Fortune, Favor, and the Roads I Didn’t Take

I once sat in classrooms where the future had already happened.

At Northeastern University, I was majoring in music industry and taking copyright law for musicians just a couple years after Napster blew open the entire business. The founder, Shawn Fanning, had sat in those same rooms not long before me. I wasn’t studying a stable profession. I was studying the crater.

Professors were rewriting syllabi in real time.
Copyright law stopped being abstract and became existential.
We argued whether an MP3 was a copy, a performance, or something the law didn’t yet have a word for.

The quiet realization hung in the room that the rules were already behind the technology and always would be.

Outside class, I carried an early Windows-compatible iPod through Boston and New York. You could spot others instantly by the white headphones. We’d give each other a subtle nod, like we were part of a small, temporary future. One minute you were trading files in dorm rooms, the next you were parsing statutes written for piano rolls and vinyl trying to stretch them over broadband.

I watched an industry break while I was learning its rulebook.

But the story actually starts before Boston, with a list.