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the replies are full of "how dare you gatekeep hiking, people are entitled to create their own desired experiences!!!"' if you were wondering how deep consumer brainrot goes. as if the woods were a purchased experience and not, you know, a fucking shared multispecies ecosystem https://twitter.com/roastmalone_/status/1348073082045440000
i went hiking in december in a huge tract of state forest on a day when someone on another nearby trail decided to scream in a really gutchurning, scary way and then laugh loudly, over and over for about 20+ minutes? it sent my heart rate through the roof.
and maybe it's gatekeepy and judgey to say "please don't play music loudly on a hiking trail" but like... there are plenty of situations where we already feel comfortable telling people not to do that. like at the movies. at church. at a play. in a waiting room.
it is not, in fact, universally acceptable to play loud music through your shitty phone speakers! there are already limits to that behavior. and nobody's saying "don't ever play music in a PARK." play music at your bbq, knock yourself out! but a hiking trail isn't a picnic area.
deep in the state forest is one of the only places you can go that isn't noise polluted, without even the sound of cars, that is *genuinely* quiet. and that is an experience that is important to a lot of people. i assume it's also beneficial to the animals that live there. idk.
there is so little quiet in the city where i live. quiet is a luxury. and a necessity for people with sensory shit going on. like do you know what my brain DOES when it hears two songs in public at once over two different speakers, which happens all the time??? i hope you don't.
there is almost nowhere you can go that doesn't offer you an experience of consumption: whether it's a product, a piece of media, whatever. there's almost nowhere you can go that isn't trying, in a very constructed way, to tell you in advance how to feel about the experience.
(and like, i get it, the concept of "experiencing nature" is itself a construct of western capitalist-imperialist hegemony that separates us from our environment and then sells us back an "authentic" encounter with said environment. i am excrutiatingly fucking aware of this.)
but i still like a little quiet on the trail. i don't like to be forced to listen to other people's music there, esp. because music works purposefully to put you in a particular mood or emotional state. i do not go miles into the fucking woods to be told how to feel by a song.
talk in the woods with your friends all you want! talk on the phone if you get lonely or you're scared of walking by yourself. the woods can and should be a social experience if you want that. but playing a speaker forces an experience onto others, and i'm not into it.
i'm also talking about, like, heavily trafficked east coast state parks. not deep backcountry. do whatever the fuck you gotta do in deep backcountry to make it out alive.
like every day of my life my worst neighbor blares bad music into MY house through her tv, because it is mounted directly on her bareass "exposed brick" wall, and people are trying to say it's their godgiven right to pump a stereo in the cockfucking woods? get a hundred grips
almost literally everywhere else on earth but the actual honest to fuck forest is a place i have to endure a soundtrack i cannot control. if it becomes common to carry bluetooth speakers in the woods i WILL become a supervillain with lazers
