When did it become OK to blast TikToks in public?

- I think I'm in my Larry David era of journalism. (laughing) - Okay, please say more. - All right, so first of all, Caroline, it's receding. Second of all, when I see things out in the world that annoy me and get on my nerves, my immediate instinct is, "Hey, why don't we make a podcast about this?" And then I come to your show and I complain about the thing that's bothering me. And if you remember, I did that earlier this year, when I came on to talk about the scourge of dog poop that we are all living amongst. - Oh, yes, I remember that very well. And you know what, I love this development for you. I love it because honestly, a lot of the grapes that you have, I also end up having. For those of you who don't know her, this is Mindwella Lopez Restrepo. She is a writer and producer at All Things Considered. So, Mindwella, what is this month's grape? - All right, imagine if you will. - A perfectly pleasant commute to the NPR office here in Midtown, everyone zoning out on the train, drinking their coffee, rubbing their eyes. And then someone next to you pulls out their phone and starts watching short form videos. - That's fine, except we're playing them on speaker. - No, oh my God. - No, I can't say that. - Yes. - I don't like that. - I don't either. And now you are filled with the annoyance and agitation of someone forcing you into the disgusting, murky depths of their personal algorithm. And now you must put your headphones in to drown it out. - That's horrific. I'm gonna be honest, that is just, it's one of those things that just hurts me. That happened to me at the airport recently. And it was someone sitting behind me and my husband. We were flying to Puerto Rico. And all of a sudden I heard it's a grating noise over my shoulder. And it was like all these videos, flip, flip, flip, videos videos is driving me nuts. And I turn around thinking that I'm gonna see like a team. And it was somebody who was clearly in their 70s. - Many such cases. - I was like, "Turn this off." It was terrible. I mean, this isn't just something that's happening to me or to you. I mean, I've seen people talking about this phenomenon. Not just in cities where you're like on the train together, but also like suburban areas. I mean, people playing loud tiktoks at restaurants, doctors office waiting rooms, grocery stores. It's everywhere you can possibly imagine it to be inappropriate is where it seems to be happening the most. So as I continue larping as Larry David, I wanna know, why does it feel like public noise is getting louder and is our social contract around public noise changing? Hello, hello, I'm Brittany Loose and you're listening to it's been a minute from NPR. A show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. (upbeat music) - So before we get into the blasting short form video of it all, I first gotta say, I know cities are noisy. Like I know that's part of the deal. But I was surprised to find there's a lot of scholarship about exactly how cities are noisy. Kate Wagner told me about this. She's an architecture critic at the nation writer and great urbanist thinker in my opinion. - There's a concept called the sound scape, which was pioneered by this composer and thinker Armory Shaper in the 1970s. His concept of the sound scape, which is that there is like a certain sonic pattern that is unique to every single place has had like really lasting effects. - And in the past, soundscapes held a lot more information for a city's residents than they do now. You know, from the 14th to 16th centuries, sound was a major medium through which space was constructed. With the kind of the regular sonic rhythms right of early modern cities, be they the regulation of time and religion through church bells, the regulation of law and political communities through civic bells, pronouncements and trumpets and things like that. - That's from a conversation I had with Nile Atkinson. He's a professor of art history at the University of Chicago. He studies public space, architecture and soundscapes. - Industrialization had ruined our relationship to meaningful sound interactions in urban spaces, especially, and had created a kind of dense white noise that alienated ourselves from acoustic conversations and interaction. - That's really interesting though. I guess I hadn't really thought about that kind of meaningful noise that predates industrialization. - Right, I mean, it's kind of foreign, right? And so, like Nile was saying, due to industrialization, we got a bunch of machines and those machines we invented are super noisy. The number one cause of noise pollution in urban areas, literally cars. And the car engines and construction jackhammers and trains and airplanes and lawn mowers, all of that noise adds up fast. - My just late colleague from Montreal, Jonathan Stern, recently he was working on sound and disability and he basically made the pronouncement in a conference. I was at that almost every one of us is disabled in our hearing because we are all suffered physically and emotionally from sounds that have damaged us. And he said, even the noise from electric dryers and public bathrooms are damaging you constantly. And so we are all in, in a particular, the fragile relationship in that sense. - Yeah, stress me out, hearing that right now to stress me out, but continue. - Obviously we're not all permanently deafened, but almost a quarter of Americans have some level of hearing loss with older Americans experiencing it more. Of course, this is something that often accumulates over time. But like he said, it's not just physical damage being done. It's emotional too, which please into why the politics of noise can get tricky. Here's Kate again. - So when we think about the urban soundscape, for example, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between things that are quote unquote natural or foundational to urban life and quote unquote noise. And so these are very politicized distinctions. And so a lot of people, for example, who live in this city, they find the wall of the highway to be calming when they go to sleep yet we would mostly think of that as noise. Or like our neighbors who are maybe having a party, it's like that is a testament to conviviality and yet some would also think it's noise. And so when we talk about being a part of urban society, we are fundamentally talking about these kind of blurry distinctions, but we're also talking about a sort of social contract and how that social contract is negotiated. - But there are politics around creating quiet spaces too. Here's Nile again. - There are ways in which you can create acoustic spaces that are separated off so that it creates a certain, a different kind of segregation. But one that's related to the other forms of segregation that we are very much used to, right? Which are spatial, economic, racial and things like that as well. - Oh, I'm definitely picking up what he's putting down. Even within a given town or city, there's not one true soundscape, right? Like each neighborhood has its own. And I could see how there could be socioeconomic boundaries around them. Did you find that to be the case? - Yeah, like neighborhoods around industrial areas and highways tend to be poorer. And those things are notoriously noisy. But what does it mean when noise is your norm? - We're gonna take a quick break, but first, if you're a longtime listener or brand new to it's been a minute, be sure to come back every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday for brand new episodes. And did you know you can make it even easier to get new episodes by hitting the follow or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app? Whether you're a new friend or a loyal bestie, join the team by subscribing today. - Coming up, after the break? - You saw like the shushing in restaurants. If a group of people was like laughing too loudly outside of bars, these signs that are like, please be respectful of our neighbors. And I'm like, no one told you to live over a bar. - Stick around. - I guess when I first noticed a difference between like sonic environments, was when I went away to college, which is a very long time ago, like in 1995. - That's right or social Gonzalez. She spoke to its been a minute producer Liam McBain about this essay she wrote in the Atlantic about noise. In that essay, she talked about how when she went away to Brown University, she noticed that she was often getting shushed. - And that sort of for a francing of quiet, became very associated with kind of upper classness in my mind. - And as we've discussed, there are a lot of detrimental effects of noise, but there's also something kind of complicated here about culture. On the one hand, a lot of people are forced to live in noiseier neighborhoods or multi-generational homes, and that doesn't have much space for silence. But the noise can also be joyful, and it can also just be normal. - I grew up in a three family house where everybody was related to me, and there was just constant cacophony. You know, there was always distant relatives coming in and out. We didn't have doors, it was a railroad apartment, so I didn't have a door to my rooms. My grandmother would be watching one thing in the room next to me, and then my grandfather would be watching something in another room in the summer. We didn't have AC, so then you were also kind of in the commune with whatever was happening out on the street. And you learn to function that way. And so in fact, many people have written to me since, is like, now would you learn to follow? that way. It is almost hard to function in quiet. And one thing she noticed after college, is that upper-crust preference for quiet, expanding outward in New York City, where she's from. I moved back then right around 2000, which was this wave of gentrification that kind of came, you know, like Brooklyn, became very hip, and most of my classmates were moving to Brooklyn, and then it was hard to not notice, particularly after the rezoning of Barclays, and we had all these high rises, you know, kind of happened around the Fort Green area, where I was living at the time. And I started to notice that that same demand for quiet was following into the neighborhood, into public spaces. And you saw like the shushing in restaurants, if a group of people was like laughing too loud or speaking too loudly, like you started to notice outside of bars, these signs that are like, please be respectful of our neighbors. And then like no one told you to live over a bar. Like what I started to find is that people, primarily people who had grown up in suburbs, were coming to the city, wanting the excitement of the city, but then wanting it to behave like a suburb in the places where they wanted it to behave like a suburb. I see this happen in different neighborhoods over time as well. Like when I first moved to New York City, I lived in Bedstuy, and there's this park where there used to be a lot more like birthday parties and family barbecues that would play music like quite late during the summer and stuff like that, especially dance hall. And I loved it because I was learning a new song that I didn't know before, but yeah, over time it's become less of that kind of space. And there's like a dog park and all this sort of stuff like that. But she's talking about it's absolutely a change that I've seen as well. And this is coming from me, a person who is suburb into the bone, okay, and moved here because I wanted to actually live a more noisy and people's life. Yeah, and there are plenty of quieter cities out there. I feel like to go someplace where you know that there are bars and clubs and community gatherings and especially parties in the park and decide that you're going to change that and to make them go away. It's wild. And it feels connected to me to what we were exploring in the dog poop episode, this type of entitlement, this suburbanization of the urban, this privatization where everything is going to become part of an individual little bubble. I get to police other people's behavior, but also I'm going to do whatever I want. I would love to see a van diagram of the people that are not cleaning up after their dogs and the people that are calling 3-1-1 or the police over noise. I'm like, what's going, let's get those stats out. Let's get those stats out. It's just a circle. It's just one circle. What's going on here? It's going on. Yeah. This reminds me of Ginger's bar, one of the few remaining lesbian bars in New York and in the country, and they announced this past summer that they were going to cancel their DJ events for Pride Month this year because of, quote, ongoing noise concerns in the neighborhood. Wait, wait, but Ginger's is an institution. Ginger's has been around for decades, like 25 years. I was going to say, yeah, it was a big deal. And like social said, nobody says you have to live above the bar. And like, I go there every so often with my friends. I have never seen it get rowdy outside. Like, first of all, they're playing Taylor Swift out there. I'm like, not to be stereotypical, but lesbians don't really get so uncouth like that. So, you know, actually, one of my best friends used to live, that was like her closest bar for a while. And that neighborhood at the time already was on the quieter side, even with whatever action was happening at Ginger's. Yeah. But back to what social is saying, there's actually a long history of certain complainers deciding the shape of New York soundscape going all the way back to 1906 with the founding of the society of the suppression of needless noise. This group successfully targeted peddlers hawking their wares on the streets of New York. And since then, there have been efforts from the city to curb its citizens' noise, sometimes using policing. For example, in 2002, officers partook in something called Operation Silent Night, where they went to the 24 noisiest neighborhoods with noise meters to catch people out. And they arrested over 7,000 violators that year. I personally just wonder who they were targeting with these types of arrests. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Curious as well. That is sick. Going around with noise meters to make arrests. I just think like with everything else going on, like Kim, there's people that are dying. You know? Literally, and I kind of had a personal moment with a noise meter once. Um, I remember I was in college and we were having a house party and someone called the cops on us. And they came to our door, like with the noise monitor thingy. And the guy was like, hello, um, you are about to pass the limit of Prince George's County noise ordinance for this hour. And I was like, about to? And he's like, yes, you're very close. And I was like, so we're not. He's like, yes. I was like, so you're coming to my door with the noise meter, but I'm not actually breaking the law. You want me to come inside and see if there's underage drinking? And I was like, we will turn the music off. Officer, thank you. Have a good night. Um, but it's like really some communities. They have that really, you know, locked down. This is not to say I think people can make any kind of noise they want at any hour. Believe me, I've had some incredibly loud labors and it is not fun. But getting the police involved feels kind of unnecessary, right? Yeah. I mean, if I was having an issue, I would like personally just go over there and just be like, hey, and you keep it down. You bang your rolling pin on their door gently. I mean, I'm getting to that age. I'm getting to Mrs. Roper age. Yeah. Yeah. But be direct. It just seems like me direct back to what we started with thinking about the short form video blasting out loud in public spaces everywhere. All this reporting has made me think more about how noise happens to us, what we're responsible for, and what we should compromise on or not. And I was curious about what social had to say about it, given that she's written in defensive noise. Now I know I've become like a public spokesperson for noise, which is so weird. It's not that I'm like an advocate for, you know, radios blasting outside your house all hours of the night, but I am an advocate for cohabitating and the necessities of compromise like in a big city. Yeah. But then there are things where you don't have to also be a jerk. You know what I mean? Like, not only is it anti-social, but it's the taking out of the headphones and the noise almost as like a repellent. It seems like what she's arguing for is not that we have to live in an environment totally sanitized from sound, but also kind of remembering that we live in a society. Let's clock that one. We live in a society. To social, these breaches of etiquette aren't new. I do want to say there was a phase where this happened and an equivalent phase back like in the early aughts where everybody did everything on speakerphone. I mean, can we verify? People did used to do a lot of speakerphone, but I remember from like the minute early minute aughts was the next tell, which I think later became Sprint. We used to go on and chirps. They had this like phone-to-phone like walkie-talkie thing where I wish I could it was like a little little little noise. Those had the DC bus system in a chokehold in the 2000s, but then they kind of fell out of fashion and then they disappeared. But yes, she's right about the speakerphone. Okay. I'm glad I asked because and let me not do my bad Cynthia or Revo impression. I didn't know that was happening, but anyway, she was saying that this feels different though from the speakerphone era. It's different when people would do the speakerphone thing. Like you could like kind of like huff and puff and be like, come on. Like, but I think that in the ensuing years particularly in the post-COVID time, I think that we don't ever know where that person is at. It might just be an obnoxious person that is like having this anti-social moment, but it might also be a person that is having an aggressive anti-social moment in order to not have an aggressive social moment, right? Like, I've now watched in the post-COVID years so many unexpected subway confrontations. Like, what's happening now is that we don't have a toolbox for how to engage with somebody. Like, I have yet to like engage with an adult in this way because I have now watched too many like behavioral corrections go wrong. Yo, that is really, really, really real. Like you never know what people are going to do now. Totally. The fact that we don't always feel safe to tell someone to cut something out, I think this is definitely downstream of the mental health crisis in this country. And I think it kind of adds to that randomized grab bag of like, what am I going to get if I choose to interact with this person? Real. Real. Like, sometimes a guy will come on with his Bluetooth speaker and sort of like look around and see if anybody's going to like dare to like say anything to him. It's like, I'm getting the vibe from you and you won. Congratulations. You took over the train car. Yeah, but that also reminds me of how nowadays like, sometimes people just want attention even for doing something negative. I'm thinking about like even how it concerts like people have really bad etiquette throwing shoes at their ostensible faves just rough stuff. We live in sort of a rage baiting world now. It's sad, honestly, but But with the blasting sound in public, whether it's that these people want that kind of negative attention, or it's out of a complete lack of care towards others, I don't know if I would say I pride myself on this, but I am the type of person who, if the situation seems not dangerous, I will tell people I will ask them politely to stop. If we're at the movie theater together and you're next to me and like, you're already going on your phone and it's been two minutes, I'm going to ask you to put it away because I just spent $20 to be here and get away from that thing and you're not going to compromise my experience because your brain is too rotted. Wow, you're real for that. But even as I personally think people themselves should be responsible for their own rude actions, it is almost always phones at the scene of the crime these days. Our parents were right, here's Kate again. To me, I think this is like a broader extension of like the anti-sociality of cell phones and like smartphones writ large, like you can't really separate it from other like anti-social uses of the phone. For example, photographing strangers, which I talked about on an earlier episode of it's been a minute or like, you know, private conversation screen shot posted on social media. This is like fundamentally anti-social behavior. So like once we like allowed certain kinds of anti-social behavior, especially with the rise of the smartphone and social media, the cat was kind of out of the bag and there are clearly behaviors that are pro social and behaviors that are anti-social. And so I think this discussion, and it's not just like people playing music out loud. I actually think that also like the inverse, which is wearing headphones all the time, is kind of equally sort of anti-social in a way. But these are new introductions to what we would call the urban soundscape are these kind of artifacts of digital life. I mean, she's really right. Even if I think about like approaching someone in public, it's one thing to tell someone to scoot over. You might be able to get one kind of reaction. But Laura Hammersy tells someone to put the phone down. Oh my gosh. I think that many people see their phone is an extension of the self. There is kind of like this merging of the phone and the self that makes people almost like doubly as offended. I feel like if you ask them to do something polite related to the phone, it's weird. We've sort of discussed machine noise and people noise. And this problem kind of lives at the nexus of both. And we've talked of course about the human aspect and how people are culpable. But I feel like the causes of machine noise in this case, and in general, there's a lot less accountability for it. Like I think all of this out loud video blasting is actually partly downstream from Apple's corporate decision making. If you recall, when they got rid of the headphone jack in 2016. Yeah. Well, the headphone jack happened to disappear the same year that AirPods were announced. Gritty. That is greedy. That is greedy. I don't disagree. And what I've come to again and again is that in the grand scheme of things, people noise is at the most benign end of the spectrum. And machine noise is so much more sinister. Like cars, again, huge contributors to noise pollution. And they're such a big part of our world. But there is one type of machine noise that's only just starting to become part of some soundscapes. And I'd say it's the scariest kind of noise I've come across in reporting this. It's the noise pollution that many data centers produce. Wait, I didn't realize that they produce noise. Okay, so it's a different type of noise. And what's wild about AI data center noise is that most people can't actually hear it. All of the machines needed to power and cool the centers, hum at low frequencies that feel more like subwoofers, it's like a deep rumbling bass vibration. How intense. Like, can you feel it physically? The low frequency energy of these physical vibrations is so powerful that some residents have reported their window casings, rattling and receiving physical damage from the constant low frequency vibration is shaking their home. Oh my God. That's a deal Hassan, a reporter for the New York Times who's written about data center noise. He told me that the people who live near these data centers can feel it up to a mile away and many report physical effects. They're describing neurological and ear issues, so vertigo, migraines, headaches, constant ringing in the ears. That's tinnitus, even fluid draining from the ears. That's very scary to contemplate. And there's a cardiovascular toll, which has been studied as well. There's spikes in anxiety, hypertension and high blood pressure and cardiovascular experts. Blink that to chronic noise induced stress. I mean, I've been hearing a lot about water, like the amount of water that AI data centers use up as like a potential public health crisis. I had heard nothing about noise and vibrations at all, nothing. Something that a deal stressed to me multiple times throughout our conversation is that it literally never ends. What makes data center noise is different is that it's 24/7. And so if you live next to an airport, even there are highway traffic tends to die down overnight. So like the relentless nature of the hum, it dominates the night. The residents describe waking up routinely at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. noting that once they hear the deep rumble, it's impossible to unherit and fall back asleep. And so that chronic sleep deprivation leaves them exhausted. Oh my God, I mean, this is really serious. Yeah. Even when people, let's say they want to move, let's say they want to sell their house. How could you possibly get rid of a property that now has this big mark on it? Who's going to want to buy that property if they know that this is part of why you're leaving? And another really kind of daunting or scary aspect about this is that if it isn't part of your community soundscape already, an AI data center, that is, it might well be soon. You're probably near one, and if you're not near one, there will be one coming near you. They are buying farmland across the country. They're moving in next door to exorbitant, suburban rural areas. They're also in cities. Some of the data centers are in industrial areas. So if your home is next to an industrial area, you have a much greater chance of having them in there. They're already zoned for industrial use. So the big tech companies don't have to go in front of a zoning board and get it changed. Okay, so don't local laws around sound make this constant noise legal? So a lot of communities do have noise laws on the books, but they aren't all designed to reign in this kind of noise that's already below human hearing. Data centers can also say that they are within the limits of noise ordinances. And they likely technically are, I think one important point to make is that most communities set their standards using an a weighted decibel scale and that was designed to mimic human hearing in a quiet environment and it significantly discounts or ignores the low frequency sounds emitted from data centers. The problem with these noise ordinances is they're just, they were created for a different time. They're written to address these leading neighborhood disturbances like block parties or barking dogs. It's another example of how since day one AI has outpaced attempts to govern or regulate it. And by the time any type of legislation can begin to approach the topic, the technology has morphed into something new. And for noise in particular, it's kind of already over for us on the federal level. Probably the main culprit of just all the problems we're having is that this clean air act gave the environmental protection agency the mandate to oversee noise pollution. And that led to the noise control act in 1972 and the creation of an office of noise abatement and control. And so there was a federal agency that really took noise seriously in the 1970s. And the Reagan administration came in and they defunded the office in 1981. And so the EPA still technically retains the legal authority to study noise, but there has been no federal enforcement or nationwide community noise standards for over 40 years. Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan found again at the scene up the crime. You're an alienable human right to blast your leaf blower on a Saturday morning has led to people reporting fluid leakage out of their ears because of data center vibrations. This kind of thing maybe wasn't a huge issue until recently. What is interesting is so much industry left this country in the 1970s. So I think they were able to kind of get away with it. Obviously we've had many presidents since Reagan and none of them have done anything with this office. So there's an advocacy group called quiet communities. They filed lawsuits against the EPA to force them to resume their congressional mandate. But until it happens, local governments are left to navigate these highly technical scientific issues completely on their own. My gosh, that's putting a lot of pressure on these like local communities. I mean, it can't be easy for them to know which experts to reach out to or even what the right questions are to ask. So what do people do, you know, if their houses start to shake? I don't know. I think communities are becoming aware of this. There are trying to pass some legislation to try to have this in. And there are also a ton of class action lawsuits that are currently happening. And some of the data center operators are aware of this problem and attempting to do some noise mitigation themselves. There is no single magic bullet to resolve data center noise pollution. But some of the things they're trying to do are they're using sound deadening mats and installing noise absorbing acoustic tiles or foam panels on the interior walls and ceiling. things of the data halls for the outside machinery, they're adding compressor sound blankets, fan silencers and sound curtain barriers that help absorb the noise. One of the things that we can be slightly optimistic about is that data center operators are moving away from fans and trying to use like liquid gel that like bath tubs where the servers sit in these cooling gels that so you don't need as many fans and you don't have as much noise. The magical goo that makes your data center less noisy. Jeez, oh, Pete's. I mean, I guess I'm glad that they're doing something, but I don't know, this whole thing is really unsettling. Yeah, and I hope that at least as more people find out about it, they'll be able to understand what it might bring for their community and how they can best prepare themselves in the future. But this story took a turn that I really didn't expect. Yeah, I started out as Larry David and now I'm ending up in Sinclair, who's kidding, I wish. But I do think that this ultimately leads to a sort of conclusion that we need to reassess the culture of noise in the United States. On all sides of the issues, I feel like we need to be accountable to each other. I think we can recognize there's a time and place for noise, and that different communities may have different rules for what noise is acceptable. But going back to what Sochiul said, I think the most important thing is to just not be a jerk. We have to be able to have conversations with each other about social norms in a peaceful way, person to person. But when it comes to data center noise, who do we hold accountable? You cannot just go and have a conversation with a corporation. Do we point to them to make changes, to local legislators, federal law makers, the EPA? We're in the very early days of an issue that will define our time. And it might take a while before we come together to make feel change on this. But pulling on data centers among Americans is very negative. So as anti-social as I feel like our culture is right now, this might be the kind of public noise that brings us together. Mind while you're absolutely right, this was a journey I was not expecting to go on at the beginning of our conversation, but I am so glad that you informed me about this data center noise. Thank you for investigating all this. I really appreciate it. Sometimes the iceberg of a complaint goes down to a real structural issue is what dog-prevent TikToks have taught me. So I'm glad to keep doing it. That was Marmela Lopez-Mistrepo, writer and producer at All Things Considered. This episode of It's Been A Minute was produced by Liam McBain. This episode was edited by Nina Potuck. Engineering support came from Jimmy Keeley. Our supervisor and producer is Sheriff Vincent. Our executive producer is Barton Gerwood. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sangueni. All right, that's all for this episode of It's Been A Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Loose. Talk soon.