You Pod

When I'm on my way to work, like virtually every person who rides the subway, I listen to my iPod and zone out staring into nothing. One of the great things about the iPod is how you can avoid all sorts of human interaction. All you have to do is put on those earbud headphones and no one will bother you. People are intimidated by the iPod listening person. In fact, one time a homeless begger actually apologized for interupting my music listening session, and gave me $3.30 dollars in nickels to make up for it¹.

I sold my old 30 GB iPod² to my sister and picked up the 80 GB version last month. In doing so, I had to give up eating for the rest of the year. I don't feel any regrets for doing this, even though I now weigh less than Nicole Richie and I can't tell my dreams from reality anymore. At the time, buying the 80 GB iPod seemed more important, so that's what I did.

One thing that may or may not be great about the iPod is that it seems to be getting smarter with every version. One of the less talked about features about the iPod is if you put it on shuffle, it will play songs that relate to each other in some way back to back to back. Most of the time, this happens only some of the time. At least with the previous versions. But the 80 GB version is different. It has an uncanny ability to play a song, and then somehow comb through the thousands of files I have and play a song that relates to that song. And it doesn't just stop at matching similar song titles or genres, it actually somehow knows the lyrics to a song and matches it up to the lyrics of another song.

This is an example of what I was listening to on the way to work today. This isn't a playlist I made, I just set it to shuffle and it went from there, leading to this uncanny sequence.

• Freeway (feat. Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel) - What We Do
• Beanie Sigel - Feel it in the Air
• Phil Collins - In the Air Tonight
• Eminem - Stan (which references the Phil Collins song)
• Eminem - Drug Ballad (which starts off with the lyric "Back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark...")
• Mark Wahlberg (as Dirk Diggler) - You Got The Touch³
• Stan Bush - You Got The Touch⁴
• Mitch Hedberg - Stand Up (which starts off with the joke about touching Koala Bears)
• The Theme Song to Duck Tales (alright, this stopped the sequence. Maybe because I skipped the rest of the Hedberg track. Then again, ducks are animals, just like koalas.⁵)
• The Kinks - Living on a Thin Line (which was featured in The Sopranos episode, "University", and Tony Soprano is famous for having ducks in his pool. Evidently, the iPod is a Sopranos fan as well.⁶)

This is pretty cool, and also kind of scary, because who knows how smart the next generation of iPod can get? It already plays audio, video, and games, and can break down song lyrics. What's next? Will the next version be able to give you advice on your love life? Or predict what happens on 24 next season? Will a future generation of iPod become a terrorist fighting machine⁷, or an dangerous, corrupt pseudo-dictator that we can't seem to get rid of⁸?

This device has the potential for anything. Because we don't just listen to the iPod, the iPod listens to us.

¹ I'm making this part up
² By old, I mean a year ago.
³ This is the most underrated funny scene in the most underrated comedy of the 90s. Yes, Boogie Nights was a comedy. Not only that, it's one of the 10 funniest movies of that decade.
⁴ From The Transformers
⁵ I'm probably grasping at straws right here.
⁶ I'm definitely grasping at straws right here.
⁷ Like Donald Rumsfeld.
⁸ Like Donald Rumsfeld.