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Rockbox is free software that's designed to replace the firmware running
on mp3 players. For about a year or so I thought it would be a cool idea
to install rockbox on one of my old mp3 players, but all the mp3 players
I still had were missing their USB cables--which meant I couldn't charge
them, nor could I upload anything onto them.
Recently I was digging through old electronics and found another mp3 player,
a sansa clip+ from around 2009, which still had its USB cable attached. I
was able to charge it and get it working after it had sat unused for several
years, although its (proprietary) firmware had become kind of buggy. I spent
the later part of the night getting rockbox installed on it, and amazingly,
rockbox worked and didn't have the bugs that the original firmware had developed.
I plan to use that old mp3 player instead of my phone whenever I'm not in
front of my laptop and want to listen to something; it's superior to a
smartphone so in many ways. For one, it's incredibly small, and hence
portable, and it also runs free software.
So many people in my country have been using smartphones for music for
the past several years that it's a little anachronistic to use an mp3
player. Most people I know just use something like spotify or youtube
to stream music, because for them, the convenience of having access to
so much music outweighs the downsides, such as the fact that they don't
own the music, they have to pay a subscription fee, their data is being
harvested, and they can't listen to music without an internet connection
(although spotify lets you download songs to play offline, but that must
be done before you go somewhere without internet--and you never know when
an internet or cell connection will be unavailable). Some people I know don't
even know the difference between streaming music and having a music file saved
locally on a device.
When I installed rockbox I realized that, when the means are available,
it's possible to radically alter the aesthetics of the world that one lives in.
For example, when software is free (as in freedom), it's pretty easy to customize
how that technology looks and functions, and you can use that technology to its
full potential--unhindered by things like copyright and DRM. Popular retrofuturist
aesthetics like cyberpunk aren't actually a fantasty. It's possible to escape
the world of material design and ugly macbooks, and create a world where you can
run a text editor on an mp3 player and use a thinkpad from 2008, where you can
escape google and microsoft and apple and carve out an existence in the alternate
universe where none of those companies ever existed.