One of the more distressing qualities of humanity, in my mind, is the emphasis we collectively put on “efficiency.”¹ It saturates our professional existence. It haunts our socioeconomic barometer. And it drives our current approach to both creating and appreciating art. It’s insidious, the inordinate amount of power “efficiency” holds over our daily lives, without even drawing much attention to itself, creeping up in unanticipated ways: the life hacks bombarding us on TikTok; the large language models we use to reduce the amount of effort we need to put into writing an email to our colleague; the Trim Silence feature on our podcast player of choice.
[…]I will admit that this is perhaps a weird hill to die on, but I truly believe that Trim Silence is an abomination that should be fully eradicated from existence, as it not only spits in the face of the people who take the time and effort to produce their shows, but also, more broadly, encourages a way of interfacing with art that can only be described as gluttonous.
While I also hate the lost nuances resulting from that feature and also hate the disposability we’re all encouraged to treat our media with, I don’t know that those are necessarily related like this article assumes.
Some things you listen to aren’t really recorded with this kind of nuance in the first place and speeding them up like this can actually improve the quality of the listening experience. Some people just aren’t great speakers but still have things to say that you want to listen to and the stuff this improves tends to be more improved than the stuff it hurts gets hurt by. Which is to say, while I don’t use it myself, if I’m hearing somebody else’s podcast and I notice something is weird about the timing and comment on that, the only response I’ve ever gotten is “oh, I turned that on earlier and forgot it was still on”.