Ditch Your AirPods, Experience The World!
When we all want nothing more but to hide away from the outside, maybe our freedom can come from opening up.
I love my Airpods. Anytime I embark on a journey by myself— to go to university, my part-time job, the pub, back home to Harringay— my ears are kitted out with dangly earrings and the Airpods Pro Generation 2s my dad won for me in a work conference raffle. As long as I have the Folk & Acoustic Mix Spotify generates for me or, recently, the more obscure sounds of ABBA thrusting their way down my ear canal, I can enter a fugue state that removes the aural horrors of the commute. No more Piccadilly line screeches between Manor House and Turnpike Lane, or raucous Arsenal chanting on match day, or just the general kerfuffle of bellowing children. The world and I couldn’t feel further from one another. In April of this year, the Liberal Democrats called for changes to the Bus Services Bill currently before Parliament which would see fines of up to £1000 issued to those that play music on public transport. “Far too many people dread their daily commute because of the blight of antisocial behaviour,” said Lisa Smart, Home Affairs Spokesperson for the Lib Dems, “and headphone dodgers playing loud music on buses and trains are some of the worst offenders.” She went on, “It’s time to take a stand for the quiet majority who just want to get from A to B in peace.” The policy lit up my Twitter/X feed with hot take after hot take on how we use audio hardware in public. Some users went as far as to proclaim society’s obsession with noise cancellation as “a fascist cultural victory” and replaced the swastika in the Nazi logo with a 2D icon of a set of headphones.
It is easy to sympathise with both sides of the argument. It can certainly be an irritation to have to listen to teenagers blasting what is often some terribly mediocre music at the back of the bus. Yet the use of the term “headphone dodger” in an attempt to criminalise the simple act of playing a TikTok out of one’s phone smacks of the politely authoritarian tendencies that draws “socially liberal” middle England to the Lib Dems in their droves. But what the two cases share is an astute observation on the breakdown of the social contract in Britain. In a post-ASBO world, where curtain twitching and neighbourhood watching are encouraged to fight the so-called“anti-social behaviour” plaguing our streets, there is little-to-no trust in one another; trust to not only respect the spaces we all share, but to enjoy them as a society. Are we “turning into an island of strangers,” as the PM would have us believe, because of uncontrollable immigration? Or has half a century of managed decline decimated society’s cohesion, alienating us from each other to the point we can only find joy in the penalisation of common behaviours or the complete shuttering off of those around us?
The concept of personal audio hardware has a long history,with roots in the Victorian age. In 1895, the Electrophone, a hand-held device resembling a tennis racket with a stethoscope stuck on top, broadcast live music performances across London from venues like the Apollo, the Lyric and the Royal Albert Hall. John Koss unveiled the first pair of high-fidelity headphones in 1958, causing a craze through his pop culture-first marketing that included the launch of the ‘Beatlephones’ in 1966 in collaboration with the band. The world was changed forever in 1979 with the release of the Sony Walkman, designed by Norio Ohga, which allowed many listeners to bring their favourite tracks out of the house for the first time. That first century of music technology design signalled a new age for how we consumed the audio artform: the Electrophone’s hand-held nature meant one could easily slip away and discuss the performance at hand with those around; Koss’ embrace of popular culture created a connection between the music we listen to and the ways we present ourselves; and Ohga’s implementation of two headphone jacks meant that social interaction was at the heart of the listening experience. These designs had community at their heart, offering not only new ways for us to really listen to the music we love but to enjoy it together.
Naturally, as modern technologies have demonstrated enough, the unifying effects of these wearable devices were lost and have instead separated us further and further apart in the pursuit of capital. The iconic image of Robert Longo’s silhouettes donning Apple’s white earphones solidified Apple as innovators in personal tech design as well as bringing tech firmly into the fashion matrix. It became almost a necessity to own a pair and slowly normalised our addictions to our music technologies. By the time Apple launched the first Airpods in 2017, detaching the signature Jony Ives-designed Stormtrooper heads from their white cords, the hardware signified a desire to be left alone, to be perceived as detached from one’s immediate context, to just appear busy.
The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, “If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches.” In our current climate, I think we are all tempted by the idea that we can shut ourselves off from our surroundings by the insertion of a device almost as small as a mint imperial into our ears. But when fascist narratives dominate our political discourse and the oversaturation of generative AI in our culture forces us to question the reality of everything we see, the answer can’t be to block it all out. If anything, it has never been more imperative to experience everything. If we can hold onto our grasp of the real world and once more learn to feel it viscerally, together, then maybe we can call forth life’s riches and fight the polarising forces that thrive on our separation.