working in technology communications, that lag between culture and practice has practical consequences. The language we use to describe technical systems shapes what people can think and do about those systems. An institutional frame — efficiency, access, innovation, value — consistently misses important dynamics that people living inside those systems are experiencing as users and as people. Art keeps the human subject inside the frame, functioning as both anecdote and data.

Plus, it’s fun and we should collectively think about art as much as possible. So, treat every song like a portal.

What does it mean to be both digital and animal? Some observations:

• Grief and sadness sit next to fun and ecstasy. Many of the older songs see computers as friend and companion, treating tech with a kind of tender curiosity, a toy that makes you happy as much as a medium for expressing longing and desire. These nevertheless tend to be layered with a sense of loneliness, a minor key, a dynamic that bears out through user research.
• Between the era of telephones and the digital web, there are a charming number of songs about beepers, beeping and pagers. I’m hopelessly devoted to Missy’s “Beep Me 911” right now.
• Recent songs are concerned about understanding identity and the self under the pressure of social media. Songs talking about social media persistently trawl the gap between your real identity and your public identity and personal brand, and how this dynamic can hollow out your relationships and quality of life. Songwriters like Jazmine Sullivan consistently refer to tech as a place of escapism, like retreating into the creation of a new Tinder profile while avoiding reflection on your last relationship. Comparison is the product, and sometimes it stinks.
• Lots of songs from peak elder Millennial/Gen X songwriters are about watching the old analog world being swallowed by the new. The older the songs, the more aware they are of the machine across the room, and the more they lean into allegory. The contemporary songs don’t worry about the boundary between human and machine much at all, likely reflecting the high level of technical integration (and acceptance) we live with right now.

Is fretting about our relationship to tech and industry part of the human condition? Or is there something specific to tech that accelerates these anxieties and impulses?

A few favs:

• I’m enjoying almost everything from the band Automatic. One of the band members is the daughter of the drummer from Bauhaus, and their work is heavily influenced by 80s era synth pop and new wave. I have several of their songs represented on the list, and particularly like “Black Box” off their 2025 album.
• Erykah Badu’s “Cel U Lar Device,” which positions the phone as an instrument of interpersonal surveillance, has been on rotation in my house for (cough) years. It is also a reinterpretation of Drake’s hit “Hotline Bling,” itself forever memorialized as a popular meme format.
• The Talking Heads’ 1988 “(Nothing but) Flowers” imagines a sunny life after the fall of industrial civilization. For the doomer take on this theme, check out Nina Simone’s cover of “22nd Century.”
• Sophie’s “Faceshopping” is about the negative pressures of cultivating a public persona and brand, and tips a hat to our relatively new ability to use science and technology to curate a physical appearance that matches your internal (and digital) one.
• Nobody talks about Ladytron anymore.