With Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today, Simon Reynolds collects together a range of essays and interviews that explore various scenes, artists and moments associated with electronic music and its promises of the future.

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.

Source: Futuromania blog by Simon Reynolds

Reynolds describes the book as the twisted twin of Retromania. These pieces read like a cultural anthropologist exploring music while in the midst of it. Sometimes this in-the-moment aspect to the writing can make it feel incomplete or dated, but this fragility is in some ways their strength. For example, a piece on Industrial Dance from the New York Times in 1991 seems like another world placed against a discussion of Daft Punk’s sampling of the 70’s zeitgeist on Random Access Memories. However, they both represent particular moments in time, possibly for different audiences.

Throughout, Reynolds continually brings up the place of science fiction and the human at the heart of the machine.

Today, it seems rather obvious to me that nothing comes out of technology – whether it’s a sampler, Auto-Tune or AI – that doesn’t bear the imprint of human intention.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

He uses Fredric Jameson’s idea of modernist works as ‘monuments to the future’,^[1] suggesting that tracks from Moroder to jungle to Auto‑Tuned trap still feel futuristic because they freeze the moment of rupture with the past inside themselves.

One of the curious aspects about future-music of the kind celebrated in this book – from ‘I Feel Love’ through ‘Acid Trax’ to ‘Renegade Snares’ – is that despite the passage of time, these tracks and thousands like them continue to exert an imposing fascination. They endure as monuments to the future, to use the philosopher Fredric Jameson’s term for the twentieth-century modernist pantheon of artworks. When you listen, the future-feeling emitted by them is as strong as ever. Despite any personal memories that might attach to where you heard the track, in the moment of re-entry to its sound-space, the original abolition of nostalgia that this music instigated – it happens all over again. These tracks are still, somehow, ‘the future’ – even though in a literal chronological sense they belong to the past.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

In this sense, the future in music is a renewable effect certain recordings continue to produce whenever we play them – a utopian/dystopian charge that keeps pulling at listeners.

In the end, perhaps The Future is just a ciphered placeholder, the amorphous object for a yearning to be ‘anywhere but here, anywhen but now, anyone but me’.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

This is all while the the broader culture seems stuck in retromania?

One of the interesting aspects throughout the book and the various articles was the way in which David Bowie kept popping up in relation to the future of music. I feel like it would be interesting to reflect upon Bowie’s career from this perspective. In particular, the way in which he feed off those around him.

I am also left thinking about my piece on nostalgia and pastiche. I am particularly taken by Reynolds reference to the yearning for something seemingly other.

All in all, what I enjoy about Reynolds’ writing is the way in which he provides a map of the world. I feel myself making notes and connections of different artists each time. Alternatively, he makes connections which I then add further details to as I read.

I listened to the audiobook via Spotify.

1. “The act of restructuration is seized and arrested as in some filmic freeze-frame… The interiorization of the narrative… encapsulates and eternalizes the process as a whole… The older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation.” From A Singular Modernity: An Essay on the Ontology of the Present as quoted in capital fellow, that Jameson (RIP Fredric) by Simon Reynolds ↩

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As I sit here on Sunday morning, reflecting on what has been one of the most hectic writing weeks in a long time, I can’t help but ask, why?

Of course, there was a lot of news and action. Not that any of that matters to me, but still, there were new Apple products that were up for review. I have had iPad Air and MacBook Neo in my hands, and ended up writing about them. Neo got me philosophical and took me on a different tangent from a regular review.

And there was that great story in the Financial Times about Softbank and its founder playing with fire (aka OpenAI). Something about it compelled me to write about it. That and a tweet by Stripe CEO led to me writing about Symbolic Capital, and as if to make my point, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick emerged from shadows to talk about Atoms. So, that turned into a breakdown of his manifesto.

This week, I moved my “pen newsletter” over to the “backpages” of this website. I am not much of a reviewer, and much prefer to write either short posts or longer pieces. So for me makes sense to just have it all in one place. I wrote two pieces, one about developing an ink-color palette from life itself, and a long reflection on the why of idle consumerism.

So, but the real answer to the “why” I wrote so much this week is that it is eleven years since my company shuttered. And I react to the emotion of loss in the only way I do, by writing. A lot.

Here’s what’s worth reading this weekend.

• Mac Neo and My Afternoon of Reflection and Melancholy. Steven Sinofsky picked up a MacBook Neo and found himself staring at what might have been. The former head of Windows writes that everything they tried to do with Windows 8 and Surface RT in 2012, a $599 laptop built on a phone chip with a new app model, is exactly what Apple just shipped. “We were early, but not wrong.” [Hardcore Software]
• The Human Condition or the Conditional Human? A genetic-testing company offers embryo selection for higher IQ. Meta’s chief AI officer says he’ll wait to have children until Neuralink is ready for implantation from a young age. Microsoft’s former head of research describes the “holy grail” as building intelligence superior to any human. David Polansky in the Hedgehog Review points out that they are all part of the same idea, one that is quietly redefining what it means to be human. Great read. [Hedgehog Review]
• How Chinese Labs Race for the Next First-in-Class Breakthrough. In its 15th five-year plan, China laid out plans for scientific self-sufficiency by spending liberally on basic research across materials, energy, and biomedicine, halving clinical trial review times to match the US. It won’t be enough as it needs a mindset change. One biotech CEO admits China is still “more about engineering and applications, not about original concept and novelty.” [C&EN]
• What Sports Betting Is Doing to America. You know how I feel about sports betting and how invasive it has become. But to get a first-person understanding of the disease? Read this brilliant piece in The Atlantic. They gave McKay Coppins, a practicing Mormon, $10,000 to gamble with over an NFL season. He had never placed a bet. What started as a journalistic experiment turned into something he describes as “unnerving.” This is the exact problem I’ve been writing about, except someone lived inside it for a season and came back to tell you what it looks like. [The Atlantic]
• The Slavery Scandal at the Chinese Takeover of a Brazilian Ford Plant. The Washington Post reviewed 5,000 pages of court records and interviewed 41 people to tell the story of what happened when BYD took over a shuttered Ford factory in Camaçari, Brazil. Brazilian prosecutors accused BYD and its contractors of trafficking and conditions “analogous to slavery.” BYD’s response was to blame “cultural differences” and accuse unnamed forces of conspiring against China’s rise. This is what the global EV supply chain looks like when nobody is watching. [Washington Post]
• In 1844, Chess Was Already Online. Every generation thinks that their technology is so special that it will change the world, and humans. I was reminded of that when I read this story. Six months after Morse sent “What hath God wrought” over the first US telegraph line, someone used it to play chess. Washington challenged Baltimore, moves were transmitted as numbered squares, and seven games were played without a single transmission error. A good reminder. Every new communication technology gets used for play before it gets used for business. The telegraph, the telephone, the internet, and now AI. Human nature doesn’t change. The wires do. [IEEE Spectrum]
• Goodbye, Tesla-Style Giant Touchscreens. The buttons are back, thanks in part to China mandating physical controls for essential car functions. Europe will now mark down cars that rely only on touchscreens for things like turn signals. So, VW and Mercedes have already reversed course. And the Jony Ive-designed Ferrari Luce interior is full of knobs and switches. Turns out, sleek and futuristic is not the same as safe and usable. I don’t drive, so I don’t know. But I wonder if all this even matters when invisible robots are driving the cars? [Domus]

Things I wrote this week, ICYMI:

• Symbolic Capitalism
• The Fact & Fluff of the Return of Travis Kalanick
• The Essence of a Machine
• The Debt Beneath the Dream
• The 2026 iPad Air M4: Early Impressions
• Tanhā: Our Modern Consumerism
• Life Has a Hex Code

March 15, 2026. San Francisco