A British writer and consultant named Martin Belam has been publishing a fascinating, if freakily insular, memoir cum meditation on how technology has changed his music-consuming habits over the years. Here he is riffing off the iTunes feature that tells you how many times you’ve listened to a certain song:

More than anything though, having that detailed play count for everything I’d listened to in the last two years showed up the lack of information I have about the previous 30-odd years of my listening history.

I really wish there was an XML file that detailed my listening habits from ‘the year dot’.

And what a complex set of data it would be.

The way that I have assembled what we now call ‘playlists’, and the way I have organised my music listening has radically changed in my lifetime. This is not only due to me growing up and becoming more aware as a consumer, but also due to the different formats and different types of metadata that have been associated with music in the thirty-plus years that I have had an interest in it.

I’m not through the whole thing yet but it’s rigorous and observant enough to plow into. (It’s very, very long.)

One thing it reminds me of—and he may get to this in the end—are the implications of the infinite library. I’m up to 4000 albums on my computer now, and I expect I’ll be finished at about twice that and of course anytime I wish to add another the process will be all but instantaneous—even, at some point intuitive.

In one sense, what will be lost is really only ephemera. Who really cares how cool it was to go to Tower back in the day? Today we have the Pirate Bay!

But when we all have every record ever made at our fingertips*, do we lose anything? Consuming pop culture always required work of one sort or another. What’s required today is a more demanding form of intellectual housekeeping … how to keep things organized, one way or another, with some of this organization requiring no little facility with some of the new toys. (The last time I moved my music to a new PC, I lost all my iTunes playlists, for example, which is more annoying than it sounds.)

I think what we will eventually lose, perhaps, is coherence, which is why the story is called “The Library of Babel.”

*and also, as Borges would have it, every record ever made mislabelled at our fingertips: “Let It Be” by the Stones (and the Kinks and the Faces), “Let it Bleed” by the Beatles (and Eric Clapton and Bachman Turner Overdrive), “Let It Ba” by the Beatles and so on and so forth. (Many of these I already have in my collection.)