Phantom Threads

The Nag Hammadi Codex

The big problem with technology is that we're too reliant on things having to be charged all the time. What you want is a system where devices are always charged and don't ever have to be plugged in. A Moleskine notebook is always "charged" for example.

Playing things "unplugged" was a thing in the 1980s where pop songs would be rearranged and played just on acoustic instruments. The problem we have now is that we're too reliant on being plugged in, as if it is an essential motivating factor for creativity or productivity.

There is an internet outage as I am writing this, but I'm still writing. But would I still want to continue writing on paper if the computer was dead, even without battery power? That's an interesting question: Is our motivation and creativity now permanently tethered to the power grid and internet, and even to social media? What are our real intentions for being creative, and can they continue in any circumstance?

A few days ago, someone asked a question on Quora, "Is it possible to learn to play a guitar without touching it?" Once you develop muscle memory and your brain has mapped the territories of instruments, you can practice mentally. To some degree this is effective, but it's a schematic and is not plugged into the rest of your body. You can play through things in your mind, and the playing is clean without errors. But it's the limitations in your hands in context with the physicality of the instrument that emerge when it is "plugged in" to your cortical homunculus. It takes a long time to actually wire the neurons, sometimes decades. The interesting thing about electronics is that they can smooth out those errors, and when you play acoustically it sounds terrible or just sounds like nothing: playing fourths, fifths, and octaves on an acoustic is not very musical in isolation, but can be with an over-driven amp with effects. This gives us the illusion that we have a good facility on the instrument, which is good enough for most people because it is closer to how we might be imagining the sound. Over the past 50 years music has become more about the sound, which obviously is more achievable than getting a good sound unplugged. Playing an "effected" electric guitar requires a certain touch, different from playing an acoustic. You have to "rewire" yourself to think differently about the instrument, with the thinking process being the way in which the instrument is approached, so it doesn't involve touching it--at least initially. Think musicians learning to play music again after brain injuries, like Joni Mitchell: the "schematic" is there re-charged with "phantom power" or the "phantom threads".