Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

Tonight we had a cascading failure of a system in our home, which lead to me pulling my hair out, yelling and red faced with anger.

That system was our Sonos. It’s still not all right, but they are taking care of it. The exact cause of my anger is not the issue at hand, but more that the failure of a hugely complicated device lead to a cascading series of events, culminating with stringing a MacBook Pro to our bedroom speaker setup to provide white noise for our baby.

It used to be that things as complicated as whole house audio, wireless networking and hell, playing an MP3 were obtrusive enough of operations to never fully engrain themselves within the fabric of being that sometimes we call life.

It is therefore telling that these acts of herculean technical feats are on par with running water to the extent that disruption of the service is as unheard of, unfortunate and insanity inducing as my water or gas shutting off. I almost wager more so: the baby could sleep without water running, not without the white noise track on repeat.

My job is to find the new and the cool and figure out how it further connects a fan with their band. As such, its looking often for the technologies that come along that fit like a glove rather than like a straight jacket. My meter for good tech is along the lines of its intuitive sensibility toward making my life easier in some way. I’ve rarely been wrong in judging a product in this regard.

Things like the Sonos, Apple’s Wifi devices, and the coming iPad are the same way.

But herein lies a problem with the music business: we sit and wait for others to invent the intuitive too often. Wait for the innovation to fall on us rather than us lead it. Being innovative requires wielding the tools of innovation, not just speaking on panels with them.

Abstract this to content or media companies. These companies too often elevate themselves up propped up on the notion of content. If you can take anything from post-structuralism though as applied to the 21st century media landscape, its that the formative difference between content, the tools of content and the innovation by and through content are nil.

Content is innovation. It is a tool and a system toward being innovative. It is the catalyst for doing innovative things, provided you are willing and able to use the tools that enable that ability.

Going back to the Sonos. Or Apple.

The delineation between innovation and content doesn’t exist on these systems. It’s a fluid construct of movement from representation to action and back again.

This isn’t to say a music company should invent the next iPad. But it is to say that the devices and systems like the aforementioned are not merely partners, but a new canvas on which to further narrow that distance between what we create and what drives a fan to love that which we make.

My thoughts on the iPad are similar to my thoughts on the iPhone upon its first release: its about the possibilities of the hardware, not the software itself. It’s about the modality of the device rather than the specifics of what we think others will use it for.

The iPhone on its first ever release, with 1.0 software had barely one screen of applications. It had no Exchange support, no push e-mail, no copy/paste, very little in the way of batch operations. It was a template for what the device could be, applied to hardware that held its promise.

The iPad is the same thing. From what we’ve seen, in terms of the mode of its representation, it fits exactly what we saw from the iPhone: an empty screen of apps coupled to hardware which at once seems obvious and new.*

All the criticism points to the “do I need this.” That isn’t the right question to ask. The right question to as is “what can this do?”

Software wise, iPhone OS 3.2 has the same limitations as 3.1.2, just with more screen. TO focus on that is missing the point completely. We all know, without a doubt that multitasking is coming, as is a higher pixel density on the basic iPhone. We know that a lot of what is valued from Android and other platforms will make its way to the iPhone and iPad. We know this for the same reason we all knew that when iPhone OS 1.0 was released, an app-store was coming, as well as copy/paste.

Why isn’t it here now? Because its not perfect. The same reason the iPad hasn’t come until now. The same reason that the iPhone copy/paste didn’t come for a bit.

Now, the iPad. The fact that people are spending so much virtual ink about “do we need this, do people need this?” misses the point. People didn’t need a better phone. A phone was a phone. And yet, people need and covet their iPhone. The iPhone has transcended what people judged it on: a PDA and a phone. It has become a general purpose device more in line with the usage of netbooks than phones. The iPad likewise will transcend what people are judging it by.

My parents, wife and others all expressed their intrinsic “want” for the device. They want it because (for my mom), it’ll be great for reading and browsing the web without overhead of a laptop when on a plane or at home. For my dad, its a simple way to do what he does most with a computer. For me, it’ll be a great home automation device, Slingplayer, lights controller, Sonos controller, Facebook/Email device for my wife and e-book reader.

It’s telling when the results of a product release is more confusion than jubilation. Confusion leads to innovation as people try to wrestle with a concept. The iPad just opened up twice as many pixels and many times the amount of processor power to the promise and concept of innovation.

I can’t wait to get started working on it.

* The lack of a camera on this device and the iPod Touch are befuddling though.

This is late.

I have a valid reason for this however.

2009 and the decade that was leave me sort of exhausted. It’s not a matter of just life changes (there were a ton), direction changes (again) or personal growth and development. It’s that as the decade progressed, living – the very act of getting up in the morning – started to become a process almost algorithmic in scope.

A decade in which we became post-human. We live outside of ourselves as much as we live within. The filters and the boundaries that used to be recognized as the “private life” permeated with every new innovation in connectivity, portability, transparency, “social” and Social to the point that we’re very, very close to eliminating the physical and haptics from the interface, going straight to the cybernetic organism.

As of now we’re textual cyborgs, or more appropriately given the cross-modality of expression: digital representational cyborgs: entities existing by and through the representation of digital data.

At any rate: the maintenance of self as such is tiring.

Tiring and without end. The downtimes we used to be accustom to are making way to in-flight wifi, smart dashboards in the car, push notifications, twitter and SMS. Post-humanism, the transference of self into more forms than the pure physical, is not science fiction. It’s fact. And to some its a predicate toward living.

That includes for me.

Moments not online are moments I’m free from myself more than with myself. That is disturbing. That means that when I’m running for 10 miles or so, and completely off grid, I’m without identity. There is something poetic about that, or disturbing. Choose.

This brings me to the decade.

I started the decade searching for a way to bring myself into two planes of existence simultaneously. 2000 was the year of Ricochet, promising universal wireless broadband via a bulky adapter and lamp-post based transmitters. Those transmitters are still all around, Ricochet is not.

Ricochet was part of my plan to allow myself to bifurcate into two parallel identities. one a person, one an IP address.

I did not get that through wireless transvergence, but I did end up maintaining that bifurcation through a site and identity I’ve maintained for almost twenty years now. The last decade was one in which the concept of “me” as an online identity almost, and nearly superseded the identity of me as me.

I spent ten years working away from that.

In the last ten years I did a lot. I graduated college. Lost my long held high school job. Lost my mind a bit in the middle there. Got into grad school, met Amy, got married, got my job at WBR, befriended my favorite band, had a kid and now I’m again on the cusp of some major changes.

The ten years that have passed have realized things I previously dreamed about in the world. We saw the best of what human innovation can offer to connect us to concepts of ourselves far exceeding physical limitations, and at the same time realized that so much growth out of ourselves doesn’t necessarily mean the best of humanity will always be represented.

For me, I’ve had the privilege of working with great tools, technology and people to explore the aspects of our post-human condition to various extents, both artistic and practical.

The current state we’re at has what I took for granted as a normal reality. We are pervasively connected with ubiquitous computers, something that was relegated to clunky devices in academia when I graduated college. But what is that doing to us? What is the fact that I’m writing this at 38000 feet over the midwest doing to me?

We are at the fulcrum of a decade poised upon either an ascension to something amazing or a descending into something slightly mortifying. I hope the power of the tools we wield are used in a way to construct a better reality for ourselves. I hope that we don’t take the elevation of dimensions of existence beyond mere physical as a way to remove accountability and personal motivation from our every day living.

More than anything, I hope that the world I am raising my son in retains the sense of aesthetic beauty which ultimately shapes memory and history more than pixel laden design and curvy aluminum.

I hope that in ten years, when my son is 11, he can still wake up and go outside to a sun rise, and leave the phone behind. Even if only once in a while.