Political Philosophy on the 37th Birthday of The Sony Walkman.

July 26th, 2016

IS THIS WHAT I WANT?

It’s 2016, I’m only 24 years-old, and they don’t even manufacture the iPod classic anymore. Is that a heartbreaking thing?

It seems right to ask, considering how we’re talking about a piece of machinery that just fourteen years ago, completely upended our realistic expectations — as consumers — regarding the sheer access to media technology could grant us. Take a couple more steps backward into time, and realize that it’s everything but heartbreaking.

See, on this day 37 years ago Sony released the first Walkman. It was a hyper-portable cassette player, which was a huge plus without even having to mention the fact that it looked cool as hell, and just like the iPod did in 2001, it represented a notable shift in how we viewed our consumption of music. In an instant, it altered the very things that we’d come to want from our futures.

The Walkman sold almost 200 million units during its production run, and as cool as it looked, and as novel as it felt, one really has to ask themselves — why? After all, the technology that made cassette tapes possible by 1979, had been around since 1963. The compact nature of the cassette tape severely diminished audio quality, which made it worse that the product was only rivaled by bigger, but way better-sounding 8-track tapes. It’s fair to say that the cassette tape was an antiquated and low-performance piece of machinery, but on the other hand, it was the first music player to eclipse what came before it by means of greater quantity than quality. The Walkmans major contribution wasn’t just to industry but to culture as well.

Knowing this, as if to intentionally put some seal on the Walkmans relevancy, Sony introduced the first portable CD player just five years later in 1982. While the Compact Disc was certainly ideal in terms of the physical space that took up, it also dwarfed the cassette in terms of audio quality. The CD was quality plus quantity — and what was left to be desired? Turns out, considerably more than anyone had imagined.

REIMAGINING MUSIC CONSUMPTION

Welcome to 1990, and we are on the cusp of the most unforeseen paradigm shift in the history of knowledge, commerce, and maybe civilization; the world wide web. By this time the Sony Walkman is eleven years old, out of production, hilariously obsolete, but in about a decade and a half will have totally informed the way we consume, not just music, but culture and technology.

This is where things start getting a bit more nebulous.

In his 1941 essay “Some Implications of Modern Technology”, German philosopher Herbert Marcuse suggests that the development of technology is not just a shrewd means of empirical reasoning or some really tactile way of getting what we want (technics). He instead calls it “a social process” from which we are inseparable. This manifests as a thing called “technical rationality”.

The idea is that it makes perfect sense to try and integrate new technology into society. It also makes perfect sense that those advances become ubiquitous. What we don’t always consider in the most direct way is that, as a society, this changes our ideas about what is rational. Marcuse doesn’t see this as something that we have any chance of going through autonomously. To him, the reformation of rationality will always be happening to us.

As political philosophy goes — Marcuse has always read as more of the television- is-stealing-your-humanity types — a man who thinks technological rationality can at best result in some dystopian mess dominated by David-Duke-elites while the rest of society ogles into their MacBooks for BitCoin.

Thinking back to the Walkman, and the way musical, technological, and social commerce changed around it — technological rationality doesn’t seem like it presents a path to mindlessness, but the opposite. It presents us the choice to step back, and decide not just which direction we want to go in, but how it is we go in each direction. Tenants of the past newly emerging for the purposes of the future. This is not groundbreaking phenomena. Art, music, literature, politics, the list goes on — they’ve all challenged assertions about the nature of desire in product moving forward in time.

For example, we favored the Walkman over the 8-track, even though the 8-track sounded way better. Literally due to the fact that cassettes are small and cheap, you can buy and carry more of them. This is the start of what Marcuse was talking about, but it isn’t the end of autonomy. We’re driven to develop ubiquitous technology because we want to have as many individualized means of expression as possible, at our disposal as often as possible, and the drive towards individualism Is.Not.New By the time CD players came around we had already gotten into a way of thinking that says production quality as it relates to social tools (not things like refrigerators, but) is simply a plus.

We’ll privilege quality if there is a belief that in doing so we can further our ability to communicate en mass or just go faster, but we’ll sometimes discount it if the gain in that column isn’t that high. It’s easy for our species to — at its core — cherish communication over “better” technology. Even the resurgence of vinyl records stems largely from the fierce desire to physically hold something after nearly a decade of torrenting becoming a norm; rather than for quality or spatial reasons.

We pine for beautiful nuggets of nostalgia, for things that can unfold like vinyl record jackets, or trinkets reminding us simply, of our love for the stuff and things of life, on one level we still don’t care if they’re the best or newest. This logic follows back to the way we torrent, often collecting gigabytes and gigabytes of poorly rendered music with low audio quality.

WHAT’S THIS MEAN?

In almost every major religion (including the church of Science) there is something suggesting that humanity is reflective of whatever wrought the universe into existence. We don’t know a lot about what that thing is, and these tools — technological rationality — that is how we understand. So, humanity will continue the trend of loving and developing things that help us reveal, more and more of ourselves, to ourselves.

Phonographs, Cassettes, 8-tracks, the Walkman, CD’s, file sharing — all followed by the resurgence of vinyl records and tape decks in the era of cloud-based music platforms and the internet! That is to say, technology will always develop forward alongside time, but the choice to take a step back is overwhelmingly an autonomous one. The Sony Walkman, in terms of music and our conception of what it means to share and express ourselves, was the first product to publicly defy Marcuse’s expectations. It did so by way of its extreme success and influence on the way we want to consume music. Furthering the trend that favors units of culture and expression over less diversified notions of quality.

The idea that technology changes rationality is not inherently bad. Marcuse and all of the people who think technology is destroying the world certainly don’t picture or appreciate a society where personal computing has basically given everybody access to the most comprehensive library in the history of the world. Moreover, they never give enough credence to the idea that we care about more than just raw development, and that we would create technology like the Walkman to prove it.