The early criticism was overblown, but I think there is a slow, gradual degradation of social values when ubiquitous technology allows people to disengage easily.

I remember being annoyed when a coworker had AirPods on constantly, even when conversing with other people. Obviously we could have a conversation, but it felt like they didn't value it enough to give it their full attention (I don't doubt the music was turned off, though).

In the early days when everyone was starting to get smartphones, there were lots of memes about people staring at their phones constantly and maybe walking into traffic or bumping into people. Constant smartphone use has been normalized now (for better or worse). In the early days, people felt bad when they pulled out their phone to look something up during a conversation, but that behavior is no longer looked down on. It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit.

There's a lot more immigration and diversity today, especially in urban and sub-urban America. While laudatory in many respects, I think it also reduces social interaction because there's less shared cultural background, beliefs, or even language that might otherwise have lubricated these interactions.

I'm just being descriptive here, not normative.

> It’s a lot harder than it used to be to start a conversation with a stranger

from my experience, strangers who start a conversation with you in public always want something, usually money

Avoiding "conversations" with strangers is exactly why I wear them. (Putting conversations into quotes here because it's almost always people who want to hold a monolog on their favorite topic)

Lots of people don't want to talk to strangers. It is socially unacceptable to wear a T-shirt saying "please don't talk to me" - but headphones are socially acceptable.

And yet still, plenty of women report persistent men telling them to remove their headphones so they can engage in unwanted conversation.

The alienation was already there; the headphone just made it more acceptable to signal.

> It’s a lot harder than it used to be to start a conversation with a stranger.

Good. I'm not your personal entertainment machine. Bring a book if you get bored.

It created a brand-new concept of private listening, I think. Music listening must have been a communal thing up until then mostly (I'm counting record players in this, so we'd need to go further back before the 20th century to consider what I'm saying). It does follow that the more we allow you to do by yourself, the more you won't do with others. Take eating by yourself for example. I can't imagine that being a common thing before our time. Tech is really putting us into a spaceship. Your little dwelling is just a ship with a terminal, and you can definitely slap on some headphones and put a screen in front of you and basically float through space in your spaceship until the day you die.

We can probably measure the impact this is having culturally specifically in non-western cultures, because their baseline is not as anti-social compared to the west.

I think it's also worth noting that many are not going to read this article and go "hah, they got it totally wrong". They didn't. Mass scale human behavioral change has the been the story for a while now.

don't fall for it, nobody owns the music

the musicians making it know this deep down. it's like the music is there, and the musician who "made" it indeed only brought it from "there" to here. that is it.

at most you own the medium in which the music's representation is stored, which is streaming's problem. the medium is your internet connection if anything

The good old days sucked. I have a large collection of CDs that I "own" and they're in a box in the basement because the medium is irrelevant.

For less than the price of 1 CD per month (and I used to buy WAY more than 1 CD per month) I have access to a near-infinite amount of music.

I've added 49 full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2025 for $78. And some of that stuff has an EXACT AND PRECISE 0.00% of having ever been carried in a physical shop on physical media such as: a DJ set consisting mainly of remixes of The Hacker tracks from the late 90s, recorded by a Canadian DJ in a Frankfurt Studio in 2025.

We're eating perfectly-prepared filet every day and people are reminiscing about school cafeteria salisbury steak.

> Since '99 I've been listening to one of the first streaming internet station.

Care to share which one? I personally like FIP.

> Discovering good new music is a problem becasuse there's so much of it

Not really, discovering it is a problem because it is hidden. Current algorithms are designed to revert you to the same old and to show you stuff similar to what you have seen. You need to know specific terms to find something new - but of course if it is truly new for you, you do not know those terms.

> Yes, sure, new technologies have always spurred anxieties and moral panic

Have they though? Because scanning those headlines I get a vivid image in my head of newspapermen salivating at the chance to fabricate a moral panic out of thin air.

Here in Zurich the trend right now with young women is apple's over-ear AirPods. On bikes, walking in the city, everywhere.

> humanity has somehow survived

debatable.

>Now everyone is wearing wireless earbuds, even while riding a bike.

Wind in the ears can be a problem. Blocking the wind helps people hear cars/ dangers better, provided the music is off/ very low volume. I, and several other cyclists i know wear buds (no music) for this reason. You can't always tell if people are listening to music, or not. With walkman headphones, i always remember being able to hear the high frequencies of other people's music.

Funnily enough, I still mostly just listen to the radio, especially in my car. I turn it on, done. No selecting tracks or streams, no fiddling with aux cords, bluetooth, it's just the easiest thing.

I had a walkman in the early 1980s, and really didn't end up using it that much, for similar reasons. They ate batteries, a cassette tape would run for about 20-30 minutes before you had to turn it over, so one tape got repetitive pretty quickly, and carrying more than a few tapes became inconvenient if you were out and about.

I later got a walkman-like device that was just a radio, which was much lighter and more practical if I was out on a long walk or run.

I'm sure the car who hit pedestrian was equipped with a cassette radio.

If the people of the 80s could only have imagined zombies walking around staring at their walkman. Their poor heads would have exploded with the first stories of people walking into poles, open man holes, etc.

Did we? People in our tribe perhaps. Others not so much. There have been some golden eras of high trust societies, though usually only among homogenous populations.

The reality of random, unavoidable death is one of the most terrifying aspects of the world. So coming up with reasons for the death, or ways to avoid it helps people cope with the existential dread that they too could die randomly one day through no fault of their own.

So the moral of this straw man is that it's not risk-increasing to walk around oblivious to your surroundings?