The Conquest of Ubiquity (1928)

This was almost scary to read. There is such a stark contrast between what I would call naïve (not necessarily bad) science fiction, focusing on the particulars of a technology, or setting contemporary stories in scifi settings, and <i>this</i> little piece, explaining not Spotify, but the implications of Spotify, to the audience of 1928.<p>This and “the machine stops” are among the most incredible things I have ever read, and I wonder what other gems might be written today about a future we should see but we don’t because we are so caught up in our pasts.

&gt; Days can be gloomy; there are men and women who are very much alone, and many whom age or infirmity confines to their own company with which they are only too familiar. These men and women, reduced to boredom and gloom, can now fill their sad and useless hours with beauty or passion.<p>I wonder if he imagined that the very same technology he predicted would comfort us in our loneliness would also come to contribute to our increased alienation from one another.

Focused primarily on broadcast music, this is a brilliant insight into a commodification-of-craft introduced by technology that mirrors what did indeed occur, and that the writer had imagined could be transformative in a dialectical materialist sense.