Douglas Coupland's novel "Generation X - Tales for an Accelerated Culture" (1991) popularized the term Generation X,

THE OTHER I think the fundamental difference is that millennials blame problems on everybody (eg pollution, poverty, climate change, wars), whereas Gen X blame problems on "everybody else" (their own politicians, immigrants, foreign countries, international organizations, and if they are white they blame blacks and if they are men they blame women). Implicitly, Boomers too blamed "the other" but back then "the other" was simply the establishment because minorities and immigrants didn't pose a threat, and the world was smaller (Western Europe + North America + Asian tigers, which were basically US colonies). Gen Xers learned from Boomers to blame everybody else, but "the other" got much bigger after the end of the Cold War and the rise of globalization (China and Asia in general replaced Europe as the second most important economy, Europe became more than just Western Europe, the great migrations from Africa and Latin America created immigrant crises, minorities expanded rapidly, women's rights and homosexual rights also created a gender "other" for men). The "other" has expanded during the last 30 years to include much more than the political and economic establishment, and Gen Xers feel threatened from multiple fronts whereas Boomers only felt threatened by the government. Millennials are growing up with and inside "the other". For them it's normal to be surrounded by different ethnic groups and live in a world that is made of 200 nations. They have never lived in a world without globalization. Their life "is" global. In fact, "the other" is an attraction: they want to travel to wild exotic places, live abroad, mix with millennials from different cultures. For them the government is not much of an issue because the big issues are global, like climate change, poverty, wars. Therefore for them government is not the cause of the problem but a possible solution: you just need to vote for those who want action, against those who want inaction. PARTIES Millennials lean Left because the Left tends to see problems as created by society as a whole and wants collective action to remedy them. Gen Xers lean Right because the Right tends to see problems as created by "the other". Boomers are torn between the two. Millennials didn't know the world before 1991. Gen Xers want to restore the pre-1991 order. Boomers remember the horrors of the Cold War era, not just the privileges. TECH Boomers grew up in a world of ideals, in which money was not important (if nothing else because there was plenty of money) and action was more important (pacifist marches, student protests, racial riots). The nuclear holocaust was a real possibility. The economy was an abstract concept, mostly for economists. Boomers mostly welcomed new technology that was a vehicle for liberation (the telephone that doesn't need the operator, the car with the alternator, the transistor radio, the record, television, the cassette, and even the early Internet). Gen Xers grew up during the Reagan-Thatcher years and the dotcom boom: greed is good, money (the economy) is the only thing that really matters. This is a generation that split when it comes to technology: a minority took advantage of new technology to become extremely rich, but the majority learned the downside of technology, which can create unemployment (and many other ills). Millennials are growing up feeling threatened by climate change and other global issues. They mostly downplay the ills of past technology and focus on how new technology can help solve problems. They are the first digital-savvy generation, meaning that just about all of them are fluent in digital technology. IDEALS Maybe the Gen X is the first generation that grew up without a transcended narrative. For 1700 years the West had an obvious transcended narrative: Christianity, which defined the ideals to live for. Then came the Enlightenment, which introduced new ideals like freedom, science, progress. Gen X grew up at a time when these Enlightenment ideals lost their power: freedom is illusory, science is incomprehensible, progress is debatable. The Millennials are trying to find meaning in a new set of ideals. AUDIENCE OF SINGLES In 1970 just 9 percent of people ages 25 to 50 had never married In 2018 it was 35 percent That was the typical audience for new music.

Emergence of multiple sub-sub-sub-genres each representing a "minority" of some kind or another. Far from causing uniform orthodoxy as Marxists intellectuals since Adorno predicted, consumer/popular culture did not erase identities it provided multiple platforms for expressing them, notably for the lower classes that previously didn't have a voice (eg blacks in the USA)

The generation of the 1940s grew up reading comic books. Comics books were a medium that was making fun of daily life. Rock, hip-hop, electronic music of the 1950s-80s were more about the tragedy of daily life. In the 1990s the videogame introduced the interaction with a machine as a major passtime. In the 2000s social media introduced the nonphysical interaction with other people (mediated by a machine) as the main passtime. A videogame is a medium that connects a person to a machine. A social platform is a medium that connects a person to another person via machines that are connected to each other: person to a machine to a machine to a person.

The Facebook generation (2008-12) and the millennials (the generation born after 1980) tech-savvy? not really. They are less tech-savvy than the baby boomers (many of whom grew up programming computers). Most millennials have no clue why "Silicon Valley" is named after silicon or why transistors are so important or what an operating system is. They are users. They are as "tech-savvy" as their grandparents were when buying a new kitchen appliance. What is true is that they use digital devices a lot more than previous generations, and that texting on smartphones is replacing email on desktops (which is not necessarily a sign of smarter use of technology given the size of a smartphone's keyboard and display).

selfie

Arab Spring (2011-12) and Occupy Wall Street (2011) Social media were used by young people around the world to start revolutions: the Arab Springs in Tunisia, Egypt, and so forth; the democratic uprising in Sudan in 2019; the anti-Chinese protests in Hong Kong in 2019;... but not in the leading Western countries. Young people in the West seemed incapable of using their powerful tools to organize protests against a regime that was increasingly anti-democratic and increasingly marginalized young people.

Great Recession 2008-2011

Global economic boom (until 2011)

Eurocrisis (2012)

nerd Bill Gates age of Silicon Valley myths: Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk

Trump 2017 fake news elected with Twitter and Facebook Rush Limbaugh Tucker Carlson evangelicals standard of acceptable behavior on the air went down and at the same time tolerance for violent behavior went up 2021 insurrection Jan 6 Gingrich, Tea Party and Trump found that chaos, instability, gridlock, and hyper-divisiveness ("legislative terrorism") gave them power. As Trump was engulfed in multiple endless scandals, including possible treason for stealing top-secret documents, tax fraud and assorted scams, a New York Times poll of 2022 showed that support for the Republican Party of Donald Trump came mainly from white males who didn't go to college between the age of 45 and 64 Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980), i.e. white illiterate males Gen Xers came of age under president Ronald Reagan, when the Cold War ended and through the AIDS epidemics. That generation produced grunge rock and gangsta rap It was an apolitical generation from the beginning. Ditto Brexit in Britain (Gen X voted to Leave) and Italy's elections in 2022 (young people voted for a party, Azione, that came a distant fourth in the overall vote count (Gen X voted mostly for the neofascists).

2019 wave of protests worldwide (but not in the USA!)

2016-2019 Britain absorbed by Brexit and US absorbed by Trump's many scandals

Atlantic article on the effects of the smartphone: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/ a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly. Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its members started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later. Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again-but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors-drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised- 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.

See also Taylor's book How the baby boomers changed: they were the hippies in the 1960s but now they are the conservatives. Either the hippies were never a significant percentage of society, or something happened as they aged.

Girls were increasingly educated and employed, although obvious differences remained in attitudes towards math, science, technology and... rock music. (I rarely get an email from a female about my music reviews or my science pages, and the vast majority of my friends and followers on social media are male).

Plummeting trust in state institutions, with Congress being rated lower than world dictators.

The similarities with the Sixties do not hold up because social media took the place that used to be of folk, blues and rock music. The political lyircs of protest songs were never particularly good: it is just that in the Sixties, when the media were controlled by the Establishment, music was the only channel to vent popular anger and get organized. Since the first Chuck Berry hit, rock music became the social media of the time. In the 2010s social media like Facebook and Twitter were far more effective at discussing social matters than the vastly dispersed music business. Rock and hip-hop musicians were more likely to engage in promoting "causes", especially universal ones, for which social media were still widely inadequate.

The skills generation(surfing, skating, acrobatic bikinh, videogames) was followed by the generation of no skills (skydiving)

TV no longer a social event but a solo event

The importance of the Like

We are transitioning from the age of broadcast (in which there was a tiny minority of creators and remixers (media that broadcast the creation) and a huge majority of spectators) to the age of self-expression, in which there will be a huge majority of creators asnd remixers.

In 2016 two votes shocked the Western world: Britain decided to leave the European Union in a bitterly contested referendum, and the USA elected Donald Trump, a vulgar right-wing tycoon, in a bitterly contested referendum. The similarities between the two countries (the countries that gave us rock music, hip hop, etc) were striking, and one in particular: the majority of young people voted to remain in the European Union, but the majority of old people voted to leave; the majority of young people voted for Hillary Clinton, but the majority of old people voted for Donald Trump. Young people under 30 voted for Hillary Clinton (55%), old people over 45 voted for Trump (53%). Young Britons voted to remain in the European Union by a huge margin (about 60%), old Britons over 45 voted to leave the European Union by a huge margin (57%). Trump won in the countryside by a huge margin (62%) whereas Clinton won in the cities by an equally huge margin (59%). The "Leave" party won in the British countryside, whereas the "Remain" party won in the cities. 53% of men voted for Trump, 54% of women voted for Clinton. Most men voted for "Leave", most women voted for "Remain". Trump won 58% of the white vote, Clinton won 88% of the black vote and 65% of the Latino vote. A majority of white Britons voted for "Leave", whereas the majority of British minorities voted for "Remain". These old people were the kids of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s: the hippies and the punks. If in the 1960s a sociologist wondered what would become of these "peace and love" hippies, or in the 1970s a sociologist wondered what would become of these rebellious punks, in 2016 came the answer: supporters of right-wing fascist racist sexist nationalists.

Death of the record store, rise of Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes

mp3 compression removes nuances, makes them irrelevant... musicians abandon the full spectrum of sound for an impoverished audio experience... musicians start composing for a shorter spectrum

Jenny Toomey, a musician who founded the indie label Simple Machines and then the Future of Music Coalition before being hired by the Ford Foundation, wrote that in the 1990s a band could sell 10,000 copies of an album and make about $50,000 while in 2024 to earn the same amount a musician�s whole album would need to reach a million streams, a feat possible only to a few stars.

Apocalypse: climate change, AI

surfing, hiking, climbing, are antisocial no spectators solpisistic addictive like drugs no arena/stadium life threatetning like drugs heroic/legendary status acquire individually, word of mouth not winning competition but courage and skills barbarians illiterate ignorant ordinary lives otherwise

In 2016, about 60,000 people died of a drug overdose in the USA alone (more victims than during the AIDS epidemics at its peak and five times more that the victims of the ebola outbreak in West Africa of 2014-15). In 2017 drug overdoses became officially the leading cause of death for people under the age of 50.

2021: Drug overdoses kills more than 100,000 people in one year, mainly because of fentanyl, a substance 30 times more potent than heroin which is imported from Mexico where it is made from chemicals imported from China

In the 1950s the main concern about youth in the USA was �juvenile delinquency�, which was viewed as a national epidemic. In the 1960s and 1970s the main concern about youth was the revolt against traditional values. In the 1980s and 1990s the gravest concerns about teenagers were drugs, smoking, AIDS, teenage pregnancy and driving while under the influence of either drugs or alcohol. By the late 2010s, all of these dangerous habits had been sharply reduced. Neither drugs nor smoking were cool anymore (although consumption of marijuana increased after its legalization). In 2019 only 4% of high school seniors reported smoking a cigarette in the last 30 days, down from 26.5% in 1997. Alcohol use by high schoolers was an all-time low. Driving under the influence was definitely uncool. And sex among teenagers had declined significantly: in 2021 only 38% of high-schoolers reported having had sex at least once down from almost 50% in 1990, and teen pregnancy had become a rarity. But the 2020s opened with a new concern for the health of teenagers: mental health. The rates of all mental health disorders were soaring, including suicide. The causes were hard to pinpoint: teens were getting less sleep and exercising less, and spending more time on social media and videogames. Sociologists and psychologists pointed at loneliness as a key factor. When teens were spending most of their time hanging out in groups, they were vulnerable to peer pressure, and therefore to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, etc. But removing the group experience was creating loneliness, the kind of loneliness that previously had mainly affected adults.

data

privacy

surveillance

algorithms

In May 2022 the art critic Christian Lorentzen published an essay in which he wrote: �Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring,� ays the blame for artistic stasis on the primacy of marketing. The risk aversion of cultural conglomerates

Tyler wrote

"A teenager has less chance of being raised by both biological parents in the USA than anywhere else in the world". The "land of opportunity" is also rapidly dissolving: a child born in a poor family in the USA is less likely to get rich than pretty much anywhere in the Western world (where better education is subsidized by the state). But, like anywhere else in the Western world, young people postponed marriage: only 51% of US adults over 18 were married in 2011. Almost 30% of US households contained only one person. The longer umarried life meant that more years were spent "dating" and living with housemates as opposed to raising children in a family home. It also meant that the average person, and notably the average woman, had many more sexual partners than the previous generations. (A female friend jokes that there should be the equivalent of "frequent flyer miles" for people who have had as many sexual partners as her: her mother married her first boyfriend and is still married to him). It might be totally unrelated, but tattoos spread like wildfire among the Generation X and the Millennials (almost 50% of people

White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) are no longer dominant. In fact, the ethnic revolution was already visible for those who wanted to see it: a black man (Barack Obama) and a Catholic (Joe Biden) faced a Mormon (Mitt Romney) and another Catholic (Paul Ryan) in the 2012 elections. For the first time there was no WASP on either ticket. Both the old and new speakers of the House of Representatives are Catholics: Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner. The majority leader of the Senate was a Mormon (Harry Reid) until 2014 (when he was replaced by a WASP, Mitch McConnell). Since 2010 none of the nine judges of the Supreme Court has been a WASP: they are six Catholics (Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor) and three Jews (Stephen Breyer, Ruth Ginsburg, Elena Kagan).

According to a 2015 study by Robert Miner, TV is no longer the first choice for kids' entertainment with 57% of parents reporting that their child prefers mobile devices to TV when it comes to video viewing. Additionally, 58% of kids in households with tablets have their own device, the study also discovered, and half the kids, when disciplined, will have their tablet taken away and are left "only" with TV. That has created a generation of kids for whom "TV is punishment," the firm noted. Additionally, when given the choice between dessert or more time on their tablet, 41% of parents say their child would choose the tablet over dessert Adults too increasingly watch videos on mobile devices because of smartphone growth, larger screen sizes, increased access to broadband and 4G services, better content selections, However, the revenues of the music industry between 1999 and 2009 declined dramatically (from $14,6 billion to $6,3 billion) and the revenues of newspapers between 2006 and 2012 declined even more dramatically (from $49.3 billion to $22.3 billion) whereas television's revenues skyrocketed from $36 billion in 2000 to $93 billion in 2010.

Since the 1950s popular music had been hijacked by the young generation keen on rebelling against the establishment. But this waned in the 2000s and almost disappeared in the 2010s. The millennials were more absorbed in mundane entertainment. The entertainment industry had created a huge commercial system to monopolize the spare time of young people, from videogames to gyms, from social media (increasingly used for fun and not for agit-propaganda) to harmless music festivals. Furthermore, the millennials had more faith in the authorities and the corporations than any generation since the 1940s. This was largely due to an educational system that "tamed" them at an early age and directed them towards professional careers. The overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet was in itself a drug. And access to information created more doubts than certainties about what to do. An obsession with safety on campus greatly increased policing and reduced tolerance for protests of any kind. Last but not least, skyrocketing real-estate prices meant that fewer and fewer buildings were affordable. The great periods of youth creativity had often coincided with cheap or free buildings where young people could stage alternative events. Such free venues had become impossible to find in places like the San Francisco Bay Area and Manhattan.

The music industry was returning to the "hit factories" that had been dethroned in the 1950s by rock music. Before the advent of rock music, most pop hits had been produced by teams of professional singer-songwriters (many headquartered at New York's Tin Pan Alley). After the rock revolution the performer had become the main songwriter and often even the producer of her/his own music.

The shift from the LP/CD to the Internet download shifted the focus from the album to the individual song, and from the conceptual mindset to the short attention span typical of those who can download thousands of songs. But this was not all that different from the car radio, that was still for most people the primary access to popular music. The iPod listener was able to flip through a multitude a songs just like the car driver could flip through the channels of the radio, and listen to only the few first seconds of each song. The big difference was in the production quality. The advent of computerized production tools made the producer an ever more important shaper of the final product. Often a song would start with the beat and some surreal arrangement. Famous singers would be hired after the song had already been designed by the producers. This marked an almost complete u-turn, a return to the pre-rock era. Singers who demanded creative freedom could be dumped overnight and find out the hard way how important the producer had been to make them stars.

50,000 suicides registered in the US

By the end of 2021 TikTok's biggest star Charli D'Amelio, who had begun posting to TikTok in 2019, was the most popular creator on TikTok with 132 million followers. Donald Trump was, first and foremost, the president of "post-truth": he lied nonstop but his lies were presented as an "alternative reality". In many ways Trump subscribed to Hitler's view that "The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed". Between 2016 and 2020 the US democracy was under attack by one of the USA's most fascist politicians, Donald Trump, a failed tycoon whose election had been engineered by Russian secret services. When he lost the elections in November 2020 by 8 million votes, Trump set in motion a plan to remain in power by pressuring officers in multiple states not to certify the votes received by his opponent Joe Biden. In the past, "sore losers" were deeply unpopular with the US public. It was telling that, instead, in 2020-21 millions of US citizens believed the sorest loser of all time, Donald Trump. Social media like Facebook and Twitter had been used by all sorts of conspiracy theorists. The covid pandemic destroyed (physical) social life in 2020 and 2021. There was a growing fear that the Republican Party would abolish democracy in the USA and remain in power indefinitely thanks to the undemocratic technicalities of the constitution. Equally bizarre, but less threatening, was the conspiracy theory "Birds Aren't Real" launched in 2017 by a college dropout in Memphis, Peter McIndoe, that spread like wildfire among the "generation Z". It claimed that birds were really government drones spying on citizens. It was fundamentally a dadaist movement because its adherents knew well that birds did exist, and deliberately parodied the conspiracy theories spreading on social media, as well as the "post-truth" climate created by Trump's congenital lying and by the avalanche of misinformation on the Internet. McIndoe and his friend Connor Gaydos even wrote a false biography of the movement, replete with all sorts of false documents. A video of a hired actor pretending to be a former secret agent of the CIA in charge of bird drones was shared by 20 million people by 2021. Just like social critics like Dada and Zappa fought madness with more madness, "Birds Aren't Real" fought post-truth with more post-truth. Trump (and demagogic accolytes like Ted Cruze and Marco Rubio) was the culmination of the Reagan age. The USA had gone through a number of stages: the Jeffersonian period (1800-1828), the Jacksonian "democracy" (1828-60), the Republican period framed by the Civil War and the Great Depression (1860-1932), the "New Deal" order that basically extended until Reagan (1932-80), and finally the Reaganomic period in which Ronald Reagan privileged the white middle class and the wealthy corporations with "trickle-down" economics and deregulation creating a huge wealth gap which, ironically, mostly affected the noncollege white middle class.

From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention�s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who�d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven�t. (And no, they aren�t having oral sex instead�that rate hasn�t changed much.) Meanwhile, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate has plummeted to a third of its modern high. When this decline started, in the 1990s, it was widely and rightly embraced. But now some observers are beginning to wonder whether an unambiguously good thing might have roots in less salubrious developments. Signs are gathering that the delay in teen sex may have been the first indication of a broader withdrawal from physical intimacy that extends well into adulthood. Over the past few years, Jean M. Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, has published research exploring how and why Americans� sex lives may be ebbing. In a series of journal articles and in her latest book, iGen, she notes that today�s young adults are on track to have fewer sex partners than members of the two preceding generations. People now in their early 20s are two and a half times as likely to be abstinent as Gen Xers were at that age; 15 percent report having had no sex since they reached adulthood. rom 1992 to 2014, the share of American men who reported masturbating in a given week doubled, to 54 percent, and the share of women more than tripled, to 26 percent. That's quite a change from the (supposedly prudish) 1950s: 1957 has the highest rate of teen births recorded in the history of the USA. .�These shifts coincide with another major change: parents� increased anxiety about their children�s educational and economic prospects. Among the affluent and educated, especially, this anxiety has led to big changes in what�s expected of teens. �It�s hard to work in sex when the baseball team practices at 6:30, school starts at 8:15, drama club meets at 4:15, the soup kitchen starts serving at 6, and, oh yeah, your screenplay needs completion A decline in unsupervised free time probably contributes a lot. online dating contributes with too much choice that results in serial dating but no commitment online dating removes the stress inherent in a date but they don't learn how to meet people in real life I use dating apps because I want it to be clear that this is a date and we are sexually interested in one another. If it doesn�t work out, fine, but there�s never a Is he asking me to hang as a friend or as a date? feeling.� Not only in thw USA. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, 43 percent of people in this age group were Japan is among the world�s top producers and consumers of porn

The decade ended with worldwide protests against human-made climate change, largely inspired by Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old who in August 2018 organized a protest outside the Swedish Parliament. In September 2019 four million people worldwide joined her to demand climate action.

Rap: the changing meaning of a mixtape. Originally a mixtape was a self-funded and self-released product (either a cassette or a CD-ROM) by a musician made available to the public directly without the distribution service of a record label. Once the Internet became an alternative to traditional distribution methods (the record store and the mail-order), musicians started deploying their mixtapes online for free download. This had the great advantage that the fans could also comment on social media and link to the music. It helped the mixtape go "viral". The mixtape was often an illegal object: it appropriated beats stolen from other musicians without their consent. This was done not so much to "steal" but to save on costs: for a rapper the cost of making a mixtape is not the rapping (obviously), it's the beat. Stealing the beat meant that the cost was almost zero. Since the mixtape was a widespread practice in the world of hip-hop, and since the "thief" was not making money from the mixtape, nobody even thought of enforcing the copyright laws. But more and more rappers became famous thanks to their mixtapes, not their legitimate singles and albums. Around 2006 things began to change and mixtapes became legitimate goods to sell in record stores or online. In January 2007 the police raided DJ Drama's headquarters, a famous studio for assembling mixtapes, and arrested him: those mixtapes were technically all "criminal" in that they didn't comply with copyright laws. After that episode, the mixtape became a business product, and a standard practice to launch a career online.

During the Victorian age, two towering intellectuals, Matthew Arnold and Thomas Henry Huxley, debated the role of the humanities in the age of science. Huxley argued that science will kill literature. Arnold replied "no way". More than a century later, the ebullient world of rock and rap proves that Arnold was right: far from killing culture, science and technology have created new powerful tools for the multiplication of cultural forms. Rock and rap appropriate whichever new technology becomes available and use it to create dialogues of one kind or another between performers and audience.

The producers had always been important for the history of music. In the 1990s the mastering engineer became as important because the new digital equipment allowed me to alter significantly the sound of a recording. The carefully architected sound of the band, as produced by the producer, could be completely distorted by the mastering engineer in a few minutes. That began a competition among mastering engineers to create the most vibrant (i.e. loud) sound. They created a new vogue for a narrow dynamic range. The extraordinary dynamic range of Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd albums (or even of Michael Jackson's "Thriller") was a thing of the past. Quote from NYTIMES: "Recording engineers and producers often discovered their carefully rendered recordings were being squashed in the mastering stage. Over time, with listeners increasingly consuming music through earbuds and cheap computer speakers, engineers and producers found themselves working in a denuded sonic landscape, many of them longing for the rich and diverse audio ecosystems of old." In the 2010s people listened to music via streaming services like Spotify and these streaming services routinely "normalized" the music's output, so that the listener didn't have to continously adjusting the volume setting while jogging or eating breakfast.