Monday, May 5, 2025

This is the thirty-sixth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. The wind is currently blowing in the direction of technology and media.

¡Today is Cinco de Mayo! As someone with nominal Mexican heritage, I felt this was important to point out.

On Friday I mentioned my extensive music collection, and how it can be loaded onto a microSD card so I can carry it around anywhere. I realized this is kind of counter-cultural anymore since most people probably listen to streaming music on Spotify or Amazon, where they aren’t limited to what they have in their collection, but can listen to literally anything they want with just a few taps of the keyboard. In some cases, you don’t even need to search for music, just tell the app to play what it thinks you want to hear.

I used Pandora many years ago, which was a positive experience overall. I learned about a lot of new artists that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, and I was on board with the curated experience until I realized what it actually meant. Your listening history becomes more data for the big tech companies to use against you, to sell and calculate and reduce you to a number instead of a person.

Conspiracies aside, there was also the pressure to be constantly rating the music I was listening to. That was a decision I had to make on each song, did I like it enough to vote it up or dislike it enough to vote it down? Listening to music is supposed to be a background activity, something I do while I’m working or writing or gardening, not something that should constantly require my attention and decision making capacity.

But it works for some people, clearly, since those kinds of apps are still around. I realized when I was writing this article that I technically stream music also, though it’s set up a little differently. The files themselves are on a cloud storage system that my computer can access without actually downloading them to the hard drive. It’s still only limited to what I own, though, which makes getting new music still a treat.