If Beethoven owned an iPhone

Hot take: I hate tech. Maybe that’s too harsh. I would be out of a job without technology. I wouldn’t be able to easily communicate with my vast network of 43 Substack subscribers (THANK YOU, BTW!) without technology. Although I’d never used it before, by the time the 2020 shelter-in-place orders came around, I was very happy that Facetime existed.

But I am from the generation that remembers what life was like before the internet, before tablet-parenting, before 8 hours of screen time per day. An era of spending hours in a library, holding actual books, flipping through musky encyclopedias and primary source texts rather than begging an answer from Siri or Chat GPT. In 2025, 25% of teens are using AI to do their homework¹. Gen Z spends three of their daily EIGHT hours(!) of screen time looking at social media sites. We are getting dumber every day.

I present: some facts

As we now know², LLMs like Chat GPT and Meta “learn” by straight-up stealing and plagiarizing art and literature that was painstakingly crafted by ACTUAL artists, creating what—in my view—is a sloppy, tasteless stew of content “creation”. This has all made me worry what our timeline’s enduring cultural contributions will be—and wonder what art, literature, music we would be consuming today, if the cultural giants of the past had access to the same sad, pathetic technology.³

Portrait of Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler 1820, modified by Yours Truly, 2024 (NOT using AI)

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If Beethoven owned an iPhone

his symphonies would number not 9, but 2 
(perhaps two and a half, leaving one
“Unfinished” like Bruckner did). 

He would check his Twitter mentions 
after every performance, scroll
the BBC Music app with each album dropped. 

Ghost vibrations would leave incomplete
his Opus 70 Ghost Trio. 
Fretting about his branding, 

he’d compose and orchestrate his LinkedIn bio.
If his Heiligenstadt Testament 
were leaked to Buzzfeed, he’d need to release 

a PR video on YouTube,
sit down with Terry Gross, 
post pics of his semicolon tattoo. 

He’d never finish the Große Fuge,
nor the Tempest Sonata.
Conducting his Triple Concerto from the piano, 

he might butt-dial that Soprano 
he collabed with once six years ago. 
He would totally tote his Zelfie-Schtüken

on his daily walks around @RathausPark.
#NeverNotComposing
He would force his niece 

to post TikToks of herself twerking
to his latest mixtape. 
On death’s stoop, he’d doomscroll

in a darkened room, puffy undereyes,
shock of iconic hair cast in a sallow blue glow, 
holding the speaker end to his deaf ear,

volume full, feeling fomo 
for his protégé’s Première.
#yolo

1. https://www.npr.org/2025/01/18/g-s1-43115/chatgpt-teen-school-homework-classroom-ai

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/

3. For example, did you realize that Beethoven would often compose at his piano, with a chamber pot right under it? That’s right: this man was so focused (a word that has lost all meaning in our modern glorification of “multi-tasking”) on his art that he wouldn’t even get off his piano bench long enough to take a dump. That’s dedication.