MP3 Tank
First published 8/10/2000

Let’s talk mp3s. First, I’ll tell you why I hope the courts shut down Napster. Then I’ll tell you how mp3s made it impossible for me to leave my house.

About Napster: yes, there are freedom of speech and copyright issues, but everybody seems to be missing the point. Napster makes finding mp3s too damn easy. You type in a phrase, the search goes to a central index, and a few minutes later you’re downloading the song. Where’s the sport in that?

I’m hooked on collecting mp3s, and let me tell you, it’s not the having, it’s the getting. Sure, I listen to ‘em, but only because that’s the only way to review my trophies. If I could mount their stuffed heads on my walls, I’d do that instead.

But hunting mp3s with Napster is like hunting gazelle with a series of orbiting gazelle-tracking particle beam weapons. Bad form! Better to go back to the old ways, and make mp3 hunters contend with all the traps and pitfalls of the Internet: pop-up ads, 404 file not founds, obscure FTP sites in Czechoslovakia. Man vs. the Internet. The way things were meant to be.

Okay, now I’ll tell you why I can’t leave the house. Since I know have about 2 gigabytes of mp3s on my hard drive, I figured I might as well buy one of those fancy little mp3 player walkman dealies. And it works great: I can load music onto it. It’s small and portable. I can take it wherever I go.

And that’s the problem. Because I’ve now reached some kind of handheld electronic plastic gadget threshold. Say I want to go around the corner for a carton of milk. I have to find my cell phone, my palm pilot, and my mp3 player. Which could take an hour. Forget it! Better to stay home and have my coffee black.

I suppose, technically speaking, I could go outside without multiple digital bleeding edge gadgets clipped to my belt, experiencing the world in analog mode. But, my God, what’s the point in having electronic portable wiz-bang gadgets if you don’t take them with you wherever you go? Batman doesn’t leave the Batcave without his utility belt… and he knows Kung-Fu! If I get attacked by The Riddler I’ve only got my palm pilot to protect me.

That’s the problem with amazing miniaturized gadgets. They’re too small. If my mp3 player was, say, the size of a tank, I wouldn’t lose it. Mind you, I wouldn’t be able to take it anywhere either. Unless it really was a tank. Then I could take it wherever I wanted. You gonna tell me I can’t? Not when I’ve got an mp3 tank!

Of course, I don’t know how you load mp3s into a tank. And they’re probably not mac-compatible. So just forget everything I’ve said.

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