Michael Rutschky
Sep 27 2006 12:00AM
Do you ever get the feeling that the future is trying to infect the present? Do you ever look around in public and see all the people walking around with Bluetooth headsets growing out of their ears and wonder if you’ve woken up in an episode of Star Trek? Or just the hundreds of thousands of people I saw in New York alone that are plugged into their iPods. It’s really a strange thing, like finally after generations of science fiction our society is finally coming around. We’re finally getting all these sleek space aged gadgets that we always dreamed of. Tiny boxes the size of a graham cracker that can store and play your entire music collection (incidentally, it does make me feel more than a little spoiled to use a $200+ digital music device to listen to old lo-fi punk recordings). Even our telephones have evolved so that they can be used wherever you go and can also send instant messages, record video, play MP3s, and take pictures.
The Internet is probably the greatest of our achievements, and probably the one that will shape the world we live in the most as time goes on. Where there were once barriers and borders separating the different people of the world, we now have a lightning fast, easily accessible network connecting everyone at once. As time goes on, we might well see humans coming out of their shell, and the tribe vs. tribe philosophy that we have carried on from our ancestors could begin to disappear.
Essentially what we have here is a secondary plane of existence, a whole new world built completely out of information. And there’s no limit to what can be done in this world. Places like MySpace.com are more or less starter kits for residency in the Internet. Now you can network yourself to every other person on the planet and share your pictures, opinions, experiences, favorite songs and movies, and so on. The use of websites even give artists and writers who are savvy enough at self-promotion a chance to publish themselves and share their work with the world in a way that was never before available. One can only hope that this leads to the extinction of the recording industry as it is today, and music can be controlled and regulated by the artists and producers that create it rather than businesspeople who are more concerned with the success of their company than pioneering new forms of music.
As a matter of fact, the advent of all of this technology means that the “record” itself is virtually obsolete. Thanks to MP3 playlists, remixes, file sharing programs, and the infinite accessibility of the Internet, music has finally been freed from its physical confines. No one can say that they own it anymore because it’s in the air — it’s intangible.
I read an interview with Beck in the September 2006 issue of WIRE where he talks about how artists should begin to change their approach to producing music to adapt it to contemporary technology. His ideas for his own projects were pretty far out. In addition to releasing several different versions of the same songs to allow the listener the chance to arrange their own playlist, he’s also looking into finding a way for each listener to remix each song to their own liking, and replace album art with graphics for each song that pop up on your computer screen and synch with the music as it plays.
Music production is of course just one small facet of our culture that the future has infected. It’s all similar to a big cycle that’s gaining and gaining momentum. As technology thrives and the global information network continues to expand, people will continue sharing ideas, moving culture forward, and technology will leap ahead to keep up. Of course it’s understandable to take this all for granted — I mean I always do. But then before you know it you’ll be walking through the mall and it will hit you that things are really changing. Amateur futurists are encouraged to check out DiePunyHumans.com, a message board launched by comic book writer Warren Ellis to monitor outbreaks of the future.