A year ago, I wrote in a short story heavily influenced by experience about the symbolism of a shared umbrella—in every case of its existence, it has been a witness to a basic humanitarian act—a routine compassionate sacrifice—its beneficiaries shoulder to shoulder, perhaps cheek to cheek, in the barest of shelters from harsh attacks from above (‘above’ in its most general and immediate sense). Its occupants share a mutual interest in warmth and dryness, and though they can neither be warm nor dry, the empathy is perhaps more satisfying.
Six years ago, I distributed one of my mix CDs (actually, the sixth mix CD I’d made) to a few of my close friends. I distributed my seventh, eighth, and so forth in the same manner as that mix—first on plastic (occasionally with artwork, varying in degrees of elaborateness) and followed perhaps a month later by the tracklist, full of pleasant surprises—to a growing list of friends who increasingly knew little of each others’ existence and eventually to impersonal ’subscribers.’ And with myself relocated transcontinentally, padded envelopes and first-class postage costing what they do, and the iPod enshrined in MoMA, at this twentysomethingth juncture in my pop music autobiography, altering the distribution model seems appropriate.
Behold: A Shared Umbrella. Nearly eighty minutes of 128 kbps mp3 in one 73 MB file.
To my close friends who knew that giddy rush of 24 tracks in the week of our high school graduation, and to the few friends who’ve entered with me in musical dialogue in the years since then, I will dispatch a hard copy of this chapter to your address. In the meantime, those who carry with them daily a piece of canonical industrial design or a similarly featured gadget can listen to it straight through immediately upon download.
Speaking of gadgets that have become ubiquitous in the past six years, I’ve also been ruminating for the last hundred hours or so on the marvel of mobile phone technology (and the closure of Bell Labs) and I think my mind is blown. The fraction of human history where instantaneous audio communication with another person physically beyond hearing range is an everyday activity is already tiny; the past six years where I could from a moving train using a completely wireless device smaller than the palm of my hand (with a built-in digital camera) and a sequence of ten digits engage in conversation another person 3,000 miles away, themselves possibly in a moving vehicle, and using any brand or protocol of telephony (no combination of bold weight and italics in those words could possibly convey the depth of my awe at the feats of engineering inherent to this entire process) are staggeringly minuscule. Albert Einstein described radio by comparing it to the telegraph, using the analogy of a cat: “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.” And if you think about it, radio is already kind of mind-blowing.
But how would he describe what happens when we talk over a mobile phone? Or how would one apply the analogy of a cat to the evolution of station-to-station telephony? I mean, after the basic telephone, one has to consider the cordless telephone—the idea of using radio waves to transmit from a wireless handheld receiver to a base station before relaying it through the basic wire system. So now, the cat’s tail and head have been cut off, but when you pull the tail in New York the head is still meowing in Los Angeles. Except that you can pull one of any number of disembodied tails and cause any number of other disembodied heads across the continent to meow. And then you clone the cat’s headless and tailless body and make a few other headless and tailless cats of different breeds and send them all on rockets up into outer space to orbit the planet. And all you need to know to get the right head to meow is a ten-digit sequence.
Now consider that in the same six years, the internet has also become ubiquitous, and so I need not fill your head with any more images of cats in various states of disrepair, please take me at my word when I say that within our lifetimes, advances in telecommunications will result in a technological sea change on the level of movable type and a socioeconomic restratification beyond the industrial revolution. Given that, it’s a wonder that net neutrality—an issue currently in vocal debate around the office—is not generally regarded with the same primacy as war and diplomacy.
Anyway. Ponder the revolution as you listen to music on your mp3 player. And it’s good music too, or at least it is in my opinion, but that went without saying.
And don’t take for granted that other miracle of technology you’re always carrying. Call someone. Perhaps me. Consider it a basic humanitarian act. I’ll be a ten-digit sequence on a moving train, and to hear your voice would be the cat’s meow.