Jordan Dworkin’s micro-site Ordinary Abundance has created a surprising stir on the internet. The site walks viewers through a modest contemporary apartment and reveals it to be full of contrivances that would strike our ancestors as almost impossibly delightful. Some of the initial reaction was over-the-top enthusiastic, which in turn prompted a level of negativity that took me aback.
The haters’ reactions did make me take another look, though, and on closer inspection something struck me about the apartment: It doesn’t contain a television.
There’s a phone on the coffee table, but it’s discussed as a communications device. Dworkin quotes “The Story of the Telegraph” from 1858, which says that “of all the marvellous achievements of modern science, the Electric Telegraph is transcendently the greatest and most serviceable to mankind. It is a perpetual miracle, which no familiarity can render commonplace.” And it is of course true not only that the telegraph was received as a game-changing miracle in the 19th century but that the ability to text your friends or family or sources at zero marginal cost is far superior to early telegraphy.
Dworkin also mentions the minor miracles of photography, art prints, and streaming music.
The music one is striking.
In 1888, Edward Bellamy’s book “Looking Backward” was a huge hit and was especially influential among socialist intellectuals. It’s a science fiction book about a utopian society that arose by the year 2000, featuring a universal retirement age of 45, equal incomes, and a shorter workweek for the people who do dirty, dangerous, or unpleasant jobs.
One aspect of the utopian society he describes is an apparatus that can make a phone call to one of several channels, each of which features a band or orchestra playing music. He describes this on-demand music as “the limit of human felicity.” That is not, mechanically speaking, how FM radio works, but radio did basically give us the capability he was discussing long before the year 2000. And then by the 2010s we had Spotify and its competitors, providing a form of music on demand that is far superior to what Bellamy regarded as the limit.
In terms of revealed preferences, though, music on the radio is absolutely felicity-mogged by video.