The death of imagination

This unscientific survey and the reponses remind me of Plato's allegory of the cave. In the allegory, people are chained up in a cave, facing a wall on which are projected the shadows of objects passing between a fire and the wall. The people cannot see the objects themselves, only their shadows. Plato used this allegory to explain there is a reality truer than what we perceive, and this reality consists of theoretical forms. (For the CliffsNotes version, watch The Matrix.)

The allegory is useful in a semantic/linguistic context. When I say "dog," you may imagine a hundred different breeds of dog, all of which would be correct. Lassie and Cujo are both dogs. But in our shared language, there's a theoretical dog that all those dogs are particular instances of.

When I tried it, I was surprised how long it took me to see anything. When I'm writing, I envision spaceships joined by a latticework of human-sized hamster tubes, mining colonies on the slopes of a Martian volcano, an island city situated in the middle of a crescent-shaped bay. Something as simple as an apple should be child's play! But all I saw at first was the dark red of the backs of my eyelids. I didn't get a clear picture of the apple until I imagined picking one up and eating it. Touch and taste are unique properties of an apple, so that helped.

In Theaetetus, Socrates says "the mind in itself is its own instrument for contemplating the common terms that apply to everything." In other words, knowledge is the ability to intuit universals from a set of particulars. What does it say about people if they can barely recall the shadows of the real objects they cannot see? How does that bode for their capacity to perceive universal truths?

The armchair psychologist in me says being surrounded by hypervisual media causes the other senses as well as the imagination to dull. I live as if that's true, and limit my kids' screen time accordingly.

By the way, 400 years after Plato, Paul wrote to the church in Colossae:

Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.

...and the author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote:

The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Earthbound and moribund

You love to hear it.

Musk, apparently already dubbing himself reigning emperor of the red planet, said that Mars wouldn't just be an “escape hatch for rich people.”

“It's going to be uncomfortable and you probably won’t have good food, and all these things, you know,” he said. He noted that colonizing Mars would be “dangerous... uncomfortable... a long journey, you might not come back alive, but it's a glorious adventure and it'll be an amazing experience.”

He added: “If an arduous and dangerous journey where you might not come back alive, but it's a glorious adventure, sounds appealing, Mars is the place. That's the ad for Mars.”

Despite this, Musk didn't think he would have any trouble finding volunteers. “Honestly, a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning. It's tough sledging over there, you know. We don't make anyone go,” he added about a colonization project that doesn't really even exist. “It's volunteers only.”

Musk is the rare billionaire whose billions haven't made him more cautious. He couldn't have pitched it any better unless he was Heinlein writing the ad that kicks off the plot of Glory Road: "ARE YOU A COWARD? This is not for you. We badly need a brave man." There's not a red-blooded man alive who doesn't get a thrill thinking about being on that crew.

The effeminate, finger-wagging tone of the writer couldn't be more off-putting. We would have made nothing of ourselves or this world without smart, fit, motivated young men doing the bidding of visionaries and egomaniacs. The post-war liberal consensus drove man's rudimentary nature into hiding, and we act surprised when it surfaces and manifests in unapproved ways. Young men will search far and wide for the camaraderie and sense of accomplishment that forges strangers into brothers. This is a worthy application of that effort.

"Space exploration has always been plagued by naysayers who insist that every problem here on earth must be solved before we even think of leaving." –Dean Bradley

It's interesting how people who advocate pouring trillions of dollars into failed government programs to lift people out of poverty morph into penny-pinching cynics when it comes to space exploration.

Mr. Neanevu's use of "human race" here betrays a mistaken (or perhaps totalitarian) sense of collective destiny for all people. As if subgroups of people never broke the bonds to their land, their nation, their country, to strike out on their own! Such was God's call to Abraham, and he obeyed. This is a recurring theme in the travels and travails of man, as old as history.

I suspect a genuine myopia underlies Mr. Nwanevu's tweet, a myopia shared by many whose minds boggle at the costs and challenges of space exploration. In which case, it's helpful to review recent history.

How easy it is to forget that the Industrial Revolution began a sustained period of rapid technical achievement that continues today. A lucky boy who may have witnessed the Wright brothers' first powered flight in North Carolina would have watched Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon 67 years later. In the same span of time streaming TV shows and movies replaced the radio drama as the go-to home entertainment medium. Who could have known at the time the changes that were coming? Our finite minds cannot fathom how technology will advance.

One of the biggest costs of space exploration is getting astronauts and their gear into space. Thanks to reusable rockets, those costs are going way, way down. Bigger savings can be squeezed from 3D printers, which are rapidly becoming more sophisticated. In-situ resource utilization will be key to a sustainable colony on Mars. Instead of waiting 6 months for a prefabbed part to ship from Earth, you can download the blueprint via satellite and build it from the raw materials you pulled out of the ground in less than a day.

That's not science fiction. That's real tech we can deploy today. Tomorrow, who knows?

Let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

'Cinderella': more than the sum of its parts

Being the father of two little girls, I've spent many a sleepy Saturday afternoon screening 1950's Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. The debate over which is better has come up now and then between me and my wife. As usual with meaningless arguments, they never reach a satisfying conclusion, even when I'm right.

In all seriousness, I think Cinderella is better. Although I love the visual style of Sleeping Beauty and the climactic showdown with Maleficent, Cinderella is more cohesive and thus more engaging. Allow me to explain. I'll assume you've seen both movies.

In Cinderella, the B plot featuring adorable talking mice and Lucifer, the malicious cat, complements the A plot, Cinderella's persecution by her stepmother and stepsisters. The mice repay Cinderella's kindness by helping to fashion her a dress for the royal ball, and later to free her from the attic room. Lucifer, who tries to stop the mice in the end, is effectively doing the stepmother's bidding by keeping Cinderella locked in her room. The mice's plight is her plight.

By contrast, when looking for a B plot in Sleeping Beauty, one comes up empty. Princess Aurora is shown to be friendly with the woodland creatures, but they disappear from the story when she goes for a sing and a stroll with Prince Phillip. The closest thing that comes to a B plot is the question of whether Phillip will marry Aurora, and the tension this creates between their fathers. Unlike the tension between the impatient king and bumbling Grand Duke in Cinderella that leads to the royal ball and the glass slipper fitting, the tension here goes nowhere. It's literally put on hold for the third act.

Another point of disfavor for me is the means by which that comes about. When Aurora touches Maleficent's spindle and falls into a deep sleep, the fairies' solution is to cast a sleeping spell over everyone in the kingdom until Aurora wakes up. Huh? Perhaps the fairy tale explains this better, but the movie executes this device poorly. It's only by dumb luck Phillip escapes the spell by going back to the cottage where he expects to meet Aurora. He's captured by Maleficent instead.

Now we come to the climactic third act. Here Sleeping Beauty has the action/adventure content that's more my speed. Phillip's duel with the dragon is spectacular, and I love that his shield of righteousness and sword of truth evokes Paul's advice to the church in Ephesus.

One can't help but regret Phillip wasn't the main character of Sleeping Beauty. It would have given the duel, and his subsequent waking of Aurora with a kiss, more punch. Thinking on it, without the clue in the title, it's debatable who the main character actually is. Other than falling in love with Phillip, Aurora does nothing to drive the plot forward, and she's absent for the third act. The fairies have the most consistent presence from beginning to end, but theirs is ostensibly a supporting role, first helping Aurora, then Phillip.

Well-formed narrative structure can lead to seeming contradictions, such as the payoff of the Grand Duke putting the glass slipper on Cinderella's foot surpassing Phillip's slaying the dragon. With Cinderella, nothing feels out of place. Every scene supports her as a character, highlighting her admirable qualities, unjust persecution, and yearning for happiness. I have to work harder to connect to Aurora.

I do love the visuals, though.

Interesting tidbit: Helene Stanley was the live-action model for both Cinderella and Princess Aurora.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Reflections on media

I guess I saw the writing on the wall a long time ago, but last year I started to believe it. Consequently I chose to be more strategic about a lot of things. One area was my physical media collection. I resold and threw out a lot of music, movies, and books I had no use for anymore. I have very few games for my '90s consoles and stone-age computer, so I kept all of them.

For Christmas I got a huge CD/DVD binder, which I filled with all my DVDs and Blu-Rays. Those movie cases were taking up a lot of space, so I threw them out to reduce clutter. Now I could walk from my office door to my chair without tripping over piles of junk. Uncovering the peeling vinyl floor was a proud moment for me.

I lost something in that, and I don't mean the movie cases themselves. I lost the possibility of sitting in my office chair and gazing at my movie library, every title arrayed before me. Each title would evoke memories of the plot, the characters, the dialogue, the action, the times when I used to pick out one of them in the spur of the moment and be transported for 2 hours, back when I was a bachelor and my time was disposable. That just doesn't happen anymore.

Flipping through the binder requires a bit more intent. But it's like flipping through a photo album. Because I rarely have 2 hours to spare, the memories suffice most of the time.

Less can be said for my stock of ebooks. Some are files on my phone formatted for Kindle or OverDrive. Most I don't even own; they exist in cyberspace at the behest (or forbearance, depending on how you look at it) of Amazon's server admins. Regardless of whether I own the files or not, they barely exist. I can access them whenever I want to, but the wanting to depends on their being present. Out of sight, out of mind.

Not so for physical books, the highest tier of media. Is there a better combo of form and function than the printed word, pressed and bound? I think not.

My books occupy a box and several shelves in my office. Their presence avails anyone who wanders past the chance to read them, a hand always extended in invitation. Because of this they cannot be forgotten.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Is the space race back on?

The political neutrality that governs space puzzles me. All previous human expansion was combative, prioritizing strength and speed. Look at the Goths, Genghis Khan, the Scramble for Africa, the Oklahoma land rush. The early days of Russians and Americans "pushing the envelope" to be the first to do [x] in space reflected this trend. Then detente became de facto policy in the '70s, and both countries pulled back.

Why? Was it Mutually Assured Destruction? The ascendance of transnational post-war liberalism as the predominant ethos? The realization there's nothing strategically worth gaining or defending in space?

Perhaps all three. But conditions are changing. This article is dated last October:

Russia is unlikely to participate in the Moon-orbiting station planned by the United States, a Russian official said Monday, marking the probable end of the type of close cooperation seen for two decades on the International Space Station (ISS).

The proposed new station, called the Gateway, "is too US-centric, so to speak," Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, said, adding Russia was "likely to refrain from participating in it on a large scale."

Here's Rogozin again in March:

Last week, Moscow and Beijing signed a memorandum agreeing to build a research station with a “complex of experimental and research facilities,” with the aim of an eventual human presence on Earth’s only natural satellite.

In response, an article published in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post called the proposed lunar station “an ominous sign for the West.” According to Rogozin, this is a complete misunderstanding of the program.

“This is not true,” the Roscosmos chief tweeted on Monday. “The plans of Russia and China on the Moon are open to broad international participation. This is not about confrontation, but about cooperation in the exploration of the Moon.”

Cooperation implies shared goals. When goals are not shared, cooperation ends. This isn't hard. Frankly, I'm amazed America and Russia have managed to cooperate on space missions to the extent they've been able to, considering they are not cooperating in Georgia, or Syria, or Ukraine. Still, one can't fault Rogozin for trying to hide the obvious. The implications of this would undermine quite a few fictions that hold up the global power structure.

All the antipathy in the world doesn't account for the Russians siding with China vis-à-vis the Moon. It signals a change in the Russians' strategic assessment. Why might they want their own Moon base separate from the Americans'? The most obvious reason is they want to claim as much territory for themselves as possible. As to what purpose, who knows?

Of one thing you can be sure: For as long as space missions depend on their sponsors, they will continue to reflect the interests of those entities. In the near-term, the political landscape on the Moon will not be all that different than it is on Earth.

Looking ahead, mid-century perhaps, it will behoove sponsors to keep their colonies dependent so they continue to serve their interests. That could take the form of rationing meds, erecting barriers to trade, or holding back technological progress.

If that kind of stuff fascinates you, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid

The tell-tale signs of a cult are these:

• Loss of personal agency
• Loss of contact with the outside world
• Hostility to contrary opinions
• Loyalty without question, particularly to the leader
• Indulgence in vices, especially sex or drugs
• Strong inducements to not leave the cult, including threats of harm and social isolation
• Unorthodox doctrine (if a religious cult)

There are others, I'm sure. But these are what I observed while reading Jeff Guin's book, The Road to Jonestown, about the Peoples Temple, infamous for its mass suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to anyone, for it's not a pleasant read. But it does its job well, which is to inform the reader about its subject.

My interest in the Jonestown massacre lies in the events leading up to it. I want to know how people can be led down such a dark path as to even contemplate killing themselves and their children. I don't believe all or even most of Jim Jones's followers were insane. I believe they were seduced by a fine-sounding argument, and the descent into madness was the slow working out of that argument to its logical conclusion. Without a firm grasp of elemental truths, we all are susceptible to repeating false arguments. You see evidence of that today, when otherwise well-adjusted people spew inanities as rote.

Peoples Temple started as an ostensibly Christian church. Jim Jones paid lip service to the God of the Bible, but the social mission was always priority one. In a way, Jim Jones lived the Gospel. He cared for the old and the sick, fed and clothed the poor, and rehabilitated criminals and drug addicts. He preached equality and fairness.

Does this sound good to you? If it does, it's because the attractiveness of heresy is its proximity to truth. Jones gathered a fiercely loyal following because he had the appearance of "walking the walk." He put himself last by serving members' needs.

There were red flags that should have (and did) turn away orthodox Christians who were nonetheless impressed by Jones's works. He staged healings with chicken offal pretending as removed tumors. He instituted corporal punishment of adult members for backsliding. He kept a harem of female Temple members, by whom he fathered two children. He claimed to be reincarnations of famous world figures. He openly mocked God.

In the later years, the details of a week in the life of a Temple member beggar belief. They highlight the concessions to good conscience Temple members made. Not everyone who was a Temple member believed in God; they were drawn to the Temple because of its socialist mission. The contradiction of atheist socialists and nominal Christians worshiping together worked by sheer force of Jones's will. It was common during Jones's extended absences for attendance and offerings to drop off a cliff.

Because of Jones, "drinking the Kool-Aid" entered common parlance as a euphemism for following a deranged cult leader. You could broaden the term to mean the uncritical acceptance of a deadly epistemological error. When faced with contradictory evidence, the cult gives its members coping mechanisms to rationalize the error.

One effective coping mechanism is the necessity of belonging. No one likes to be left outside while everyone he knows is inside. Another is a sense of inevitability. If the error is enforced by powerful people, resistance can seem futile.

Don't be fooled by princes and principalities. They are no rival to the one true God:

Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. (Isaiah 41:10)

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

The 3 camps of consumer revolt

The consumer revolt borne from Disney's mismanagement—in some cases deliberate subversion—of its IPs has had little to no effect on their business. Disney+ grew by 21.2 million subscribers in the last quarter of 2020 alone. Brand inertia is real. As Bradford C Walker writes:

Brands operate as cults and use cult psychology to attract and retain loyal paypigs who will eat the slop no matter how foul it tastes or how much they dislike it.

Disney's mismanagement continued in the first quarter of 2021 with the firing of Gina Carano from The Mandalorian. #CancelDisneyPlus trended for like a day, undoubtedly nicking Disney's subscriber count. But you need to make deep cuts to take down a giant. The consuming masses, ignorant of or ambivalent about Carano's firing, drowned out the justified outrage.

The rebellion, if you will, has been in full swing for 5 years. Naturally its inability to achieve tangible results has caused it to split into camps. They differ in end goal and strategy.

1. Agitate. Agitate against Disney's managerial incompetence until they get it right. This has become a drama in itself, framed as a pitched battle between IP purists and woke Pharisees, or a special forces siege against terrorists who took the IP hostage.
   
   I lurked in this camp until about 2 years ago, when I realized it had devolved into a tiresome, reactionary echo chamber that had effectively monetized clicks and outrage. To paraphrase Brian Niemeier, don't rely on someone who profits from a problem to fix it.


2. Rehabilitate. Stop buying Disney products, and encourage friends and family to boycott until Disney learns the error of its ways and comes around to respecting its fans again. This assumes, incorrectly, that corporations can't make a profit at the lower end of the demand curve. They can. Losses are only temporary as they scale back operations.
   
   The epidemic destroyed demand for Disney's movies and theme parks, two huge components of their business. They're a smaller company now after laying off 32,000 of their 223,000 employees. Even though they lost money in 2020, it was their second-best year in terms of revenue.


3. Obliterate. In my opinion, the only strategy that has a reasonable chance of success. Replace the baleful Mouse's products with newer, better products. While I have more respect for camp 2 than I have for camp 1, both of them are essentially consumer mentalities.
   
   This here is a competitor mentality. It's what all the indie authors and creators in the blogroll are striving for. It wasn't activism or boycotts that put buggy manufacturers out of business; it was Henry Ford. Ford risked failure in order to give consumers a choice. The choice didn't start with them; it started with him when he decided to take a risk.

All creativity is risk. You never know what will sell until you put it in front of people and let them choose.

So, if you have a creative bone in your body, give people a choice. If you're a consumer, know that you have a choice. You don't have to settle for corporate, ideologically driven, focus-grouped entertainment. There are artists out there who respect you. They can stretch your dollar further, too.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Don't send a robot to do a man's job

I'm not one to romanticize nature, but I entertain an unconfirmed theory that man was better when he was at odds with nature. When man conquered nature and was set up in worldly comfort, he turned his efforts to conquering God and removing His claim to His children. As is often the case with patricide, the murderer, having to live with his murder, suffers more than the victim.

One theater where man's ennobling battle against nature continues is space. Since we're still over 3 years (!!!) from putting a man on the Moon again, currently all eyes are on Mars. The hopes for the Perseverance rover are high, as the United States's last three Mars rovers have logged 30 years of service, and Curiosity is still going.

Next week the Ingenuity drone helicopter will take flight on the Martian surface. It's scheduled to make five flights, but it's the first one that really matters. The atmosphere is 1% as dense as Earth's, which is offset by a factor of three by Mars's weak gravity.

If Ingenuity can stay in the air using a pre-programmed flight plan, it opens the door for future missions to expand their range of operations. One thing Mars rovers are not is fast. It will take Perseverance years to simply go to where it needs to complete its mission. A helicopter with an instrument package and greater wingspan would be the logical next step in unmanned Martian exploration.

If Ingenuity fails—if it can't take off or it crashes—it'll confirm what skeptics like me have been saying for years. We need to put a man on Mars. I cheer Perseverance on, but it's doing a man's job at one one-thousandth the pace. Some say we're going to the Moon as a dress rehearsal for Mars, even though the Moon and Mars are nothing alike. The only way you can maintain that narrative is to make a future manned Mars mission dependent on the success of your manned Moon mission.

The more we learn about space, the greater the gulf in those missions grows. We now know extended periods of time spent in zero gee causes the heart to atrophy. Moon missions last a few weeks at most and don't need to worry about bringing along exercise equipment. Mars missions will. At least one of the astronauts who goes to Mars will spend closer to 2 years in zero gee. There's a good chance he will need extended rehab upon his return to Earth, no matter how fit he is when he leaves.

Our continued reliance on rovers betrays an aversion to risk that is an order of magnitude greater than the Apollo days. No doubt there are men chomping at the bit to be the first to visit another planet. But ours is not an explorer society. We're an insurance adjuster society.

Nevertheless, the spirit of Manifest Destiny is being revived by the kinds of eccentric personalities that used to populate the halls of NASA before it became yet another alphabet bureaucracy. I'm looking at you, Elon. Thanks to people like him I'll see men piloting helicopters on Mars in my lifetime.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Brevity is the soul of wit

For me, watching creatives achieve storytelling heights with limited resources is a neverending marvel. By limited resources, I don't mean just money; although, that is a glaring factor in movie, TV, and game productions. The writer, on the other hand, is bound only by his imagination and the limits of the medium. The only real costs are ink and paper, which the industry has simplified to a calculation based on wordcount.

How long should a story be? However long it needs to be, is the best answer. (Or, if you're Zack Snyder, twice as long it needs to be.) From a story-telling perspective, the quotas tradpub puts on words is completely arbitrary. Which is why, despite my misgivings about the digitization of entertainment, I still celebrate the ebook revolution. There is no set length for ebooks, so the writer can tell the story in as few or as many words as necessary.

In the last couple of years, David V Stewart has done well self-publishing short-form books. His Eyes in the Walls was one of the best stories I read last year. I can't recommend it enough! But rarely does tradpub take a chance on a standalone novella of 120 pages.

Movies are undergoing their own change. It used to be movies respected a hard upper limit of 3 hours. Then the coronavirus killed theaters and pushed Hollywood onto the small screen. Now movies are no longer constrained by how long you can sit in a dark theater with a belly full of popcorn and carbonated soda. Realizing this, Warner Bros. released a gratuitous 4-hour cut of Justice League to sell HBO Max subscriptions to DC Comics cultists.

Is it worth it? I could give many reasons why not, but the one I'll focus on here is time. The older I get, the more I value my time. Nothing upsets me like wasting my time. If you want to sell me a 4-hour movie, it had better be on par with Ron Maxwell's Gettysburg or the The Return of the King extended edition. By all accounts Justice League was a mediocre 2-hour movie. Four hours to tell basically the same story is the definition of self-indulgence. It verges on disrespect for the audience.

Then again, I'm not their audience. This guy, whom the well-worn aphorism "quality over quantity" was meant for, is.

In an era of virtually limitless data, creatives are tempted to push the upper limits of length in their stories. They do so at risk of alienating their audience, who are still limited in the amount of what they consume by time. Style differences aside, storytelling done right is tight, efficient, and economical. It should linger to drive home significant points, and it should describe to excess when the reader's imagination fails.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Your hill to defend

After I went running last night, you know what I did while waiting for my pulse to come down and the sweat on my forehead to dry? I sat in my office chair and watched an hour of Looney Tunes' Pepe le Pew. Next week I'll get around to watching Gone with the Wind. The only reason I borrowed these DVDs from the library is I expect I won't be able to watch them in the future. Our commissars drove the amorous French skunk who made children laugh from polite society last month for violating their current year sensibilities. HBO Max—"the world's worst streaming service" according to Christopher Nolan—temporarily removed Gone with the Wind before restoring it with humiliating commentary videos to put the movie "in context." If Gone with the Wind is indeed guilty of what it stands accused of, there's only one acceptable outcome to the commissars: digital death.

I don't want to get into why I despise the cleansing of legacy IPs from cultural memory, or the many ways it exemplifies a decadent society. The point is our house is on fire, and there's a limited amount of time to save our things before it collapses. Pepe le Pew went from the subject of a throwaway line in a C-list New York Times column to cut from the Space Jam sequel in 5 days. While many of us were hearing about the latest outrage and having a good laugh, corporate board members at Warner Bros. were holding crisis meetings. As usual, they listened to the loudest voices and those most privileged by supposed grievances. At least in Nineteen Eighty-Four Two Minutes Hate ended after 2 minutes. Now the object of cathartic scorn disappears forever, or else limps along on used DVDs that you can't resell on eBay without being added to the no-fly list.

So, 5 days is the new benchmark for a legacy IP to be revived from relative obscurity only to be figuratively burned at the stake. Away from the culture war front, the conflagration is slower moving. Sony's online Playstation 3 and PSP stores are going away this summer, which means a lot of people are going to be buying external hard drives to keep their games.

The situation reminds me of early electric cars being designed to tap backup gas tanks in case the engine battery ran out of juice. If gas is a more reliable backup, why bother with an electric battery in the first place? The same could be said of Cloud storage versus owning physical media. Why bother with the Cloud when you can upload a game from a CD-ROM onto your computer plus any computer you own in the future?

The answer is convenience, but not on the customer's part. I'm a supply-sider, which means I believe the market is pushed not by what people want, but by what producers offer consumers. It's more convenient for producers to maintain a direct pipeline into your home, to feed you games, music, TV, and movies on-demand. That pipeline is a single point of failure. In the back of our minds we may have understood the inherent flaw of the system, but only recently have we come to grips with what it really means: the erasure of cultural memory.

JD Cowan, take it away:

As download speeds got faster and hard drives got bigger, so did the possibilities grow. Physical sales of media dropped year after year, eventually ending up with music more or less stranded on digital download services with no other option for purchase. Unless you were quirky enough to get a vinyl release, finding CDs had gone out of style with the death of rock music. And this is before getting to the downgrade that is streaming.

Everything changed in a small handful of years, but nobody realized how much it had until much later. Some of us still don't see it, and won't until they wake up without access to a digital library that had been turned off by the license holder. We've walked into a situation that many think is a dream but is actually a nightmare scenario.

You don't actually own anything anymore. Most won't even notice or care until they get their rude awakening. We will keep paying corporations to make things more convenient, and yet far inferior, to what came before.

They can't take from you what you physically own. It's convenient to retcon the digital space; it's harder to burn books for real.

Maintain a personal library. Include things you enjoy as well as timeless classics. Make a habit of raiding yard sales and resale shops. (Amazon is part of the problem, but it's also part of the solution. I get a lot of physical media there that I can't find locally.) Be discerning, lest you fill your garage to the ceiling with stuff you'll never look at. Don't forget to save something for your kids. This is your hill to defend.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.