Wireless earbuds like AirPods are the most futuristic (and dehumanizing) tech we’ve created to-date. Let me explain…
Our ancestors would be awed by these insect-sized, multi-polar devices that transmit song and sound. With the power of all human knowledge and audible art able to transmit straight into our ears with realistic clarity, we take a step forward in the story of humanity. The dream of science fiction is realized in new ways. Not only do we receive music and data from this tech, we can command our world from them. Accepting calls, activating voice assistants, controlling our automated ecology. As LLMs integrate with this tech, we will reach a new level of AI-powered access to and sovereignty over our environments. As hardware shrinks and AirPods become AirImplants, more inconspicuous and affixed, we will see the deeper proliferation of the kind of “abilities” we’re granted.
This tech, like most products of a consumer-driven world, carries with it a fatal convenience. We are unmoored from reality in the wake of our audio implant’s abundance. Content streams from our internet-enabled devices and reaches the most intimate part of ourselves like a whisper. We can go an entire day with the sounds of podcasts, audiobooks, and artists filtering through our brain and never hear the voice of another proximate being. We can lose our place in the world.
Productivity gurus and business elites will commend the level of knowledge absorbed. This level of consumption is unnatural. Ask yourself, since the information age began and the internet proliferated with abounding content, have we become more wise? Have we become more loving? More united as a people? Or have we imbibed a different narrative through the mediums of the twenty-four hour news cycle and weekly releases of cultural analyses, entertainment, and infotainment. As Postman said, “we have transformed information into a form of garbage.“ It goes in, and comes out, affecting little in the hearts of hearers.
Similarly, music used to be a communal act. After instruments lost their solitary perch in cultural utility, radio, record players, cassettes, and CD players offered a communal substitute for those unable to experience concerted musical efforts or create it for themselves. Headphones changed the tenor of this medium in a profound way. Like most of the digital world, this technology trended towards serving the individual their needs separate and ignorant of the rest of life. We lost something as wireless leveraged a newfound independence in the West.
Wireless headphones exponentially exacerbate this cultural issue of isolation with their convenience. The ease of connectivity and effortless segregation fixes users in a world of their device’s making. The thought world of a species has been decided by algorithmic movements for a decade now, and the interactions between communities can entirely occur online.
There is a great good brought about by increased education and widespread access to the arts. These things mark the improvement and flourishing of a civilization. But not when found alone. Community, physicality, and resilience to the crutch technology offers are vital. We need to be educated, not as an end, but that we can govern with wisdom and love. We need to experience art, not as an end, but that we can tell the story of history, struggle, and triumph through the sound of a relational encounter with like-minded and like-”emotioned” beings.
