Steven Levy recounts and celebrates the “iPod Revolution,” the story of everyone’s favorite portable digital music device. Now, I’ve always been an Apple fan, always been a Mac user, and I’m glad to see the company prospering. That said, it’s pretty irresponsible to do what Levy does here and leave out the roll a really dumb law and some business blunders by the record labels have played in the iPod’s rise to hegemony.

In particular, if you went out and bought an iPod, and then you wanted to legally acquire some music for it, the only place you could turn was the iTunes Music Store. And, once you’d built up a library of songs purchased through the iTunes Music Store, the only place you can play the songs is . . . on an iPod. So if when your iPod’s battery dies, you think to yourself “fuck this, I’m going to buy a different company’s player,” well, doing that will require you to re-buy all your music. So you buy another iPod, and you buy more music and you’re further and further locked-in. Even better, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal for a rival firm to construct a player capable of playing legally owned iTunes Music Store files. This is a great deal for Apple who, in virtue of being first, gets to entrench its advantage deeper-and-deeper but it’s not very smart legislation.

Even weirder, using Digital Rights Management to produce this sort of circular lock-in wasn’t Apple’s initial plan for the music store. Instead, they wound up incorporating the DRM features that are key to their business model at the insistence of the record companies, who haven’t actually accomplished anything for themselves (it’s still very easy to illegally download MP3 files) while accidentally creating a new music industry juggernaut.

Greg Djerijian asks whether America’s “unipolar moment” is waning. The real issue here is that the unipolar moment prophesied by Charles Krauthammer in 1990 was always somewhat illusory. The true unipolar moment came not in 1990, but in 1946, when the United States enjoyed something like half of the world’s economic output and a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Since that time, the long-term trajectory of US relative power had been distinctly downward. The collapse of the USSR bumped it back up, but not back to anything resembling 1946 levels and didn’t alter the long run trajectory. Nor should this be a surprise — sustaining the 1946 status quo would have been impossible and would have entailed miring the vast majority of humanity in a permanent state of economic misery. It’s worth remembering that Robert Keohane’s book on what happens to U.S. foreign policy After Hegemony was published in 1984 and locates the end of hegemony in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

For various reasons, by the dawn of the 21st century we’d arrived at a situation where only the United States maintained a serious capacity to “project” military power to regions distant from its borders. Nevertheless, a great many countries containing a majority of the world’s people could not realistically be subjected to direct military coercion of this sort. In terms of non-military forms of power (including the coercive “hard power” of economics) the United States had long been the strongest player, but not strong enough to generate its preferred outcomes without cooperation from other major players. There’s a reason, after all, while real or contemplated US military interventions during the so-called post-1990 “unipolar moment” have been concentrated in the Middle East and Africa — these are the regions where there are no particularly strong local players so the sharp divergence in the great powers’ ability to project force becomes decisive.

Tyler Cowen suggests a simple model, I’ll explain and elaborate a bit below the fold.

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