Relinquishing digital mediums is not increasing agency; it's not "productive", that self improvement schlock we see with all these tacky e-fasts.
What you're actually doing is offloading a lack of agency from your digital avatar to a smaller, localized, realer world. This makes you more aware of your own limitations, hence the meditative bit in the article. With digital mediums, even benign ones like Spotify, the endless curate and control options give the illusion of an agency that isn'r really there, made worse considering the added anxiety of knowing you're living in an impossibly vast anonymous, uncontrollable alien algorithm. Giving up playing a console game in demo mode, controller unknowingly disconnected where you don't have any real stakes to watching a football game in a real stadium with the potential to rally along with some kind of community. In both cases you're just sitting down, watching a game, but the latter is life affirming.
I've been moving from Spotify to my own Jellyfin installation/server, and it's working pretty well. Don't need to pay the yearly fee for Plex remote streaming, and there's two perfectly-usable apps that aren't bogged down with ads. Plex charging me yearly to watch/listen to things outside my own home and then having the temerity to say "yeah, you'll see ads, and give us your data too" sucks the ballsack.
Good read, even though I have no intention of following the author's lead. This essay kinda feels like a weird intersection of techlash and classic hipsterism in which someone feels inclined to share their profound epiphanies from *checks notes* listening to radio commercials.
The guest author looks nothing like what I thought they would and I’m surprised to see they’re a conservative. I had to check a few times just to make sure I read that right. I guess I’m judgmental?
I still have a huge music collection from the iPod/Rip your own CDs era. I use Jellyfin media server (open-source, free, runs on Windows/Mac/Linux) running on my desktop computer and some wacky VPN stuff so I can access it on my phone everywhere. The apps for doing it yourself are pretty good these days.
Bandcamp means I can buy song files directly from bands and drop those into my collection. I love this live radio thing NTS.live for electronic/jazz/weird stuff and sometimes I'll download particular DJs shows and ... drop them into my music collection and stream on my phone :)
While your piece definitely improved the shitrag NYT as a whole, I think it is important for people to remember that it is still a shitrag. What you're doing here is better and more unique - don't forget that.
This kind of presents a false choice between having convenient, unlimited music choice and tacky status games like Unwrapped. I've seen one other commenter mention YouTube music, and there's also Amazon. Neither one has a strong "social" component.
The Crawford reference about limits breeding spiritedness vs unlimited options breeding anxiety is spot on. I actually find myself agreeing with the point about ads becoming familar friends after repeated exposure, theres something oddly comforting about that predictability. The shift from curated control to receptive posture feels like a meaningful fram for thinking about satisfaction in general, not just music.
Great read. The idea of being open to receiving what you are given, rather than being in a constant state of choice, is something I resonate with.
I too have been on a multi-years-long journey to reconfigure my relationship to music. A few years ago I was suddenly hit with the realization that, due to the listening habits formed by Spotify, I no longer truly connected with music or artists as I once did. Music no longer held an important place in my heart or life, despite (or rather, as we're all discovering, because of) having access to all of it all the time (and all the nefarious practices spotify uses, ofc). Which made me sad.
Everyone's solution for this will be different, and for me completely giving up streaming is (for now) something I'm not willing to do. But I've managed to recalibrate things and find a healthy balance between:
- celebration and connection (concerts/live shows)
I'm so much happier with my relationship to music now than I used to be.
Pro tip for anyone looking to alter their relationship to music but is unable/unwilling (yet) to completely give up streaming: stop using playlists, and limit yourself to listening to a few (my limit is 5-10) albums for a 1-2 month period. Allow yourself to sit with it, and don't give in to the temptation to keep wading through everything else. After that, you can rotate them out. You'll have the ease of streaming but with the joy of having limited options. And get off Spotify, there's better services out there :)
This was wonderful. I myself have been thinking a lot about how in the pre-Internet age you would get a magazine, and you had the choice to read or not read the article articles. But you couldn’t specifically curate your experience.
Similarly, when you were in the waiting room somewhere or on an airplane, you had to read whatever was in front of you.
In some ways, this was good because it taught us to sit with boredom and perhaps experience something that isn’t perfectly suited to our personal taste.
I love the opportunities and creativity that are digital age has brought, but I worry that we’ve sacrificed a lot .
I work in communications professionally and I know how hard it is for writers and news outlets. Audiences are fickle and the businesses depend on subscriptions. Publish one out of step op-ed do one story that your audience doesn’t love and they unsubscribe.
Thanks again for the great article. I’ll try to listen to the radio while I finish making Shabbat dinner.
Tons of work out there on the paradox of how too many options actually make us less happy. To the point that comparison to the 'cereal aisle' of any major supermarket is now synonymous with being paralyzed by indecision due to option overload -- with a side order of snark about how none of choices are meaningful anyway. Seeing the same thought applied to Spotify Premium gives one pause to thought about the impact of ALL of these algorithmic intrusions on one's life.
re Spotify, this reminded/motivated me to spend all day writing with music so as to properly bias the results; I haven’t used it as much this year due to YouTube superiority
Relinquishing digital mediums is not increasing agency; it's not "productive", that self improvement schlock we see with all these tacky e-fasts.
What you're actually doing is offloading a lack of agency from your digital avatar to a smaller, localized, realer world. This makes you more aware of your own limitations, hence the meditative bit in the article. With digital mediums, even benign ones like Spotify, the endless curate and control options give the illusion of an agency that isn'r really there, made worse considering the added anxiety of knowing you're living in an impossibly vast anonymous, uncontrollable alien algorithm. Giving up playing a console game in demo mode, controller unknowingly disconnected where you don't have any real stakes to watching a football game in a real stadium with the potential to rally along with some kind of community. In both cases you're just sitting down, watching a game, but the latter is life affirming.
Got it.
I've been moving from Spotify to my own Jellyfin installation/server, and it's working pretty well. Don't need to pay the yearly fee for Plex remote streaming, and there's two perfectly-usable apps that aren't bogged down with ads. Plex charging me yearly to watch/listen to things outside my own home and then having the temerity to say "yeah, you'll see ads, and give us your data too" sucks the ballsack.
Good read, even though I have no intention of following the author's lead. This essay kinda feels like a weird intersection of techlash and classic hipsterism in which someone feels inclined to share their profound epiphanies from *checks notes* listening to radio commercials.
The guest author looks nothing like what I thought they would and I’m surprised to see they’re a conservative. I had to check a few times just to make sure I read that right. I guess I’m judgmental?
Not a conservative. Just a bit bizarre.
Read this for clarification https://arcadepublishing.substack.com/p/ae9c636d-b499-4bdd-b4c6-82ad00a80e73?postPreview=paid&updated=2025-12-01T18%3A51%3A15.980Z&audience=everyone&free_preview=false&freemail=true
I still have a huge music collection from the iPod/Rip your own CDs era. I use Jellyfin media server (open-source, free, runs on Windows/Mac/Linux) running on my desktop computer and some wacky VPN stuff so I can access it on my phone everywhere. The apps for doing it yourself are pretty good these days.
Bandcamp means I can buy song files directly from bands and drop those into my collection. I love this live radio thing NTS.live for electronic/jazz/weird stuff and sometimes I'll download particular DJs shows and ... drop them into my music collection and stream on my phone :)
I hate streaming and I'm glad to be rid of it.
Shoutouts to Jellyfin.
While your piece definitely improved the shitrag NYT as a whole, I think it is important for people to remember that it is still a shitrag. What you're doing here is better and more unique - don't forget that.
This kind of presents a false choice between having convenient, unlimited music choice and tacky status games like Unwrapped. I've seen one other commenter mention YouTube music, and there's also Amazon. Neither one has a strong "social" component.
The Crawford reference about limits breeding spiritedness vs unlimited options breeding anxiety is spot on. I actually find myself agreeing with the point about ads becoming familar friends after repeated exposure, theres something oddly comforting about that predictability. The shift from curated control to receptive posture feels like a meaningful fram for thinking about satisfaction in general, not just music.
Great read. The idea of being open to receiving what you are given, rather than being in a constant state of choice, is something I resonate with.
I too have been on a multi-years-long journey to reconfigure my relationship to music. A few years ago I was suddenly hit with the realization that, due to the listening habits formed by Spotify, I no longer truly connected with music or artists as I once did. Music no longer held an important place in my heart or life, despite (or rather, as we're all discovering, because of) having access to all of it all the time (and all the nefarious practices spotify uses, ofc). Which made me sad.
Everyone's solution for this will be different, and for me completely giving up streaming is (for now) something I'm not willing to do. But I've managed to recalibrate things and find a healthy balance between:
- discovery (streaming)
- curation, physicality, intentional listening (cds/vinyl/mp3s)
- celebration and connection (concerts/live shows)
I'm so much happier with my relationship to music now than I used to be.
Pro tip for anyone looking to alter their relationship to music but is unable/unwilling (yet) to completely give up streaming: stop using playlists, and limit yourself to listening to a few (my limit is 5-10) albums for a 1-2 month period. Allow yourself to sit with it, and don't give in to the temptation to keep wading through everything else. After that, you can rotate them out. You'll have the ease of streaming but with the joy of having limited options. And get off Spotify, there's better services out there :)
Great article - especially as I, like many others - contemplate leaving Spotify.
On the topic of radio, check out Radio Garden - you can explore radio from around the world.
https://radio.garden/
Liz Pelly - Mood Machine is well worth a read/listen.
This was wonderful. I myself have been thinking a lot about how in the pre-Internet age you would get a magazine, and you had the choice to read or not read the article articles. But you couldn’t specifically curate your experience.
Similarly, when you were in the waiting room somewhere or on an airplane, you had to read whatever was in front of you.
In some ways, this was good because it taught us to sit with boredom and perhaps experience something that isn’t perfectly suited to our personal taste.
I love the opportunities and creativity that are digital age has brought, but I worry that we’ve sacrificed a lot .
I work in communications professionally and I know how hard it is for writers and news outlets. Audiences are fickle and the businesses depend on subscriptions. Publish one out of step op-ed do one story that your audience doesn’t love and they unsubscribe.
Thanks again for the great article. I’ll try to listen to the radio while I finish making Shabbat dinner.
Congratulations Kat!
Tons of work out there on the paradox of how too many options actually make us less happy. To the point that comparison to the 'cereal aisle' of any major supermarket is now synonymous with being paralyzed by indecision due to option overload -- with a side order of snark about how none of choices are meaningful anyway. Seeing the same thought applied to Spotify Premium gives one pause to thought about the impact of ALL of these algorithmic intrusions on one's life.
re Spotify, this reminded/motivated me to spend all day writing with music so as to properly bias the results; I haven’t used it as much this year due to YouTube superiority