...nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of owning music...

I have no desire to go back to that. New music is being created WORLDWIDE constantly and we also have a few hundred years of already-made music. There's no way I could even come close to 'owning' all of the music I'd want to own.

Discovering good new music is a problem becasuse there's so much of it. Since '99 I've been listening to one of the first streaming internet station. DJs give them one to two hour sets that go into rotation. There's no limit to the variety - you'll get an hour of Portuguese Fado music (was a fad in L.A. for awhile) followed by 8-bit video game music then Iranian music... I like it because it's curated by humans and not computer.

Thing 1: Everyone staring into their smartphones, nobody conversing at all. In many context where in the past, people would have started conversations out of sheer boredom, but made social connections that way.

Thing 2: A good 50% (and growing) people on sidewalks, bike paths etc. are completely oblivious to auditory stimuli such as callouts like "may I pass please" or bike bells or, for that matter, cars! Inevitably they have Airpods-style earphones in. With advanced environmental noise cancellation. At least the foam pad on-ear headphones of the Walkman era let other sounds through.

The sudden rise of headphone wearing pedestrians - spurred by Sony’s lightweight headsets (17% the weight of others)

Funny to see this trend has completely reversed. People wear more and more huge behemoths of headphones again. Not that I mind that but I find it an interesting development.

The article also goes on about beepers/pagers. I didn't know these were also demonised. I really miss mine in fact, it was great to be reachable while not constantly sending my location to 2000 "trusted partners". Unfortunately here in Spain there is no longer even a single pager network in operation.

A dumbphone only gets part of the way, as the operator still knows pretty well where I'm hanging out. As does the government.

Some said it was a sign of a continued rise of Reagan and Thatcher style individualism. Cultural critic Allan Bloom deemed the Walkman "a nonstop... masturbational fantasy” in his 1987 book ‘The Closing of the American Mind.’ Neo-Luddite John Zerzan saw the Walkman as part of a modern trend that encouraged a "protective sort of withdrawal from social connections" and Thomas Lipscomb, chief of the Center for the Digital Future, equated it with the euphoric drug "soma," from Huxley's Brave New World, creating, as he put it, "an airtight bubble of sound" that was nothing but a "sensory depressant." In other words it all felt ‘a bit blackmirror’ as one might say today. (A collection of quotes collected in this 1999 Reason Magazine article)

not sure about the masturbational fantasy but the rest seems fairly spot on as a critique?

Oscar Gross was preparing to take the case all the way to the supreme court, but backed out after someone was killed crossing the street while wearing headphones. The kind of tragic anecdote that is the inevitable and unavoidable price of freedom.

1. Apologies if autotune pop music is your thing but it makes my skin crawl so please, keep it to yourself.

https://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/Pedestrian,_three_others_kill...

People's rush to blame the victim never ceases to amaze me. I think that people see that the victim did X, and they don't do X, therefore they'll never suffer a similar fate, and they need to proudly proclaim it to the world. Maybe it's related to magical thinking and the just world fallacy.