INT.001 — Sonos: Human Transitions.

I thought I was using a sound system. In reality, I was using a regulation tool. What remains with me when the speaker falls silent isn't a song. It's that I started. The shower happened. I got dressed. It took effort to hook my backpack onto my back. I looked in the mirror, put on cologne, felt handsome—and left the house. By the afternoon, I no longer remember what was playing. Only that that day I was able to jump-start something that seemed impossible first thing in the morning.

Mornings—or the early dawn, depending on how you look at it—begin around four with coffee, a cigarette, levodopa, and a handful of other pills and vitamins: the breakfast of champions. I swallow them by the handful. Coffee and cigarette soon end up at their universal destination. And there, on the toilet—a place of supposed pleasure—another ritual begins that nobody designed: the analysis of the body.

The toilet is my dopamine dashboard. Postural instability. My hands. I move them, play with them, analyze them. Small motor-skill tests to measure how much dopamine has already arrived. Because there are days when I need to head out fast, and water and rigidity make bad companions.

Those days I put on the Rocky soundtrack. Not because I want to listen to Rocky. Because I need the shower to happen, and my willpower alone won't get me from the toilet to the shower. With the trumpets, shadow boxing starts in the mirror and voice exercises follow. I try to replicate them with this faint, broken voice. I sound like two cats fucking. I laugh. And sometimes I let out an Adriiiiiiiian. I step into the shower with more courage. I come out showered and with more dignity—even if I lost it telling the story. In that league of small details is where I live. Every little bit helps.

Before leaving, the mirror. I look into my eyes and treat myself with compassion, longing for what I saw in other mirrors years ago. I try to smile. And I see—I feel it—that my lip is trembling and I can't hold the smile. I force it. Then the other voice comes out, the street-smart one, amused, fighting: but look at that great head of hair, you bastard. At forty you had to choose between Parkinson's or hair... and you chose well. Right then I understood that sound doesn't just play music. It also pulls people out.

The observation

I use Sonos about ten hours a day. Pornhub, a few minutes. And yet Pornhub has me perfectly calibrated: every visit suggests something new, related, disturbingly spot-on. Sonos, with ten hours a day of my life in its hands for over ten years, greets me with the last thing I listened to or forces me to decide from scratch. Imagine the reverse situation: going into Pornhub and always finding the exact video you finished with last time. Absurd. 

Well, that is Sonos every morning. The difference is neither magic nor better technology. It is incentive design. An addictive content algorithm feeds on every micro-signal that I capture without realizing it because every signal is money. An ambient audio system doesn't have that pressure: no one measures its success in minutes of captured attention, so no one invested a single euro in understanding me.

Sonos is not such a simple villain. Its radio catalog has two categories: Genres and Moments. Deep Focus. Cocktail Hour. Dinner Party. Sleep Sounds. That shows that someone there already understood half the argument: we don't listen to songs, we listen to states of mind. That is why they exist. But a radio station called Mellow Morning takes it for granted that every morning starts the same way. And they don't.

There are mornings when I already come with momentum and mornings when I am completely OFF. I don't want the same ramp for both. Sonos has understood the destination. It lacks an understanding of the starting point. Half the journey is done. The critique begins on the other half.

The verb

I do not use music. I use regulation. I do not listen to songs. I build states. I do not play playlists. I try to recover capacity. The first question is never what product I am using. It is what I am trying to achieve. The quick answer would be to listen to music. It is not the correct one. What I am trying to do is start something: shower, train, write, sleep, concentrate, celebrate, cry, recover, connect. Music was never the product. It was the medium. The real product is the verb.

The conditions

The sound did not change my body. It changed the conditions in which my body could act. That is regenerative transfer: a capacity generated in one place that appears later in another.

Before
I'm still not doing anything, and that nothing is the most expensive part of the day. Overcoming inertia. Gathering momentum. Convincing myself that I'm capable of starting. That moment consumes an amount of energy that no one measures—and almost no product in the world is designed for it. The system hasn't even started yet. I'm already paying.

During
The music starts. The anxiety eases, the body stretches, the stiffness yields. Action begins —not because the song is perfect, but because it manages to move me from one state to another. The transition is already happening, and I've barely noticed. When the music starts, the system disappears. It doesn't ask, it doesn't interrupt, it doesn't compete.

After
The shower happens. The training starts. The text gets written. I don't remember what song was playing. I remember that I managed to start. And of the two things, only one matters.

Hours later
The effect survives the music. I don't think about Sonos: I think about the fact that I worked out, that I wrote, that I left the house, that I was able to start something that early on seemed impossible. The best products disappear. Their effects do not. What remains when the speaker goes silent is the residue. It's not the playlist. It's that I started.

The cost
Sound restores my capacity. Sonos is the instrument I’ve learned to use to do it. But first it asks me what I want to listen to. Every session starts with an interrogation. Choosing also consumes energy. And when living already consumes too much, every extra decision is a small toll at the worst possible moment. The return is real. The toll, unnecessary. There is a capacity debt that doesn't need to be paid. The regenerative transfer is already happening—the proof is that I left the house. Only it still arrives with a toll.

The design question

Why does a system that has been listening to me for ten years still ask me how I want to start every morning. Why have we normalized the fact that only the products that need to retain us to survive bother to understand us. A product designed for well-being should have, at the very least, the same ambition to understand me as one designed to consume me. I am not asking for Sonos to become addictive. I am asking for something simpler and quite a bit harder: for understanding a person to stop being the business model of their predators.

A shower never starts when you turn on the tap

This essay was never about Sonos. Sonos was just the excuse. The real question is another one: what if we've been designing for the wrong moment this whole time. The best products don't change our lives while we use them. They change it when they make something happen afterwards. Because a shower never starts when you turn on the tap. It starts much earlier. And perhaps design does too. The criterion is not whether one yields or not. It is what remains afterwards. In this case, what remains is that I started. The rest is the toll that doesn't need to be paid yet.

Proof of Life

You introduced Sonos 27. You said you are no longer a speaker company, that you are an audio operating system, that the system knows the shape of a home and the way a family lives in it, and that 27voice is the shortest path between wanting a song and hearing it. 

You put personality into every room: a detective, a coach, a trivia champion, John Cusack in the living room.

Personality is the wrapper. The verb is the test. This is mine.

I am sitting on the toilet. It has been three minutes. I intend to get up and my voice won't come out. My body is hunched over. I look in the mirror. My left arm is hanging limp. The next step, if it comes, will be a fearful one. It is not laziness. It is OFF. My hands have already run the usual tests: how much dopamine has arrived, how much the next gesture is going to cost.

I am not going to say «put on Rocky.» I can't. And even if I could, it's already too late for that phrase. That phrase comes when the body still hasn't gotten going.

There is the agent. One on one. Me and him. The same toilet. At four in the morning. He doesn’t ask how he can help me. He doesn’t whisper aspirations to me. He doesn’t give me a pep talk. He doesn’t ask me for a command. He knows I’ve been three minutes. He knows what usually happens next. He knows what sound, what cadence, what silence or what volume this body has produced before, from here to the mirror, from the mirror to the shower. 

Maybe the trumpets are starting. Maybe not. Maybe the volume of what was already there just goes up a notch. Maybe it goes quiet.

He doesn't answer me. He moves me.

If he understands the moment, I get up. Feeling scared. Left arm still hanging. I get into the shower. I come out showered. If he doesn't understand the moment, I stay seated. Or I get up myself, with stiff hands, looking for Rocky. Then there is no agent. There is a speaker with character.

The test is not a demo. It is not a conversation at ten in the morning, when I am already ON. It is this: an agent, a person, the same toilet, three minutes, one week. Afterward, a single question. Has anything changed in this person's life?

If on the seventh day the shower happens and I haven't had to decide how to start, you have understood the residue. If on the seventh day the command is still «play me Rocky,» Sonos 27 stayed in the kitchen, winning at trivia.

The music already knows where I am. Now it has to learn what I'm here for. I've already put my body on the line. Ten years. Three minutes. An Adriiiiiiiian that sometimes doesn't come out. Now I decide whether I wait for Sonos 27 to enter this hour or if I have to wait for 37.

You version software. My disease versions shit. Whoever arrives late isn't the speaker. It's the verb.

State:
Published.
Waiting for a response.

This note has been sent to the people responsible for deciding what Sonos is and what it could become. The observation remains open. If Sonos responds, this status will be updated. If it stays silent, it will be too.

Because responding is designing.
Keep quiet, too.