Think, for instance, of the hassle of receiving a text document a few years back. Photograph: Simon Turner/Alamy Stock Photo Pre-digital interoperability between brands and formats wasn’t an issue.
Software can be interoperable, either through common, open file formats, or through different programs speaking directly to one another, and so too can hardware: open standards are what allow you to use any headphones with any music player, for instance, or buy a TV without worrying if it will work with your streaming set-up. Interoperability is the technical term for what we’ve lost as tech has matured. Simply put, nothing works with anything else any more, and it’s starting to become a problem. A concentration of power at the top of the industry a focus on building easy-to-use gadgets over powerful general-purpose devices and a shift from programs and files to websites and APIs: all have left us in this slightly run-down sci-fi future.
The phone in your pocket – possibly even the watch on your wrist – is substantially more powerful than the desktop computer you may have stashed those music files on, and is connected via a cellular connection a hundred times faster than the 56K modem you used to download your MP3s to an internet unimaginably larger and more useful.īut alongside those wild improvements have come other changes with a more mixed outcome. Nostalgia is an ill-fitting emotion for the technology sector, where exponential growth rules. Want to switch to Spotify? You can, but make sure you never accidentally hit “play” when nothing’s on, or Apple Music will start right back up.
Want to use headphones made by a different company? You need to buy a dongle to plug them in if they’re wired, and you won’t have access to the fancy new “spatial audio” streams Apple now offers if they’re Bluetooth. Sure, competitors exist, but with each passing year they struggle to offer a service on parity. You listen to Apple Music on your Apple iPhone through your Apple AirPods. Today, for millions of people around the world, all those companies have been replaced by one: Apple. Your headphones, of course, connected to whatever you were using, be that a simple Discman or a fancy Nomad Jukebox, with a normal 3.5mm plug.
Whether or not MP3s interested you, you probably bought your music on CD, and had a couple of players in the house – maybe a portable one and a hi-fi. And if you were lucky enough to have an early standalone MP3 player, it was probably made by another company again. Whichever option you picked, you’d play them on your computer with a program built for the task. How you acquired them is probably best left between you and a priest, but you may have ripped them from a CD, downloaded them from a file sharing service, or bought them from one of a few nascent download sites. I n 2001, if you listened to digital music, you did it with a large folder of MP3 files.