I have seen the future of music, and its name is ThinkEar.

A new audio gadget from, oddly enough, a Finnish oil company named Neste, ThinkEar is a set of “mind-controlled earphones” that will allow your brain to choose the songs you listen to without any input from your thumbs or other body parts. Let’s go to the press release:

The world is poised on the brink of a technological revolution; rapid progress in brain mapping technology means that the ability to control devices with our minds is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Neste’s ThinkEar earphones are a bold entertainment concept that offers thought-controlled personal audio.

If I had listened to Gary Numan instead of Gang of Four when I was growing up, I would have seen all this shit coming. I mean, the guy was already using an Amazon Echo in 1979:

Back to the press release:

Making full use of the latest developments in brain wearables, the earphone’s integrated 5 point EEG sensors are able to read your brainwaves while an integrated microcomputer translates them into interaction commands to navigate your audio content.

You know who had the nicest brain wearables? The Borg.

OK, so here’s where the press release reaches its climax:

Unlike other systems, the earphones are not tethered to any external device. [They] access your favorite cloud services directly.

Which means, of course, that the cloud services will also be able to access your brainwaves directly. (Interaction is not a one-way street.) And that’s where things get really cool — you might even say numanesque. Remember when I last wrote about the future of pop? It was a year ago when Google announced the shift of its Google Play Music service from the old paradigm of listener-selected music to the new paradigm of outsourced “activity-based” music. As Google explained:

At any moment in your day, Google Play Music has whatever you need music for — from working, to working out, to working it on the dance floor — and gives you curated radio stations to make whatever you’re doing better. Our team of music experts … crafts each station song by song so you don’t have to.

ThinkEar is the missing link in mind-free listening. With your ThinkEar EEG sensors in place, Google will be able to read your brainwaves, on a moment by moment basis, and serve up an engineered set of tunes perfectly geared to your mental state as well as your activity mode. Not only will you save enormous amounts of time that you would have wasted figuring out what songs you felt like listening to, but Google will be able to use its expertly crafted soundscapes to help keep your mental state within some optimal parameters.

Far-fetched? I don’t think so. It’s basically just Shazam in reverse. The music susses you.

The applications go well beyond music. Cloud services could, for instance, beam timely notifications or warnings to your ears based on what’s going on in your brain, either at the subconscious or the conscious level. Think of what Facebook could do with that kind of capability. And if Amazon melded ThinkEar with both Echo and Audible, it could automatically intervene in your thought processes by reading you inspiring passages from pertinent books, like, say, The Fountainhead.

Maybe it’s not so odd that an oil company would invent a set of mind-reading earbuds. Once the land is tapped out, the extraction industries are going to need a new target, and what could possibly be more lucrative than fracking the human brain?

Time magazine’s Rana Foroohar says my new book, Utopia Is Creepy, “punches a hole in Silicon Valley cultural hubris.” The book comes out on September 6, the day after Labor Day, but you can read an excerpt from the introduction at Aeon today.

“Computing is not about computers any more,” wrote Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his 1995 bestseller Being Digital. “It is about living.” By the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was selling more than gadgets and software: it was selling an ideology. The creed was set in the tradition of U.S. techno-utopianism, but with a digital twist. The Valley-ites were fierce materialists – what couldn’t be measured had no meaning – yet they loathed materiality. In their view, the problems of the world, from inefficiency and inequality to morbidity and mortality, emanated from the world’s physicality, from its embodiment in torpid, inflexible, decaying stuff. The panacea was virtuality – the reinvention and redemption of society in computer code. They would build us a new Eden not from atoms but from bits. All that is solid would melt into their network. We were expected to be grateful and, for the most part, we were.

Our craving for regeneration through virtuality is the latest expression of what Susan Sontag in On Photography described as “the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is a machine.” What we’ve always found hard to abide is that the world follows a script we didn’t write. We look to technology not only to manipulate nature but to possess it, to package it as a product that can be consumed by pressing a light switch or a gas pedal or a shutter button. We yearn to reprogram existence, and with the computer we have the best means yet. We would like to see this project as heroic, as a rebellion against the tyranny of an alien power. But it’s not that at all. It’s a project born of anxiety. Behind it lies a dread that the messy, atomic world will rebel against us. What Silicon Valley sells and we buy is not transcendence but withdrawal. The screen provides a refuge, a mediated world that is more predictable, more tractable, and above all safer than the recalcitrant world of things. We flock to the virtual because the real demands too much of us.

Read on.

“When a man is reduced to such a pass as playing cards by himself, he had better give up — or take to reading.” –Rawdon Crawley, The Card Player’s Manual, 1876

Big news out of the Googleplex today: the internet giant is offering a free solitaire game through its search engine and its mobile app. “When you search for ‘solitaire’ on Google,” goes the announcement on the company’s always breathless blog, “the familiar patience game may test yours!”

Pokémon Go, Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Farmville, Minesweeper, Space Invaders, Pong: computer games come and go, offering fleeting amusements before they turn stale.

But not solitaire. Solitaire endures.

Invented sometime in the eighteenth century, the single-player card game made a seamless leap to virtuality with the arrival of personal computers in the early 1980s. The gameplay was easy to program, and a deck of cards could be represented on even the most rudimentary of computer displays. Spectrum Holobyte’s Solitaire Royal became a huge hit when it was released in 1987. After Microsoft incorporated its own version of the game into the Windows operating system in 1990, solitaire quickly became the most used PC app of all time.

“Though on its face it might seem trivial, pointless, a terrible way to waste a beautiful afternoon, etc., solitaire has unquestionably transformed the way we live and work,” wrote Slate’s Josh Levin in 2008. “Computer solitaire propelled the revolution of personal computing, augured Microsoft’s monopolistic tendencies, and forever changed office culture.”

Google is late to the party, but it’s a party that will never end.

Microsoft had ulterior motives when it bundled solitaire into Windows — the game helped people learn how to use a mouse, and it kept them sitting in front of their Microsoft-powered computers like, to quote Iggy Pop, hypnotized chickens — and Google, too, is looking to accomplish something more than just injecting a little fun into our weary lives. “A minor move like putting games in search means that users – especially mobile users – will turn to the Google search app at a time when a lot of the information we need is available elsewhere on our devices,” reports TechCrunch.

It’s a devious game these companies play. We are but deuces in their decks.

Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that solitaire is a perfect microcosm of personal computing, particularly now, in our social media age? In “The Psychology of Games,” a 2000 article in Psychology Review, Mark Griffiths pointed out that games are a “world-building activity.” They offer a respite from the demands of the real. “Freud was one of the first people to concentrate on the functions of playing games,” Griffiths wrote. “He speculated that game playing provided a temporary leave of absence from reality which reduced individual conflict and brought about a change from the passive to the active.” We love games because they “offer the illusion of control over destiny and circumstance.”

Solitaire, a game mixing skill and chance, also provides what psychologists call “intermittent reinforcement.” Every time a card is revealed, there is, for the player, the possibility of a reward. The suspense, and the yearning, is what makes the game so compelling, even addictive. “Basically,” wrote Griffiths, “people keep playing in the absence of a reward hoping that another reward is just around the corner.” Turning over an ace in solitaire is really no different from getting a like on Facebook or a retweet on Twitter. We crave such symbolic tokens of accomplishment, such sweet nothings.

Shuffle that deck again, Google. This time I’m going to be a winner.

It’s my longest, funniest book yet — granted, the competition was not exactly fierce on either count — and it is now printed, bound, and on its way to a bookstore near you. The title is Utopia Is Creepy . . . and Other Provocations, and the book collects my favorite posts published here at Rough Type since the blog launched in 2005, along with a selection of essays, aphorisms, and reviews that appeared over the same period. It also features a couple of new pieces, including one on transhumanism called “The Daedalus Mission.”

As I was pulling the collection together over the last year, I began to see it as an alternative history of recent times, from the founding of Facebook to the rise of @realDonaldTrump. It is, as well, a critique of Silicon Valley and its cultural powers and pretensions. Here’s a peek at the introduction:

Utopia Is Creepy is out on September 6. More information, including those all-important preorder links, can be found here.

Thanks to all who have read Rough Type over the years.