I asked a black cylinder to play BBC Radio 4 and listened with reverent awe as it did. Then I recovered my poise and thought, so what? Yes, it was magical that an inert thing could (most of the time) figure out spoken requests and play them, but how was this a giant leap for mankind? How different was it from clicking a preset station on a digital radio? Not very; in fact the preset was more reliable. Actually, how different was this from tuning a shortwave station on an ancient valve radio? Okay, very different, but my point is that the transaction was basically the same: Man finds Voice in Ether.
I suppose you could argue that a smart speaker like Amazon's Echo or Google Home finds more voices than your standard issue radio can. Apart from the radio stations where you listen to stuff other people play, these two-way speakers that talk back can also stream songs from massive online music libraries on demand. So you can, if you want, stage an all-day requests programme where not only are you the only caller on the line, you're also the only listener. You can make voice requests without having to phone them in and a dead bot with a woman's voice plays them for you. This must be progress.
Or it would be if the dumb bot didn't play the worst cover versions of every other song you request. "Alexa?" you say interrogatively, "play Me and Bobby McGee", and it plays not Janis Joplin's version or even Kris Kristofferson's but some country and western cowboy who ruins the song for you forever. You're much more likely to find the version of a song that you want by using Spotify or Apple Music on your phone in the usual way.
Besides, talking to an inanimate thing that mightn't understand your accent is a performance. I end up being elocutionary for someone who doesn't care. Listening to a desi talk to Alexa is like eavesdropping on an Indian speaking to a white person on the phone. This is post-colonial humiliation of the worst kind. Sucking up to a white person is one thing; sucking up to a white person who doesn't, you know, exist is quite another.
Also, why should a personal digital assistant be a woman? Unless the target market for the device is men from Mad Men. I prefer Google's take on this. On Google Home you just ask Google to fetch and it does. There's a nice ungendered impersonality to it, with none of the weird intimacy of 'Alexa'. Google is an omniscient eye in the sky, a nerd's take on a biddable god; Alexa, on the other hand, could be a post-Soviet pole dancer.
To return to the radio comparison: isn't it extraordinary that it's only now, after generations of digital innovation, that we have an electronic 'cloud' that animates our devices? The sky metaphor (because that's what it is, given that the cloud consists of earthbound servers) was available for radio broadcasting for a hundred years before it turned up as a buzzword in the tech papers and as an icon on your phone. Think of 'Akashvani': a bit flowery but so much more evocative than All-India Radio. Though given how one-eyed its political coverage always was, 'Akashkani' might have been more accurate.
The older cloud that beamed talk and music into non-digital devices was as portable as this one - think transistor radios - and much more sociable. There was the sociability of millions of people listening to broadcast, free-to-air programming: collective listening for which the price of entry was the radio set, the content cost nothing. No connectivity costs, no subscriptions, just the price of replacement batteries. While broadcasters fought over bandwidth, for the listener, the radio was a kind of commons.
So everybody tuned into this cloud and listened to request programmes on Vividh Bharati or Radio Ceylon. City boys like me listened sceptically to radio announcers read postcard requests from places like Jhumri Telaiya. I knew there was no such place; it was a gobbledygook name invented by radio presenters to stand in for the great Indian hinterland. So when I met Rajinder in college and he let slip he had grown up in this mythical place that I'd assumed only existed on the air waves, I realized that Vividh Bharati had been a proper national communion. It had joined his home in Bihar (now Jharkhand) to mine in Delhi, only I had been too thick and too insular to see it.
But apart from the sociability of the airwaves, there was a sense of real world community as radio commercials, snatches of songs, the static and gabble of cricket commentary, merged to create a soundtrack for our outdoor lives. And because you couldn't dial up what you wanted, you had to listen in to the preferences of others, even people who wanted to hear Mahendra Kapoor sing.
Television was different. The act of looking, of staring at a backlit window that opened into an adjacent universe, was fundamentally asocial. It cut you off from people around you; it was the pioneer of the self-absorption that cellphones have perfected. But historically, the thing that paved the way to narrow-casting, to bespoke, mobile listening wasn't a digital device, it was Sony's Walkman. It was the fatal combination of a portable cassette player and cheap headphones that helped the world accept that listening to stuff was a private, legitimately unsociable business. And hard as it is to imagine in a world where the mobile phone has made private communion the new normal, people felt vaguely affronted by the head-phoned young. It was as if they had chosen to secede from a shared aural republic.
Philip Pullman's 'Lyra' novels are set in a contemporary Oxford in a parallel universe. Its humans are different; their souls are daemons embodied as animals. Its technology is different too. There's less of it to start with and what there is, is archaically named. "Anbaric" devices stand in for electrical ones and people carry naphtha lamps instead of torches. It's a bit like what our world might have been if digital had never happened, if our road to modernity had run down an analogue highway.
There's something involuntarily epic about my generation having spent half its time on earth in an analogue present and the rest of it in what would have seemed a science-fictional future if we hadn't lived both in a single lifetime. Unlike millennials, our baby-boomer lives contain epochs. So perhaps it's unsurprising that we speak to cylinders; we are the Jetsons that we marvelled at as children - these are our flying saucers.
