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.