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My right earlobe started hurting a few years ago. A hard knot showed up under my ear piercing, the size and shape of a friendship-bracelet bead. When I noticed it, I took out my earrings, stared, squeezed. Nothing. The next day, the earlobe stuck out at an odd angle, pink and bruised like the recipient of the world’s most depressing hickey. The damage was gone within a few days, but the lump stayed.
After a week, I became concerned enough to Google (always dangerous). When my search for “can ears get cancer” came up short, I went with something more targeted. My search history shows that I typed in “hard earlobe.problen? reddit” at 9:44 p.m. That led to a thread, which led to an article, which led to a (gross) answer — a benign cyst, caused by some blockage in a pore or hair follicle. The culprit was obvious: my AirPods.
Looking closer, I realized that the cyst was right at the point where the stem of the earbuds (Pros, obviously — I’m not an animal) jostled against my skin. The irritation, and resulting blockage, made sense. In fact, it was kind of a shock that it hadn’t shown up earlier.
This was the early months of 2022, two years and three apartments into my post-college, work-from-home reality. I’d been a headphone user in high school and college, relying on moody playlists just like the next borderline-depressed brunette. But my first purchase of AirPods in the summer of 2020 (paired with, you know, everything else that year) super-charged my audio consumption. They cut through the mind-numbing boredom of early quarantine. When every day looked, tasted and felt the same, the least I could do was make them sound a little bit different, right? Perhaps more importantly, the AirPods gave every moment a feeling of slight, ambient productivity. I’ve always had a misguided sense of pride in the sheer amount of information I can take in and remember, and seamless access to audiobooks and podcasts only fed that impulse. Never mind that I wasn’t doing anything else with that trivia, but it was a weird time and I was 22, so I get a pass.
The point is, it was the perfect storm to create an unshakeable habit. The earbuds became an ever-present, cyst-creating companion. I kept them next to my bed and popped them in the moment I woke up. I wore them to the gym, I wore them at work, I wore them in the car (only one, though! safety!), I let boring audiobooks play at 0.5x speed to lull me to sleep. It was too much, and the fact that it affected my body — even in the most minor, pore-clogging way — freaked me out.
The cyst went away on its own. My dependence did not. Neither did my essential discomfort around headphone use. In the years since, I’ve tried — really tried! — to moderate it. I’ve read scary statistics about what these hours of concentrated sound waves are doing to my eardrums. I’ve been disgusted by my Spotify Wrapped statistics. I’ve made my way through entire audiobooks and not remembered a thing. I’ve felt my hand twitch to my ear when someone says my name, instinctively pausing the audio even when nothing is playing. As someone who is constantly craving human connection, I know that my little white “don’t talk to me” signs aren’t doing me any favors. Still, I can’t seem to quit them.
Perhaps, then, it’s more useful to examine why I’ve become so reliant on these devices and the unique form of half-isolation they enable. Headphones an unquestioned part of modern life, but I wondered where they came from initially. Most sources cite the late-19th century Theatrophone as the earliest iteration. It was a listening device that allowed hoity-toity Frenchmen to tune into opera, theatre and church services through telephone lines. It eventually made its way to Britain as the Electrophone. It led to a minor fad (the Queen even had one!) and some silly pictures of fancy people with massive Y-shaped headsets held under their chins.


Around the same time, telephone switchboard operators started using headband-like things to mount receivers to their ears, leaving their hands free to operate the boards. Tinkerers built all sorts of variations, but the technology stayed in a holding pattern for the next decade or so. It only really advanced when the military got ahold of it. You know, like LSD or Elvis. In this case, it was the U.S. Navy, who ordered 100 headsets from one of these inventors — a fundamentalist Mormon named Nathaniel Baldwin — in 1910.
I have to sidebar here to tell you about Baldwin, the guy who maybe invented modern headphones but also loved polygamy too much to get anything useful out of it. Happens to the best of us, right? Born into the first generation of Utah-native Latter Day Saints, Baldwin was a physics and theology professor at the school that would later become BYU. I’ll preface this by saying that my understanding of LDS doctrine starts at Under the Banner of Heaven and ends with Heather Gay, but from what I understand, this late 19th century period was one of transition for the church. After years of struggle against the federal government, they’d given up the doctrine of plural marriage in 1890 in order to assimilate into American society, but some prominent members still held polygamy as a key part of religious life.
One of those pro-polygamy leaders was John Tanner Clark, who became friends with Baldwin and led him deeper into the Mormon fundamentalist movement. Baldwin eventually became so involved that he was fired from the university in 1905. He worked in a mine for a few years, until the idea for an invention came to him at an LDS general conference in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, where he struggled to hear the sermons onstage. He got to work on a primitive loudspeaker, which led him to patent a set of ear-mounted receivers. Those receivers caught the Navy’s attention, and Baldwin’s company continued to grow as World War I loomed.



As Virginia Heffernan points out in her 2011 essay “Against Headphones,” it’s telling that headphones were first spurred by a desire to hear religious doctrine more clearly, cutting through the noisy Tabernacle — and that they became ubiquitous only when military leaders realized that they could distribute orders more efficiently. She writes: “From the beginning, it seems, headphones have been a technology of submission (to commands) and denial (of commotion).”
Too real, Virginia! It’s a bit sobering to frame my AirPod habit as one of submission (to podcasts) and denial (of street noise), but it does ring true. Honestly, I feel like these two essential motivations for headphone use don’t go far enough. This essay was written in 2011, when wired earbuds were the norm and streaming audio was in its infancy. Sure, it was possible to have headphones in all day at that point (lest we forget the high school geniuses who threaded the wires through their sweatshirt sleeves), but tangles offered some healthy discouragement, and the options for listening material only went as far as a personal iTunes library. The complete control of the audio environment that wireless headphones offer, paired with the near-endless, instantaneous choice of what to fill that environment with…that feels new. While Heffernan’s hypotheses point in the right direction, I think my particular issue springs from a different, and perhaps more modern, set of needs.
I found a better explanation in media theorist Mick Hagood’s 2019 book “Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control.” Hagood opens with a detailed description of a Beats Electronics promo campaign from the mid-2010s. In the first commercial, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick (pre-national anthem protest) calmly pushes through a crowd of angry Seattle Seahawks fans, shielded by his Beats by Dre headphones. The ad ends with Kaepernick warming up inside the stadium, headphones still on, as a tagline appears: “Hear What You Want.”
The implication is clear: that headphones are a route to emotional self-preservation, a way to protect oneself against the noisiness of the modern world. The ‘noisiness’ here is both literal and figurative — the commercial starts with an anxiety-provoking radio clip asking if Kaepernick can ‘handle the pressure’ of the upcoming game. The fact that Kaepernick is Black, and the majority of the Seahawks fans are white, only intensifies this message. It positions wireless headphones as a helpful tool for moving through spaces where one is uncomfortable or unwelcome, and continuing to optimize the mental and physical state throughout that journey.
It’s a darker, more high-stakes version of the message presented in early Sony Walkman commercials, which show Walkman users living in a heightened, Technicolor world where they “really feel the music.” Beats, in the Kaepernick commercials, don’t enhance the user’s life on an emotional level the way that the Walkman did. They make it bearable. They’re just as focused on tuning out the sounds and messages one doesn’t want to hear than tuning into the things one does. They’re a technology of chosen beliefs and chosen realities, a physical manifestation of those “media bubbles” we’re all warned we’re existing within.


And like…can we really blame ourselves for choosing them? When we’re bombarded with hundreds ads per day and may be greeted with videos of an active genocide whenever we open the FYP, it only makes sense to seize a bit of control where we can. I don’t blame anyone for deciding to “hear what they want'' when the systems we live under are bent against them, or when they just want a break from it all. The world (or at least the media landscape that reflects it) is overwhelming and dysregulating, and some form of filtering feels increasingly necessary.
It seems like designers have caught onto this. While the discreet, wireless AirPods are still my go-to, anyone with a Pinterest account knows that the real cool girls have switched back to the cheaper, wired versions, whose instantly-recognizable white cords do away with the fantasy of moving through the world silently optimized. Meanwhile, the higher-end AirPod Maxes seem to get larger and more obvious every year. After a period of submitting to the fantasy of silent, sneaky optimization of our personal audio space, it seems like we at least want to do away with the silent aspect. If we’re forced to live inside a self-made media cocoon, we might as well let others see the silky exterior.






But that’s the tricky thing about cocoons, right? They’re comfy, but no one is supposed to live there forever. I’ll spare you a butterfly analogy, but we all know they bust out of there at some point. At least in my case, I don’t think vaguely gesturing toward the “horrors of the world” gives me a hall pass to plug my ears and move along as usual.
I also think it’s worth examining how this shift toward solitude in our media consumption is affecting media itself. These effects could be relatively trivial: I suspect, for example, that the rise of songwriters as pop stars – Olivia Rodrigo, Noah Kahan and most obviously, Taylor Swift – has something to do with the shift toward headphone-focused music listening, which rewards lyrical density more than communal listening experiences like car radios and nightclubs might. I think the lore-focused storytelling of the MCU is also predicated on the assumption that people watch its movies and TV shows alone, which is part of what makes them so goddamn exhausting. But that’s a separate essay, probably. On the more serious end of things, this shift toward individual listening can also enable radicalization and alienation.
To illustrate this point, let’s return to Nathaniel Baldwin. His Baldwin Radio Company scaled rapidly throughout World War I. He steadily improved his headset technology for both the field of battle and everyday listening, and his business continued to grow after the war. By 1922 he had at least two factories in Utah, one in Illinois, and budding contracts in Japan and Canada. But just as the Baldwin Radio Company seemed poised to hit new heights, Baldwin himself doubled down on Fundamentalism. He established a shady do-everything company called Omega Investment and sunk his personal fortune into the search for a “dream mine,” a vein of gold allegedly prophesied by Brigham Young that still has yet to reveal itself. His circle became tighter, and his beliefs around plural marriage hardened.
He was banished from his local ward around 1923, and only became more reactionary, replacing his factory managers with fundamentalist randos and sending the company into turmoil. A series of shady stock deals led to a federal indictment, and in 1930 Baldwin was sent to McNeil Island Federal Prison. He returned to Utah in 1932, but was never able to recapture the success of his former company. He watched as waves of soldiers returned from both world wars and integrated headphones into their living rooms and garages, but his business had been too decimated to take advantage of the trend. He died penniless in 1961 – three years after the invention of stereo headphones, which would make his signature product a true household necessity.

Sad, right? It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that a man who aided in the creation of individualized, controlled soundscapes was eventually driven to ruin because he refused to listen, in a more general sense, to the beliefs of others. I mean yeah, those “others” were still the leaders of a high-control religion, but I’m already 2400 words into this thing, so let me cook! The point is, he was a poster child for “hearing what he wants,” to disastrous effect.
So, as I glide toward the end of the year and take stock of which habits I want to leave in 2023, I’m putting a yellow “proceed with caution” sign on my AirPods. I want to recognize the power that selective tools like headphones – or recommendation algorithms, or single-passenger cars, or meal delivery, or set routes to work – have in shaping my view of the world. I want to work on understanding what I’m avoiding hearing when I plug my ears up, and question the utility of the things I opt for otherwise.
Ultimately, I think there was merit to that initial, post-cyst discomfort around my headphone habit. Maybe I knew that the control I’ve been seeking – the control that these companies have sold me – is impossible to achieve.
The real world will bleed into my curated, AirPodded-up one every time. And if I reach a point where it doesn’t – well, that’s an even bigger issue.
Oof, that was probably longer than it needed to be! Thank you for making it all the way to the end. My key sources are linked throughout (including a long article on Baldwin from the Utah State Historical Society), but I also recommend reading Mick Hagood’s essays on noise-canceling tech and the search for “real” sound for Real Life Magazine (RIP), Kier Keightley’s work on gender and midcentury hi-fi systems, and Shusei Hosokawa’s early take on the psychological effects of the Sony Walkman if you’re interested in this topic and want to read smarter people’s takes on it!
I’m happy I got this essay out the door before the new year — travel, sickness and the holidays waylaid me, and it’s definitely not as buttoned-up as I’d ideally like it to be, but finishing things is a skill of its own, right? I’m planning to put out a quick “ins and outs” post for the new year in early January as a little palette cleanser.
I hope the weirdo nether period between Christmas and New Year’s is treating you well, and if it’s not, I hope that you’re at least able to treat yourself and your favorite people well through it. I don’t know how to sign off on these. Love/Best/Sincerely/Cordially/As Always, Kylie
Excellent work as ever. Definitely identify with this. The moment you began to investigate this desire to isolate through sound I was SHOOK. The commentary on how our world has changed from the walkman commercial to the beats commercial is spot on and heartbreaking. We really seem to be in a period of collective exhaustion. Maybe I’ll take a week off of the old podcast app… probably not lol
oof, as an out-loud phone speaker listener, I’ve often found myself frantically scrolling looking for the next thing to put on and tune out- because any time in between sound leaves me listening to my own thoughts. really interesting to hear about the headphone side of things