We don’t have an iPod. We have a first-generation Dell DJ. Compared to the design of the opalescent obelisk ubiquitously clutched in every hipster’s hand, the Dell DJ is striking. It looks exactly as if Soviet super-scientists invented a time machine, traveled to the future, copped on to the inherently socialist nature of the music trading scene, and — traveling back to their own era — attempted to make their own mp3 player out of a two-inch plate of Soviet-grade titanium tank plating. Fifty years later, Dell.ru found about a million of these in an abandoned Muscovite silo, dusted them off, formatted “Lenin’s Greatest Hits” off the hard drive and sold them as is, to idiots like probably-not-you but definitely-royal-‘we’.
