Play On

In the late 1960s, a young musician was recording the sounds he played on his synthesizer onto his Revox tape recorders, when he suddenly discovered: if you connect the two tape recorders together, so that the playback head is separated by several feet from the record head, you get a very long delay echo.

A few years later, the young man used this idea for the legendary title track of his fourth studio album and went on to basically invent the genre of ambient music. He worked and produced records with artists like U2 and David Bowie – whom he told to slowly back away from the mic while singing Heroes –, and composed the sound that played when you started up Windows 95. His name, of course: Brian Eno.

When Eno is faced with a piece of technology that can do something, he immediately doesn’t want to know what it is supposed to do. He wants to know what it can do that the makers didn’t imagine it would ever be used to do. He wants to find out what hasn’t yes been done with a piece of technology, with a system – and what might excite people. “Because when you are excited, you are at your most alert. And when you are your most alert, you’re more likely to spot the little thing that is going to turn into the big thing.” as Eno explained in a truly remarkable, calm, and wide-ranging conversation with Ezra Klein. An interview that I can’t recommend enough, spanning from music and art to the practice of creating and generative AI to architecting versus gardening to Stewart Brand and – Ethan! – even A Pattern Language.

When Brian Eno starts to tinker with technology, he’s actually playing. Not only like musicians play. But how children play. Just like them, he’s playing to explore and make sense of the world around him. He’s playing to learn. He’s playing to come up with something exciting. He’s playing to imagine things and imagine how they would feel like. How he would feel like. He’s doing what the grownups like to call “art”, to distinguish it from the seemingly more serious and important stuff, like stock trading.

We could use more of that approach on the Web. When we’re creating things on, for, and with the Web. More play. More prototyping. More art. More echo. More ambient web design.

How about we start with our personal sites first?

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This is post 16 of Blogtober 2025.

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