The Year Was 1979
And silence became portable
1979 was the year of the Sony Walkman, so true to form, this week's essay will be presented as a classic cassette tape format — a mini-album, total running Time: 25:32 minutes — tracking how personal technology taught us the power of pressing pause on the world.
Side A: The Personal Revolution
Track 1. Five Hours to Freedom (5:00)
The Stanford Cart1 crosses a chair-filled room at glacial speed. Five hours to travel a few meters. Like AI research itself in 1979, progress is glacial, expectations deflated. But while artificial intelligence stumbles, personal computing finds its stride.
Track 2. WordStar (3:45)
June: WordStar arrives in beige boxes, $495 worth of possibility. Before this, changing a sentence meant retyping a page. Moving a paragraph meant scissors and glue. Now text flows like mercury under the cursor's touch, each document a private performance. The clip-clack of typing pools yields to the quiet hum of personal screens. The personal computer, still searching for its purpose, finds one of its first killer apps.
Track 3. Press Play (4:33)
On Akio Morita’s desk at Sony, a prototype the size of a paperback book waits. The Walkman sits on Morita's desk, a belt holster for clipping and a lingering testament to domestic discord: two headphone jacks and a "hot line" button that, if pressed, pauses the music and activates a microphone for conversation — because Morita's wife couldn't tolerate his prototype-induced silence at home. Unsure of his creation's appeal, Morita orders a cautious production run of 30,000 units. The Walkman debuts to near silence in Japan. But the world is about to discover that silence, when portable, is precisely what it craves.
Track 4. Hot Line (4:17)
Sony's marketing envisions teenagers sharing headphones, using the "hot line" button to connect. Reality proves different. In test groups, teens remove the button's wiring. What the engineers built as a bridge, users instinctively converted into a wall. They don't want connection; they want escape. Future sociologists will call it “engaged disengagement,” a “technological shield” creating a “new form of human experience.”2
Track 5. Between Your Ears (4:44)
The innovation isn't in the technology - cassette players existed, headphones existed. The revolution is in the combination, in what happens when you give people a bubble of personal space in public, the ability to create absence in the midst of presence. The sensation is entirely new — music living inside your skull, every note a private earthquake. Word spreads through Tokyo's streets like a whispered song: there's a machine that lets you carry a soundtrack with you. No concert hall could match this intimacy. No speaker could achieve this possession. The Walkman isn't just playing music; it’s rewiring the human experience of sound.
Side B: The Isolation Equation
Track 1. System Error (2:17)
As personal devices promise control over private soundscapes, Three Mile Island's nuclear accident demonstrates how easily control can slip away. Hundreds of warning lights flash in the control room, too many to process. Automated systems, designed to prevent human error, instead create a cascade of confusion. A valve sticks open, but a faulty indicator shows it closed. The machines meant to simplify have only complicated.
Track 2. Revolution #79 (3:33)
In Tehran, the Shah's dream of a technologically advanced Iran collides with a revolution running on cassette tapes. While Sony engineers perfect personal stereos in Tokyo, Iranian clerics record sermons on cheap recorders, passing them hand to hand through bazaars. The same technology that isolates Japanese teenagers unites Iranian protesters.
Ayatollah Khomeini's voice, duplicated thousands of times on magnetic tape, spreads through the country like an analog outbreak.3 The Shah's modernization program - his nuclear ambitions, his computerized military, his Western-style universities - faces a population awakened by this simpler technology used for collective rather than personal purposes. As some nations race toward digital futures, Iran charts a different course. Technology itself isn't rejected - just its Western packaging. The cassette tape proves that the same tool that can wall us off from each other can also bring us together, depending on who's pressing play.
Track 3. Climate Control (1:45)
In Geneva, the first World Climate Conference convenes. For the first time, mainframes crunch global weather data, translating countless measurements into prophecy. Computer models predict a warming Earth, but few listen.4 The same year we begin sealing ourselves in personal soundscapes, we start viewing our world through digital abstractions.
Track 4. Static (1:11)
CompuServe launches MicroNET, inviting home computers to talk across telephone lines. The future of human connection arrives with a screech - the sound of modems handshaking at 300 baud. While Walkman users navigate cities in their private soundscapes, early network users build invisible communities in digital space. Both are forms of escape, but in opposite directions: one into perfect solitude, the other into a new kind of togetherness mediated by machines.
Track 5. Silence (4:44)
At the decade's end, the future arrives through headphones. As ambitious AI projects gather dust in university labs, simpler technologies reshape human behavior. The Stanford Cart, after its five-hohur journey, rests in a corner of the lab. WordStar users tap away in their electronic solitude. Climate models run their dire calculations. But it's the Walkman that truly previews what's coming: a world where technology doesn't just isolate us from each other, but gives us control over that isolation.
The question nobody's thought to ask yet: what happens when everyone gets really good at tuning each other out? The answer is already playing, encoded in magnetic tape, spooled between two plastic reels, hammering between our ears.
Two Three From Today
First, to dive deeper into the impact of the cassette tape, I highly recommend Radiolab’s special series called: Mixtape. “Before there was the podcast and the smartphone, there was the cassette tape and the Walkman — two devices that although not considered much today, were revolutionary. . . These cassette tapes brought us together, pulled us apart and forever changed how we say those three simple words, ‘I love you.’ In five episodes from around the world, Mixtape explores the impact the cassette had and continues to have today.”
Writing in the Age of AI: Khanmigo Writing Coach on 60 Minutes, Sarah Robertson, Khan Academy’s principal product manager for Literacy and Classroom Experience, shares perspective on Anderson Cooper’s 60 Minute segment, where she demonstrated their writing coach, Khanmigo: “Learning to write still matters, but how we teach writing needs to change.”
Even in a world where AI can produce written output, the act of writing remains a distinctly human practice, with real human value.
As Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” The process of writing has always been just as valuable—if not more—as the product.”
How Claude Became Tech Insiders Chatbot of Choice “. . .Anthropic has been working on giving Claude more personality. Newer versions have gone through a process known as “character training” — a step that takes place after the model has gone through its initial training, but before it is released to the public. During character training, Claude is prompted to produce responses that align with desirable human traits such as open-mindedness, thoughtfulness and curiosity. Claude then judges its own responses according to how well they adhere to those characteristics. The resulting data is fed back into the A.I. model. With enough training, Anthropic says, Claude learns to “internalize” these principles, and displays them more frequently when interacting with users.”