What Have I, What Have I Done To Deserve This?
The blight of public noise from Bluetooth speakers. Yes, I'm talking to you, asshole.
If I were to imagine a scenario in which I did something that could put me in jail for life, it would probably be on the lines of one recent resident of the Bronx, Shaun Piles. Ms Piles, after a series of escalating fights with her next-door neighbor over the loudness of his music at all hours of the day and night, stabbed him multiple times with a kitchen knife when he was keeping her awake at 2 am — finally losing what was left of her shit.
To which I can only say of the now-imprisoned martyr: Free Shaun Piles!
There is something about being forcibly exposed to someone else’s choice in loud music that makes me lose my shit as well. It got so bad a few years back that I talked to my shrink about it. I wasn’t just irritated, annoyed, or put out by it. I was instantly full of blind, hateful rage. My rational faculties would desert me, and I’d find myself yelling at strangers in public, which is something I usually only do online.
What is it about this relatively minor problem in the grand scheme of things? I’m a pretty congenial person in public usually, with some English reserve. My shrink suggested it was about my years of living with a dictatorial father. I continued to overreact to situations where I was completely powerless, she suggested, and unable to escape. There was something to that, I think. I’m extremely independent-minded as an adult, and bristle at being pushed around.
But I’m also a bit of a hippie, a meditator who from childhood on loved just being contemplative in nature, in silence, or actually listening to the subtler sounds of the non-human world. So when two of the most cherished oases in my life for three decades — my local Meridian Hill Park in DC, and the remote Herring Cove Beach outside Provincetown — became saturated with the noise of others these last few years, I was bound to get upset.
The modern world is noisy, I get that. I’m fine dealing with busy, urban places. But that surely makes those other places where you can escape the noise all the more vital in the constant struggle for sanity in this century. This is perhaps the one issue on which uber-leftist Elie Mystal and I agree. He found himself this week in a waiting room, full of peeps “listening to content on their devices with no headphones… LOUDLY. What the SHIT is this?? Is this normal?” His peroration: “I’M DEAD. I CAN FOR REAL FEEL THE VEINS IN MY HEAD THROBBING. THIS IS HOW I DIED.” #MeToo, my old lefty comrade.
The degradation of public space in America isn’t entirely new, of course. As soon as transistor radios became portable, people would carry them around — for music or sports scores on construction sites or wherever. But the smartphone era — thanks once again, Steve Jobs, you were so awesome! — gave us an exponential jump in the number of people with highly portable sound-broadcasting machines in every public space imaginable. In other words: Hell on toast.
At the beginning of this phone surge, a term was even coined in Britain for playing music on your phone in public: “sodcasting” — after “sod” for “sodomite”, i.e. something that only a total ASSHOLE would do. Sodcasting was just an amuse bouche, though, compared with our current Bluetooth era, where amplifiers the size of golf-balls have dialed it all up to 11, and the age of full-spectrum public cacophony — including that thump-thump-thump of the bass that carries much farther than the sodcasting treble — has truly begun.
National parks? They are now often intermittent raves, where younger peeps play loud, amplified dance music as they walk their trails. On trains? There is now a single “quiet car” when once they all were, because we were a civilized culture. Walk down a street and you’ll catch a cyclist with a speaker attached to the handlebars, broadcasting at incredible volume for 50 feet ahead and behind him, obliterating every stranger’s conversation in his path.
On a bus? Expect the person sitting right behind you with her mouth four inches from your ears to have a very loud phone conversation, with the speaker turned up, and the phone held in front of her like a waiter holding a platter. The things she’ll tell you! Go to a beach and have your neighbors play volleyball — but with a loud speaker playing Kylie Minogue remixes to generate “atmosphere”.
When did we decide we didn’t give a fuck about anyone else in public anymore?
It’s not as if there isn’t an obvious win-win solution for both those who want to listen to music and those who don’t. Let me explain something that seems completely unimaginable to the Bluetoothers: If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford AirPods, or a headset, or the like. Put them in your ears, and you will hear music of far, far higher quality than from a distant Bluetooth, and no one else will be forced to hear anything at all! What’s not to like? It follows, it seems to me, that those who continue to refuse to do so, who insist that they are still going to make you listen as well, just because fuck-you they can, are waging a meretricious assault on their fellow humans.
What could be the defense? The Guardian — who else? — had a go at it:
“the ghetto blaster reminds us that defiantly and ostentatiously broadcasting one’s music in public is part of a history of sonically contesting spaces and drawing the lines of community, especially through what gets coded as ‘noise’ … it represents a liberation of music from the private sphere in the west, as well as an egalitarian spreading of music in the developing world.”
The first point is not, it seems to me, exculpatory. It’s describing an act of territorial aggression through sound. The second point may have some truth to it — but it hardly explains the super-privileged NYC homos on the beach or the white twenty-something NGO employees in the park. But would I enjoy living in Santo Domingo where not an inch — so far as I could see and hear when I was there — was uncontaminated by overheard fluorescent lights and loud, bad club music? Nope.
Whenever I’ve asked the sonic sadists whether they actually understand that they are hurting others, they blink a few times, their mouths begin to form sentences, and then they look away. Or they’ll tell me to go fuck myself, or say I’m the only one who has complained, which is probably true because most people don’t want public confrontation, and have simply given up and moved on. Then there is often the implication that I’m the one being the asshole. On no occasion has anyone ever turned their music off after being asked to. Too damaging to their pride.
One reddit forum-member had this excuse: “It’s because earbuds hurt my ears and headphones don’t stay on.” Another got closer: “A lot of people that play their music out loud think that others won’t mind it.” Self-absorption. One other factor is simply showing off: at Herring Cove, rich douchefags bring their expensive boats a little off-shore so they can broadcast with their massive sound systems. It strengthens my support for the Second Amendment every summer.
What is there to be done? One woman on a bus tried howling like a dog to compete with the noise. Another option is to get your own boombox or Bluetooth and blast it even louder. Some places have penalties — up to 4,000 euros for beachgoers in Portugal! — for loud public music. A grassroots campaign in London fought to revoke the free bus passes of Bluetoothers but had to settle for mandatory signs: “Turn it off: Keep it down.” One national monument in California has also begun to put up signs banning amplified music: “If we don’t start thinking about this now, children of the future will never know what a natural quiet peaceful setting sounds like,” explained one park official. But who will ever enforce this? It’s all but impossible without a baseline level of public decency that fewer and fewer Americans seem to have.
Maybe we could sue on the grounds of hurting people with “ADHD, chronic fatigue, tinnitus, autism, anxiety and misophonia,” who are particularly vulnerable to the assholes. Or try pointing out the environmental impact: “Urban and industrial noise can also change the timing of birds’ songs, suppress the complexity of their calls, and prevent them from finding mates.” Protect the piping plovers from Dua Lipa!
Then there’s the more satisfying dark side. You can try to jam Bluetooth systems from close by; you can hijack them; you can even try and fashion an EMP Generator from a disposable camera and destroy the speakers entirely if you get close enough. There is also the simpler option of murdering every single one them, of course, as I’ve mentioned. But I have to say I’m not optimistic that even this will work.
I’m not against all music outdoors. Concerts, acoustic guitars, drum circles: go for it, at specific times and places. My local park has a drum circle every Sunday afternoon, and it’s communal, not amplified, and makes me super happy. But this kind of moderation — music without speakers, while respecting neighbors — seems beyond many.
The younger generation — the most fucked-up and miserable of our lifetimes — knows everything about white supremacy in bird watching, but they have no idea what basic manners are. When everyone is playing the main character — and in Gen Z, they all are — no one else matters. And when you have become used to performing in public in every area of online life, adding a soundtrack to every Insta-story, you see little wrong in one more act of self-regard in the actual physical presence of strangers: showing the world how cool your world is by forcing others to live in it.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a friendly debate with Richard Dawkins about God; listener feedback on our episodes with Abigail Shrier and Christian Wiman; lots of reader dissents over my latest piece on the transqueer movement; six notable quotes from the week in news; 20 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a plug for a new Netflix series that captures the Cultural Revolution; a spring-themed Mental Health Break with David Attenborough; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a newcomer:
I read an LA Times op-ed by Judith Butler a couple days ago, and my thought was, “This is weird, these people are nuts.” Then I read your piece destroying her premise, and thought, “I should subscribe to this.”
New On The Dishcast: Richard Dawkins
Richard is an evolutionary biologist, author, and public speaker. From 1995 to 2008 he was the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and he’s currently a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature. Among his many bestselling books are the The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and his two-part autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder and A Brief Candle in the Dark. He also has substack called The Poetry of Reality — check it out and subscribe!
A pioneering New Atheist, Dawkins is a passionate defender of science and denigrator of religion. Who better to talk to about God? Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on whether faith is necessary for meaning, and which religion is the worst. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s episode with Abigail Shrier on kids in therapy, as well as the ever-popular talk with Christian Wiman. Plus more reader debate over the transqueer movement, and I respond at length.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Next up: Daniel Finkelstein on his memoir Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, and Neil J. Young on his history of the gay right. After that: Johann Hari on weight-loss drugs, Adam Moss on the artistic process, and George Will on Trump and conservatism. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Dissents Of The Week
A reader is tired of all the trans stuff after reading my latest column:
If for no other reason than variety’s sake, can you take a couple of months off from the gender theory screeds (and, better yet, the whole topic of wokeness in general)? No one’s trying to muzzle you here, but let’s be honest: your latest column provided absolutely nothing new beyond what you’ve already said a million times before. It’s the same arguments, the same statistics, the same stock phrases (“transing,” “neo-Marxism,” etc.) every time. It’s just so predictable at this point. When I read the Andrea Long Chu piece a few days ago, I said to myself, “Welp! I know what this week’s Dish is going to cover.”
Challenge yourself, man! Those of use who faithfully read the Dish for so many years in its daily incarnation appreciated its breathtaking variety. I think you could do more to inject some more range into the weekly version beyond the familiar “wokeness bad/Biden old/Trump deranged” refrains.
There’s always more variety when you’re posting 30 times a day, as on the old Daily Dish. But I still got very similar emails back then telling me to stop going on about marriage equality, or torture, or the Iraq War, or Obama, or cannabis legalization. So, yes, I go on crusades occasionally, because I think they matter. But I take the point about variety, and if Butler and Chu hadn’t appeared simultaneously, I might have put it off for another week.
Here are the topics of the last few Dishes, by the way: Biden’s State of the Union, Google’s AI experiment, Navalny’s courage and humor, Coleman Hughes’ book on color-blindness, age-limits for public figures, and the revival of Trumpism. That’s not to mention the Dishcasts on therapy, Christian despair, a troubled childhood, Stoicism and the Founders, gambling, the prosecution of Trump, and the revival of Christianity, to take the last few months. We take the mix of the Dish seriously.
Read three more dissents here, along with my responses — ditto for the spill-over pod page, where I have much more space to respond. As always, send your dissents to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Trump going broke, Schumer’s speech on Israel, and the “commodification of queer culture.” Below is one example, followed by substacks we just caught wind of:
Katherine Dee gawks at Gen Z: “sexual orientation no longer has anything to do with who you actually have sex with.”
Paul Waldman left the WaPo to join Substack. James Carville and Al Hunt are also aboard. Compact, too, is on the platform. Vive la resistance!
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. An entry from last week serves up a new song:
I’ve scoured the landscape for the letter E on hillsides and just can’t find the right one. (Or could it possibly be an F??) Somewhere out west like Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon, etc.
Since I can’t settle on a location, I’m just going to suggest everyone listen to the Decemberists’ new song:
The band is from Oregon, so maybe that damn hillside is there. Another tidbit about this song is that James Mercer from The Shins is doing backing vocals, and the Shins are from New Mexico. That’s two states that could possibly be it! This is the best I can do this week.
See you next Friday.