Back in 2019, the Smithsonian did a retrospective in honor of the 40^th birthday of the Walkman. While an impressive innovation, the Walkman is a single function device: it only plays cassette tapes. Yet it triggered cries of technological doom that are being echoed today.

While unable to record, the Walkman was used to play mixtapes, and the music industry saw this as a threat. While many awful mixtapes were mixed, the industry somehow survived. With each new technological innovation, the cry of doom echoed across the world again and again. And yet the day the music died has not arrived. As such, we should heed the lesson of the Walkman: dire predictions of doom should be made more cautiously. That said, technology can be a terrible swift sword and the challenge is to sort out what it is likely to slay and what it will spare

The Walkman was also symbolically to insult the youth.  Der Spiegel called it “A technology for a generation with nothing left to say.” But the Walkman generation had a lot to say, and the prophecy of silence did not come true. With the invention of the smart phone and tablet, this same story played out again. And it will happen again with the next innovation.

 Regardless of technology, the youth of today are always claimed to be the worst generation. They are also supposed to lack the virtues that their elders supposedly possessed in their youth. When I was a kid, we didn’t rot our brains wit smart phones. We did it with TV and the Walkman. But if every generation of youth were as terrible as claimed, the elders would also lack virtue since today’s elders are yesterday’s youth. Before claiming that the youth of today are terrible, think back on what your elders said of you.

The Walkman was supposed to “rot” the brains of the youth, just like TV only by using audio. Alan Bloom, the philosopher of doom and gloom, wrote in The Closing of the American Mind about  youth defiled by the walkman, “a pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms.” He predicted that “As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say.” Having grown up during the height of the Walkman era, I can assure readers that the Walkman did not have this effect. In addition to people listening to the classics on tapes, many people read the classic while listening to their Walkman, just as people did with their Victrola, Gramophone, or stereo. The Walkman of today is the smart phone, and the worry is that the youth will be swiping rather than throbbing. But the truth is that the youth do read the classics on screens (and on paper) and that the dire predictions will no more come true now than they have in the past. AI is also being presented as a brain rotting technology, although it is something accessed through existing technology, including phones.

Looking back at the Walkman, there is a law governing the emergence of new entertainment technology and the societal response. It is created, dire predictions are made, it becomes a symbol used when bemoaning how bad the youth are today, and then another generation is born, and new technology emerges. The process repeats itself. The Walkman users were judged to be the “throbbing youth”, now they are the judges. The smartphone kids are growing up to judge their kids, making dire predictions about whatever they think is rotting the brains of the youth.

It is worth considering that technology will be developed that will fulfil these prophecies of doom, that really does degrade, corrupt and isolate the youth. But until then, the cycle will continue.