The doorbell announces the arrival of your food. Literally: “Your dinner’s here,” it says. About time; it’s been seven minutes since you ordered. As you begin to eat, the DJ lowers the volume and recalibrates to an ambient register. The food, like the music, is a little bland—your orders are routed through your refrigerator, which is monitoring your sodium intake—but the meal is adequately filling. Once finished, you decide it’s time to go off-grid.
You utter the command “manual,” and your digital servants come to a stop. The effect is not entirely unlike an electricity blackout, and you panic, for a moment, at the prospect of making an unassisted choice. The first thing that comes to mind is an oldie: “Anaconda,” by Nicki Minaj. (The rapper’s oeuvre is experiencing an ironic resurgence in popularity following her election to the presidency.) As the song begins to play, you permit yourself a nostalgic indulgence.
The 2010s. With some embarrassment, you recall the regrettable years you spent pawing at your cellphone—back then, people still conceived of the Internet as somehow separate from “real life.” The roots of the transformation in music can be traced to that decade, although the technology was clumsy in its infancy. Seeking to differentiate their products in the streaming wars, Google and Apple (and Facebook, after it bought Spotify) spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring and developing rudimentary song-selection technology that was, for the longest time, a colossal bust. You never got the song you wanted, voice commands barely worked, and the term “DJ” referred to some French guy in a mask who wasn’t even monitoring your serotonin levels.
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