Hi there music lover—I hope you enjoyed that subtitle. Look, just between friends, I’d like to tell you something: I’ve been awfully sad. I am the extremely proud owner of an iPod Classic—a fifth generation 80GB classic—which my mother gave to me years ago, because she is a good mother. This little hard drive has been my constant companion, bearing all kinds of weather, plugged into all kinds of machines, tearing through innumerable headphones as it has saturated me, in a near constant spinning of data, with all the sounds that might complete a life. I have kept it in many cases; I have wiped its contents and started clean; I have held it in my left pocket, in my right, strapped it to my arm, and tucked it in my waistband; I have even levered it open and replaced its faithful, fatigued battery. And now, as of this September and Apple’s reconfiguration of their product line, it has, as a species, gone extinct.

This is wailingly sad news. Every Classic out there now is the last. And if I may, in this tidy little essay, I’d like to offer a dirge, what’s more, a pronouncement, that life as we know it faces an uncertain and altogether different future, that our humanity faces serious threat. I know this is a tall order; please bear with me, because we will need to take this to the very end…

Read the whole piece at The Hairsplitter.