Walkmans

In partnership with

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I got out of the house for two days. During some of the worst rain I’ve ever seen. Which meant in practise that I was mostly sitting in a car during zero-visibility weather stuck in traffic or being re-routed away from flooded roads, adding three hours to a two-hour journey. I am not rested. And yet! Onwards!

Short one this week, long one next week. Probably.

In this letter:

• My Wrongs

• Typeractive

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

MY WRONGS

Among the many things wrong with me is that sometimes I think too much about Karl Lagerfeld’s collection of iPods. He treated iPods like cassette tapes and had three hundred of them.

I have ONE mp3 player, a Sony NWZF805B F Series 16GB player that I bought in 2012 for £200. It still works, believe it or not. Had to replace the proprietary cable twice using eBay. I could, and do, load up the phone with music, but we all know iPhone audio isn’t all that. Fine for podcasts. Not so much for real music.

And then sometimes I think, what if I had a rack of mp3 players curated for different moods and spaces? With wired earbuds. Non-networked, no wifi. Is that mad? Maybe. But is it wrong?

Well, probably. But still.

Look at this lunacy. It’s a £50 lossless mp3 player called the Snowsky Echo Mini, styled to look like an old Walkman tape player. It even has an extra port for in-ear monitors.

I was on a flight once in a seat opposite Fred Armisen, who was staring intently into a a laptop screen reviewing footage while wearing the weirdest earbuds I’d ever seen. People were bothering him constantly for selfies and the like while he was trying to work, and he was very nice and gracious to everyone. I waited until he finished work and closed his laptop before I leaned over, asked his forgiveness - you could see him bracing for another selfie or weird question — and then asked him what the hell he was wearing in his ears. His face lit up and he then explained to me what in-ear monitors are, and I’ve wanted to try a pair ever since.

Mid-range mp3 players seem a lot cheaper than they used to be. The high-end, is, however, now insanely priced.

Phones are convenient, yes. But if you want to listen to music properly while on the move, you need something else. Maybe it’s time to reject convenience, go for quality and style and wrong. Look at this. This is, by any measure, wrong.

Except there is a degree of fuckit that says, if I’m going to curate a collection of music players, then is a designer case for them really a step too far? Listen, my kid’s (just about) a millennial and she doesn’t even want phone and email any more. (Her partner jokes that she’s reading to *go full bog-hag” and it’s not even really a joke.) In a world where we might retreat from everything being networked, and where we might want to pay real musicians real money for music we can really own, maybe this isn’t quite as crazy at it looks.

Vuitton famously put an entire fold-out office into a travel trunk for Leopold Stokowski, so an custom iPod trunk wasn’t a stretch.

If you think I’ve gotten old enough to turn tech-conservative, ask yourself if you really want ads streamed to your fridge door or clock, and remind yourself that when you outsource your doorbell and your bed to tech companies, Amazon Web Services might go down and kill your doorbell and brick your fucking bed, as happened last week. Draw a line somewhere.

2025: a server outage lobotomised your smart bed. That is the Science Fiction Condition, and not the happy one.

(I wrote a whole lecture about this in 2015 that I should throw up here one day.)

And then I discovered, reader, that modern mp3 players take SD memory cards. And that Chinese companies make all kinds of cheap lossless mp3 players. So I don’t need a case of machines. All I need is a case of SD cards. So I have one of those players, three 128GB cards and a case, and a card device coming. I therefore descend into more disconnection.

And yet, somehow, more cables.

Bonus round: a whisky blender’s travelling trunks:

How about you and me start being mad, being wrong, and being happier?

ORBITAL

TYPERACTIVE

Artist, writer and designer Rian Hughes has a compendium of his typography up on Kickstarter.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

Morning Computer: a few useful things first thing in my day

• Notes on Catherine Nixey’s excellent book HERESY

• resurfacing the blogchain-about-blogging BROADCASTING HOUSE

• telemetry - various links

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and is sponsored by:

Looking for unbiased, fact-based news? Join 1440 today.

Join over 4 million Americans who start their day with 1440 – your daily digest for unbiased, fact-centric news. From politics to sports, we cover it all by analyzing over 100 sources. Our concise, 5-minute read lands in your inbox each morning at no cost. Experience news without the noise; let 1440 help you make up your own mind. Sign up now and invite your friends and family to be part of the informed.

Subscribe to 1440 today.

I’m out. Be good to yourself. See you next week with some new stuff.

W