The Perfect Thing

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness
pub. 2006 Steven Levy
304 pages

I've never had an iPod, but given that Audible was doing a sale this week and that I seemed to be doing an Apple-related set, why not? The Perfect Thing hails the influence of the iPod and shares its history, both how Apple came to experiment with a consumer device and how it used the device to transform the music industry.  It's light "reading" (I listened to it, so the description is imperfect), and its datedness has appeal: this is an Apple book written before the iPhone took over everything else,  written when Jobs had announced that yes, he had cancer, but it was easily remedied with surgery and all was well now.

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and pushed the company to focus on just four products -- professional and consumer variants of desktop and laptop computers --  his idea for the desktop computers was that they were to become key components in home entertainment, a "digital hub".  The iMac came packaged with software like iMovie and iTunes to allow users to create their own videos and play music from the computer -- and not just play the CD, but copy music onto the computer to allow the iMac to be a digital music library.  Around the same time, the .mp3 coding format had been established, and there were even clunky attempts at a consumer-marketed mp3 player.  Then the inspiration: what if Apple created its own mp3 player, one that would be designed to  link perfectly with iTunes?

Although its price gave cause for balking,  the device's ease of use and attractive design made it a marketplace winner, changing the way people approached music.   Although CD players had already started allowing for more musical freedom --  make it easy to listen to the same song over and over again, or skip weak songs in an album instead of having to manually fast forward and rewind tape -- the iPod and its clones would make it a breeze.  Although a certain artform was lost in the process (having an album that told a story when listened to in entirety, in order),  most people just wanted to listen to the music they lived, when they wanted it. 

The other great influence of the iPod on music was on the industry itself.   In the days of Napster and Kazaa, the record companies were seeing the rug pulled out from under them, with CD sales following as people were able to just help themselves to goodies out there for the taking -- along with viruses,  malicious jokes, and extremely poor information as people shared files with the wrong artist and title names.  Jobs proposed an alternative: iTunes could be more than a music player and CD ripper;  it could become a storefront, allowing the record companies a way to adapt to the  demand for digital music and maintain an income stream, while giving consumers a safe and legal alternative to obtaining music at a fairly good price -- $0.99 a song. 

Levy is a tech enthusiast, an it's therefore not surprising that he completely dismisses all who look askance at the takeover of people by their little devices.  Are people retreating from one another and reality by losing themselves in their music whenever they feel like it? Sure, and why not? Although there is truth in Levy's statement that moral panics always erupt  around new technologies,  it doesn't follow that there aren't legitimate causes for concern when people put themselves into danger or ignore their family and friends (in their very company) by dropping out.

Hackers

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
© 1984 Steven Levy
458 pages

How did computers cease to be the playthings of secretive governments, universities, and multinational corporations and become instead fixtures in 80-90% of all American homes?   Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is a history of that transformation, driven by young men who could not be satisfied with the status quo. Stealing into locked rooms, or spending night after night learning the best tricks to convert typed words into real-world action, their persistent  curiosity edged technology forward.  Their obsession with mastering computers, with pushing them to their limits and fiddling with them to get more out of them, not only influenced the development of the machines themselves, but created new industries.

Nowadays we think of a hacker as a force for ill, someone who invades others' computers and systems and wreacks havoc or steal things.  That negative baggage was acquired only in the mid-1980s, however, when a few young people made headlines through their network intrusions.  Before that, the term referred to ..tweakers, if  you will, to those who fiddled with  electrical and computer systems to learn their ways and to see what they could do with them -- often improving them along the way.  Hackers fills itself with the stories of young, awkward men (and one woman) who forced innovation by refusing to stop their incessant modding. Through these restless lives we see a progression of computers, increasingly accessible and increasingly more agile. This was not the area of "plug and play":  some users were operating in basic assembly language,  compared to which FORTRAN and company were user-friendly.  The computers were often put to unorthodox uses, programmed as calculators or even games (Spacewar). As interested in them grew,  companies arose to put computing hardware into the hands  of technically-savvy consumers.  This was not the era of the Apple II, though -- not yet. The first 'hardware kits' produced a machine whose 'output' was blinking lights.  Hackers is not all technical, however; some people who are drawn to computers have grand ideas for their use, as a portal to human awakening. Some of the pioneers here weren't pushing hardware so much as they were access - like a computer 'collective' on the west coast that sought to establish a public-access mainframe in Berkeley, with a communal directory of information.

Hackers is thus a personal history of the computing revolution,  driven on by curious enthusiasts whose fascination with the potentials of these devices bordered on obsessive.  In a day where "nerd" and "geek" have achieved a kind of faux-chic,   Hackers provides a memory of the genuine article.