In my morning scroll through the feed, an essay from Habr flashed by — "Make This World Truly Boring." The author defends a thesis that begs to be challenged: the root cause of fragmented attention wasn't the smartphone, but wireless earbuds. The wire, he writes, was a "social protocol": you could see someone was busy, and there was a ritual — tap them on the shoulder. Earbuds killed two-way visibility, and now nobody knows if a passerby is available — hence the eternal scene of "Wait, are you talking to me?"
First impulse — brush it off: what kind of technological determinism, blaming the attention crisis on a few grams of plastic. But the phrase "social protocol" stuck. Because if a protocol is an agreement about who can speak when, it should have an implementation history, an architecture, and... a deprecation history. Protocols don't die on their own — they get phased out. And I dug in to check: was the wire really once an interface of politeness, who designed it — and what's left in its place?
The answer turned out better than expected. The juiciest bit wasn't in the philosophy of attention, but in the hardware: the first mass-market personal player — the 1979 Walkman TPS-L2 — was designed for two people. Two headphone jacks and an orange Hotline button so your conversation partner could get through without stopping the music. An icon of solitude, built as a device for dialogue. How that happened — and why the dialogue utopia got stripped from the hardware within five years — that's the story below.
Let's start with the fact that headphones are older than most of what we consider "audio technology." In 1910, Nathaniel Baldwin — a former physics professor fired from Brigham Young University for supporting polygamy, working as an electrician at a remote hydroelectric station in a Utah canyon — hand-built the first units of his sensitive telephone receiver. In his kitchen. Family legend has it he was pushed by poor audibility of speakers at a church conference: he figured voice could be amplified and isolated from background noise.
Funny detail: the first product was a pneumatic loudspeaker — a contraption that propelled sound with compressed air. A witness described how Baldwin's voice "filled the canyon," remaining quiet but piercing. Headphones were born as a side branch of a public address project — not for listening in solitude, but to carry voice farther.
What came next — classic American nineteenth-to-twentieth-century inventorship. The Smithsonian Institution suggested sending four headsets to the Navy for testing; Baldwin packed them in a baking powder tin. The DIY packaging drew laughs from inspectors — the test results silenced them. An order for hundreds of units, a Navy contract, and by WWI "Baldies" were on the heads of Navy, Air Service, and Signal Corps radio operators. A veteran radioman left testimony that the headsets "stood up under all the jouncing that stubborn mules could give" — across the Mexican border, at the Marne, Château-Thierry, the Argonne.
By the mid-1920s, Baldwin's factory in East Millcreek was making 150 headsets a day around the clock, bringing in two million dollars in annual sales, and powered by its own hydroelectric plant cobbled together from bicycle wheels and piano wire. A pair of "Baldies" cost twelve dollars — about $146 today, meaning premium segment. And then fate took a novelistic turn: Baldwin considered headset assembly "trivial" and never patented it, gave away his fortune to fellow polygamists, built them houses on a street still called Polygamy Alley, and ended with a two-year prison sentence on mail fraud charges — convicted on Valentine's Day 1933. His grandson summed it up bitterly: if grandpa had been a slightly better businessman, "he could have been the RCA of America."
For our story, what matters is different: from birth, headphones were a professional communications tool. A radio operator in headphones was a person on the line, listening to the ether. Nobody perceived them as a capsule of solitude; this was an interface of being on duty. The inversion of meaning would come later.
July 1, 1979, Sony released the TPS-L2 — the first commercial personal stereo player, ¥33,000 (about $150). The hardware honestly reveals its origin: this is a repurposed cassette dictaphone, the TCM-600, known to journalists as the Pressman. Engineers stripped out the recording circuit, mic jack, and tape counter, installed a stereo head — and, importantly, kept the internal microphone.
And here's where what they don't write about in "Walkman history" retellings begins. The unit had two headphone jacks — in some markets playfully labeled "guys" and "gals" — so two people could listen to one cassette simultaneously. And where the removed record buttons had been sat an orange Hotline button: pressing it dimmed the tape and mixed in the microphone signal. Someone could talk to you without stopping the music. This isn't collectors' esoterica — this is documented device architecture, and Michael Bull, the leading sociologist of personal stereo, recalling the era, emphasized: "Walkmans came with two jacks" — shared listening was a real practice, not a curiosity.
In other words, the most "antisocial" consumer electronics in history was designed with explicit dialogue interfaces: second listener — by default, interruption — one button press. The engineers' motivation, though, was more prosaic than philosophy: the microphone survived from the dictaphone, and since the hardware was already there — they gave it a function. From a utilitarian detail carried over from another product grew a social feature.
The market voted against it. Sony projected five thousand players a month — sold thirty thousand in the first two months, and already the next models lost the Hotline and second jacks: extra ports cost money and space. By the mid-eighties, personal audio had definitively become a device for one. The player born as dialogue survived as monologue — and that's the form it was remembered in.
Sociologists noticed the shift quickly. In 1984, Shuhei Hosokawa published in Popular Music a paper with the formula "Walkman effect": portable music gives the listener control over their sound environment — the street can be overwritten with your own soundtrack. A decade and a half later, this idea got its chief chronicler: Michael Bull from the University of Sussex, whom the New York Times called "the leading — perhaps the only — expert on the social impact of personal music players." His book on the Walkman and iPod formulated what we now consider the diagnosis of the era.
Bull's key concept — "accompanied solitude": people on the move want privacy, but along with it — a sense of social presence. The player gives both at once: you're alone, but not in a void — you're accompanied by a soundtrack. Bull's respondents described it almost literally: "life is like a movie playing just for me." Playlists matched to weather, time of day, and mood turned the commute to work into a personal film edit.
Bull's second mechanism he called "nonreciprocal looking." Headphones permit staring at people without meeting their gaze in return: earbuds signal to others "this person is busy," and the street becomes a cinema where you're both viewer and invisible. This, in his words, is "a great urban strategy for controlling interactions" — asymmetric by nature: you see everyone, nobody sees you. And the third, sharpest quote: "Many people don't like being alone with their thoughts. The best way to avoid that is to listen to music." Take off the headphones — and there they are, your thoughts. No wonder respondents took them off literally at the office door.
To be fair: Bull isn't painting an apocalypse. He reminds us that the urban world was deaf to strangers before the Walkman — "how often do you talk to people in public space?" — and that the sense of safety grows from the mere presence of people you don't need to interact with. The player didn't destroy publicness, he believes, but helped it survive by making crowds bearable. But precisely in this deal — tolerance in exchange for invisibility — was embedded that very protocol: now privacy doesn't need signaling, it's the default assumption.
A second technical line ran parallel, without which today's picture wouldn't exist. Active noise cancellation — the idea of canceling sound with an opposing-phase wave — was patented by Paul Lueg back in 1936 (filed 1933, priority January 1933), decades before electronics capable of computing it in real time. The idea slept in patent archives until 1978, when Amar Bose, flying Swiss Air from Europe to the US, tried the airline-issued electronic headphones and discovered engine roar drowned out the music. He sketched the noise cancellation math before landing.
Ten years of development — and in 1986 two Bose prototypes saved the hearing of Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager in their nine-day nonstop around-the-world flight on Voyager. In 1989 came the first commercial aviation headset for pilots, in 2000 — QuietComfort, and noise cancellation moved from cockpit to cabin. The market did the rest: by the 2020s, headphones learned not just to cancel noise but selectively let the world through — Transparency mode, and from 2023 Adaptive Audio, which in real time blends noise cancellation with transparency: how much street to let into your ears, the algorithm decides.
Note the dramaturgy: first the technology learned to isolate (ANC), then — to dose isolation (transparency). The industry over a decade programmatically recreated what wire did physically: the ability to be in the world but not entirely in it. Only now it's not a property of material but a paid feature with a slider in settings. The politeness protocol became a subscription option for hearing.
September 7, 2016, from a San Francisco stage, Phil Schiller announced that iPhone 7 was saying goodbye to the 3.5mm jack. The port is "ancient," space inside the phone is worth its weight in gold, and the future is wireless. The word everyone remembered was "courage": Apple had the guts to remove what everyone uses. Journalists snarked that you still need to know how to cancel what's needed: in the box lay a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter, and AirPods — white earbuds for $159 with five hours of battery — didn't even come included, shipments only started late October.
Sarcasm aside, this day is considered the departure point of the social protocol. The wired headset ended in a cable, and its owner was "connected" to the street: visible wires — means busy; tug the wire — means available. AirPods erased both signal and ritual: from outside, a person in earbuds can't be distinguished from someone listening to the world. The scene "Wait, are you talking to me?" quoted in the Habr essay is a direct consequence: the visible boundary of availability vanished, and every contact now starts with a probe.
The irony is that Apple, dismantling the politeness protocol, clearly didn't set that as its goal — the company fought for millimeters and margin. But systems don't ask about intentions: by removing the wire, they removed its external effects. Even though an adapter still lay in the box: wire officially became legacy you drag along, like a foreign adapter.
The finale of the story — the most unexpected turn. September 12, 2024, the FDA authorized the first over-the-counter hearing aid in software form: Hearing Aid Feature for AirPods Pro. People with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss — that's over 30 million Americans — can tune the earbuds for themselves through HealthKit, without an audiologist or prescription; a clinical study on 118 volunteers showed self-tuning gives comparable benefit to professional fitting. A product built as an isolation machine officially became a device for connecting with hearing — literally an appliance returning the world to ears.
In this symmetry there's something of technological karma: the same self-tuning, same form factor, opposite vector. Headphones people were ashamed of as a symbol of being walled off turned out to be the most mass-market hearing aid in history — the stigma of hearing aids dissolved in a design everyone recognizes. The social protocol wasn't defeated — it was reinvented from the other end: now the invisible earbud doesn't wall off, it connects. Age-related hearing loss stopped being a mark precisely because wearing earbuds became the norm.
And the last plot point that closes the arc. By late 2025, wired headphones became fashion: white cable spotted on Lily-Rose Depp, Paul Mescal, Bella Hadid, in Balenciaga campaigns and on the cover of New York magazine, where celebrities ride the New York subway — all with wires. A fashion editor for British Vogue formulated the diagnosis precisely: wire is "an analog way to opt out," it's "visible in a way AirPods aren't — there's a 'do not disturb' feel about them."
Reread that thoughtfully: fashion reinvented the social protocol. Wire again means "busy" — just now it's a choice, not a hardware property. A photographer whose Instagram feed documents New York passengers' hands calls the renaissance "an extension of digital fatigue": who needs another glitchy gadget that needs charging. Low barrier to entry — EarPods cost £17 versus £99 for AirPods — and knots in wires even got romanticized: "think of the knot as a more friendly Rubik's cube." Brands are bringing back wired lines, one retailer reports 193% growth in sales of a top headphone model over the year — though overall Bluetooth still rules the market.
And at the end of the Guardian piece — the line worth digging for: the photographer says he'll always keep wired headphones, "to share an earbud with a friend." Forty-six years after the TPS-L2, the second jack returned — not in hardware, in gesture. Shared listening is possible again: a wired headphone, unlike an earbud, has a second half. The protocol that engineers built into the 1979 device and that the market stripped out by 1985 turned out tougher than silicon — it just waited to become fashionable.
What I like about this story — nobody designed the protocol. The 1917 radio operator in Baldwin headphones didn't "announce unavailability," he was just working; Sony engineers kept the microphone because it was wasteful to throw it away; Apple removed the jack for a millimeter of board space. No politeness committee convened — the property of material became social agreement because it was visible and legible. Then the material changed, the agreement crumbled, and nobody noticed it in the changelog — because the changelog wasn't written by humans, but by the market.
Hence skepticism toward the Habr recipe to "make the world boring" — not the diagnosis, but the therapy. The diagnosis is accurate: nonreciprocal gaze, accompanied solitude, fear of being left with thoughts — all documented by sociologists decades before "digital detox." But people won't give up the soundtrack — they refused once in 1979, and haven't changed their minds since. What actually works, the wire renaissance shows: return not "boredom," but visible availability — the signal "I'm busy" and the ritual "I'm available." The industry already gets it and sells it back: transparency mode is a programmatic attempt to recreate wire, and cable fashion is cultural.
And my favorite detail last: the Hotline button. In 1979, Sony engineers built interruption into the device — a legally enshrined ability to say "hey, listen to me" without making the world go silent. The market dismantled it within a couple years because solitude sold better than dialogue. Now we're buying that interruption back in pieces: Conversation Awareness, Adaptive Audio, wire as a "do not disturb" sign. The politeness protocol didn't die — it's waiting for someone to make it a default button again.