The Partial Observer

No can dispute that the 2024 Presidential campaign – already underway for a year – is unusual, if not unique. For one, we have a former President running as challenger for the first time since Teddy Roosevelt’s third-party run of 1912. For another, that challenger is unique, both by virtue of his past actions as President (inciting an insurrection; watching a million citizens die from a pandemic) and his actions beyond and subsequent to holding that office (recent civil rape judgement; mishandling highly classified documents and refusing legally binding requests to return same; regular provocation of stochastic terror; continuing legal judgements and press revelations of financial shenanigans).

Considering in particular the odd “who knows where we go from here?” media coverage of Trump’s always-inevitable romp through the Republican primaries, political horse-race focus on the narrow or negative margin for Biden in national polls, and widespread Democratic angst about same, I wanted to note that we are not running the last campaign; 2024 is not and cannot be 2016.

That year, let us recall, saw the H. Clinton campaign more or less chortling with glee at the prospect of running against Trump. This turned out to be a bad misjudgement of the risks, in both magnitude and geography – see, e.g., Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. Establishment Republicans, meanwhile, showed deep concern at first, were dragged around only reluctantly to supporting Trump, and ended up shocked and pleased at their good fortune, and happily (early 2017) making plans for gargantuan new tax cuts and the final suborning of the judiciary.

This year, by contrast, sees even never-Trump Republicans reconciling themselves to Trump as standard bearer once more, while Democrats fret at the near-invulnerability of Trump polling in the face of all of the above-mentioned issues. In this sense, everyone is treating 2024 as if it’s 2016.

But it’s not. In fact, I wonder if the Trump that Democrats are facing in 2024 isn’t in fact the Trump that Clinton (and many Dems) thought they were facing in 2016: So demonstrably unsuited to the office that his winning a majority of votes – or electors – is effectively impossible, making the election a cake-walk.

Granted, as evidence I can point only to the barely-50% of die-hard Republican primary voters who have voted in his support in Iowa and New Hampshire. And the national polls have not been going anywhere. But as the polls and focus groups continue to emphasize, until now, almost none of the independents in these polls has believed that Trump was going to be the Republicans’ Presidential nominee. And once they realize he is – if I am right – that will all start to change.

The one-on-one campaign itself – every day of it – also promises to be very different. Trump’s election-rally-as-narcissistic-ego-boost shtick has worn thin, he regularly hallucinates himself into bizarre alternate realities, and he will continue to show up regularly in courtrooms where it only takes a single thwack of the judge’s gavel to slap him down (not very dominant).

I would not say optimism, much less insouciance, is warranted. But I do know it’s going to be different.

Apparently, there is a deficit of Gen-X programmers (or App supervisors? or executives?) working on music streaming Apps, because whoever the key decision makers are don’t get how these Apps are supposed to work. As a consequence, your music streaming App is broken.

Somehow said decision makers (every one of them) missed Peak Filesharing, that halcyon moment in time when all Gen-Xers accidentally accumulated libraries of hundreds to thousands of songs (I mean, this just happened one day – please don’t ask for details) and were forced, by dint of hard lived experience, to learn everything there is to know about managing large music libraries and their associated playlists.

In any case, we would offer this hard-won knowledge to the world, if they would have it. We’re nearly all streaming now, and we could all use it. So here goes:

1. Playlist Memory

• Every playlist needs to remember its status, persistently, so that when I go back to that playlist after a hiatus / podcast listen / YouTube interlude, the music picks up where I left off. This the only appropriate default behavior for play this playlist.
• To reiterate: What is needed here is per-playlist memory. I don’t care if it’s been two years since I was last listening to the playlist, if I play this playlist today I want, as default, to begin where I left off two years ago.
• This means remembering the existing shuffle order if the playlist was shuffled, and continuing playback from where it left off. Don’t reshuffle the playlist, and don’t play the (ordered or shuffled) playlist from the beginning. Play it from where I left off.
• Specifically: On the request to play this playlist, begin with the last song played, if the song was only played in part, or begin with the next song in the playlist if the previous song was played to within 10 seconds of completion.
• Anyone who wishes to play this playlist from the beginning can click on the first song. Anyone who wishes to play this playlist from this particular song can click on that particular song.

2. App Memory and App Startup

• The App should always pick up where I left off, by playlist and song (or radio/streaming station, or podcast, etc). I don’t care if I have installed a new OS and rebooted my phone / computer since the App was last running. Cache my status on the home servers if you have to, but please, remember where I was. (I’m looking at you Apple Music!)
• Cache at least one or two songs ahead in the playlist so that music always starts right away.  News flash for Apple Music: I often start streaming music as I’m pulling out of my garage when the WiFi is weak and fading fast and the cellular connection is poor. This should not prevent me from listening to music!

3. Song and Playlist Notes

• Playlists need per-playlist and per-song notes and comments. (Playlist notes are now offered on Apple Music.) This is useful for shared playlists, to explain (when necessary) why each particular song was selected, to show off our arcane knowledge, and to point out clever relationships between songs; and for private playlists, to keep a record of why each song was considered important or relevant, if alternative songs were considered and not included, or thoguhts on what songs might be included in the future.

4. Playlist Sorting and Playlist Tags

• We need more options for sorting and tagging playlists. Having “Alphabetical by name” as the only reliable full-library sort option is tiresome, and completely unworkable for large libraries – which now means all of us.
• Consider: Style, Mood, Era (average year of release, earliest year of release), Creation Date, Creation Location, Last Edited Date, Last Played Date, Last Played by Location. That’s just a few suggestions to get your dev teams going.

5. Radio-Safe and Explicit Modes

• It should be possible to play through any Playlist using either radio-safe or explicit versions of all the songs on the Playlist. Make it a toggle! This is important for those of us with children, parents, or (Gen-X again!) both.
• What would be even better would be to have the radio-safe mode switch automatically depending on whether the App is streaming to headphones / pods (Explicit) or to a speaker (Radio-Safe).

Everyone on board with these? Fantastic – can’t wait to start streaming all this glorious music properly.

-po