A criticism paper arguing consumer playback UIs (YouTube/Spotify/etc.) reduce playback control to a coarse discrete speed menu, where a record scratch — and Aesthetic Computer's own players (video.mjs velocity scrubbing + inertia + pitch-bend, dj.mjs turntable, speaker-bundled.mjs granular time-stretch) — offer continuous, gestural, real-time control. The unclaimed position is playback-as-instrument in the default transport of the surfaces that own consumer listening/watching. Grounded in the theory of directness (Hutchins/Hollan/Norman, Shneiderman, Buxton DOF/chunking, Card/Mackinlay/Robertson resolution, Moore MIDI), turntablism (Hansen), elastic audio (Ableton/Serato), and prior art (Lee & Borchers DiMaß 2006, djay, Pacemaker). All citations verified against primary sources via an adversarial multi-agent pass; platform facts current as of July 2026. Registered in cli.mjs (Essays) + metadata. Conceptual cover generated by figures/make-cover.mjs. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>