One of the most utterly creepy moments in cinematic history is the death of a robot. HAL 9000, the malevolent, self-aware guidance computer on the space station in Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus 2001: A Space Odyssey ends his “life” doing what most humans do in the face of murder: begging. But, once a few plugs are pulled, he begins executing his first programmed function—singing Harry Dacre’s 1892 love song “Daisy Bell.”
It’s unsettling, where triumph should swell. In a strange turn, I feel the same way when reading articles about the impending Google Chromebook and Apple’s somewhat demonically named iCloud. It’s not that I feel like we’re headed toward some Matrix or Terminator-like hell, where humans are subservient to an ungodly mass of machines. It’s not even that cloud computing makes me weep, it’s a staggering achievement of connectivity. But the thing that worries me, and the reason that you’re seeing this on this website is this—I am scared to lose my music, then lose my identity.
In their 11th issue, Brooklyn hipster lit-punks n+1 wrote an article about the iPod being the official death knell of organized, social revolution. While the situation in Egypt may have been a slight exception, it’s one that proves the rule. The personalization of music has forever changed exactly what music means to people. It has made the communal, personal. While we isolate ourselves on the subway, more and more self-possessed by what we’re listening to, the iPod has enabled us to find out exactly who we are, relative to music. The music you like has become a personality trait instead of a town center milk crate. That is what n+1 didn’t notice about the iPod; it wasn’t destructive, just transformative.
But now, Apple’s going to kill that. Google is loading the bullets. Spotify is driving the getaway car. The coming Cloud will engulf us in a wave that may at first seem like the culmination of everything we Internet music geeks have sought for—the complete access to everything the music industry has to offer—the whole kit-and-kaboodle. We stand on the precipice of being able to choke ourselves to death on music, which is exactly what we are going to do if we don’t get some perspective on what kind of chasm we are falling into.
What do you get at the end of a buffet? A stomachache and a dirty feeling in your mouth like you’ve tasted too much and remember too little. Worse yet, you couldn’t list the things you ate if you had days to remember it. The iCloud works the same way.
For a modest fee that will turn out to be not so modest, Apple will lay the buffet out before you and tell you to plate your entrees as you like: Create your playlists, save them and come back to them when you wish. But you’ll get sick of everything. You’ll wander around aimlessly in the sticks, looking for that Bon Iver B-side, to no avail because people have learned how to market to Bon Iver fans. You’ll get your kicks sitting outside on a park stoop listening to Matt & Kim’s new jam, but that stomp will snuff out when you lose signal because you’re on AT&T.
Worst of all, your identity will take its place among everybody else’s. You will be no different than anybody else, living in a strange amalgam of communism and pay-your-way capitalism. Everybody will listen to what everybody else listens to, sometimes at the same time. It will feel warm at first, to know that you are part of a community. But that communion will be squashed by the crushing reality that you are no different from anybody else. You no longer own your music and it no longer says anything about you. You are just a traveller in a sea, controlled by a nonexistent bank, somewhere up in the sky.
This may sound preachy, and it probably is. Come its arrival, I’ll be hawking up money for the iCloud, using the Chromebook to access web streaming services for “my” music. But it won’t feel the same. Our iPods are our parents’ vinyl collection, and we are on the verge of having to buy CDs and go to Borders for our fix. It is reality, and it is sad. But unless we want to be marooned in a hopeless sea, like the intrepid captains in 2001, might as well start swimming.
