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Many years ago, I Ask a friend what kind of case she plans to buy for her shiny new flip phone. She paused, a little angry. “I don’t like buying stuff for my stuff,” she said. Those words got right into my hippocampus and never left. She is right! I think. Don’t buy anything! It’s simple! I’ve worked hard to stick to this principle ever since, and it’s developed as you’d expect. Sure, I might spend $1,000 on a smartphone controlled by a tech giant, but I only do it every three years (nodding wisely), not every two years. This is how we win.
The problem is that certain kinds of things only attract more. Home is obvious: it craves sofas, sweaters, buffet cabinets, chandeliers. Computers are another matter. They grow USB tendrils.Smartphones give birth Earplugs, cloud backup and music service subscription. I’m jealous of those who use Eames chairs, fancy footstools, some fine art books and multi-generational inheritance. Their iPads are empty with just a few apps, and I have 60 TB of storage spread across various flashing devices because I download large datasets for fun.
I often fool myself into thinking that the road to less stuff might be paved with more stuff. Recently, under the influence of some pent-up urge to hit, I bought a drum machine. It’s actually more of a portable production studio — a hardware-based update of the music-sequencing software of an old Amiga computer. It has buttons, a jog dial and a screen that mainly displays numbers. It’s called Polyend Tracker, but I think it’s a Sonic spreadsheet. Everything you can do with it can also be done on a laptop. But crucially, it’s not connected to the internet.
I bought a Sonic spreadsheet, fantasized about going offline, escaping the centralized world I lived in, making sick beats in the backyard or at the kitchen table. I wanted to stare at the small screen instead of the big one, and that’s how I got back on land.Instead, I ended up bending over in front of my regular monitor and watching various nerdy YouTube videos showing how them Make beats. Most of their beats aren’t that gross. They are well lit, though. Maybe the people who make the worst beats don’t make YouTube videos.
After a few weeks of use, the Tracker started calling: feed me gear. Boxes of things started to arrive – the curved legs to support it, the rubber feet to stabilize it, a padded case to protect it, a battery pack to power it. Although I have a mic and many earphones, I decided to just have a special mic and special earphones for this thing. Then I downloaded 100 audio samples from the 1990s, which meant I needed to upgrade the Sonic Spreadsheet’s microSD card. (Of course, the names of the samples are inconsistent, so I wrote code to organize them.) Every single thing, every single thing, has its own pet supplies – a stand, a foam cover, ropes, a manual, A small drawstring case.This supply chain It’s fractal: zoom in on your stuff, and more, endlessly.
The result of all this is that I have absolutely no musical talent. I spent hours cutting and pasting, turning tiny expressions into whole songs, spinning that jog dial like a pro, and when I got back to those tracks the next night, I kept finding that I didn’t have a single idea . My drums sounded like a nervous bunny kicking a bongo. If you need ominous, pompous digital clown music, like a Christmas carol playing from barking dogs, I’m the guy for you. I am not a musician. I am the system administrator for my digital audio workstation. I won’t have SoundCloud.
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