Apple iPod 2nd Generation Touch Wheel

Oakland, 2002

Driving north from Oakland in 2001, I saw a billboard advertising the first iPod. Though I had no idea what I was looking at, I remember having a strange feeling that, whatever it was, it would change the world.

It certainly changed mine. Music fuels my writing— and in the early 1980s, my Asia packing lists included a hefty boom box and a soft case holding two dozen cassette tapes. (These were not the heaviest things I carried; my Smith Corona typewriter filled half of my backpack.) Within the decade, the tapes were replaced with CDs. But still.

Suddenly, none of that baggage was necessary. The number of songs I could load onto this iPod was virtually unlimited. A plug-in speaker completed the kit. From that point on, it became impossible to keep up with the overabundance music on my devices—and so it remains today.

But the universal availability of any music, at any time, came at a cost: the death of anticipation. I used to love cycling up to Telegraph Avenue and rambling through the used CD bins at Amoeba and Rasputin, experiencing the giddy endorphin rush of finding that obscure Stan Getz or Van Morrison recording. Today, like everything else, Boozoo Hully Gully is just a mouse-click away.

What fascinates me about our 21st-century devices (and the Internet as a whole) is that none of the sci-fi authors I read (and I read a lot of sci-fi) predicted them. The only one came close was H.G. Wells: “A World Encyclopedia,” he said in a 1937 radio broadcast, “no longer presents itself to a modern imagination as a row of volumes printed and published… but as a sort of mental clearing house for the mind; a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized [and] compared… This Encyclopedic organization need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network [that] would constitute the material beginning of a real World Brain.”

Wow. Right? I’ll tell you what I wish I had predicted: that I should put my money where my music was. When I bought my first iPod in June of 2002, Apple stock was $1.50 a share. “Regrets? I have a few…”