Do you remember the 2000s? The 90s? Before then? If you were to look at all the things you enjoyed and consumed, what would be the one, fundamental, undeniable difference between the and now?
…
Did you say that the difference is that now, you don’t actually own anything you consume? Because if so, you’re exactly right, and that’s what I’ve come to talk to you about today.
For all the modern advances we’ve made, and all the power we’ve put into the hands of individuals through technological advancements, allowing you to control your home, car, and health monitoring watch with just your voice, we’ve also lost something pretty massive. We’ve lost our ability to own media.
It almost doesn’t seem like a problem, at first blush. Netflix, Spotify, even digital purchase systems like your Switch library or your Kindle. Surely these things being digital, and not ever demanding the full price for anything up front, surely this is a good thing, right?
I’d argue no. We are living in an age where the ability to hold something in our hands, the ability to say “forever and ever, this piece of media is mine” is all but forgotten. Most of our computers don’t have CD drives anymore. Most of our music is streamed digitally — when did you last pay for and buy an MP3 file? It’s even growing harder and harder to own any media in these even semi-permanent ways. Everything is reliant upon streaming and online libraries rather than your own data, and call me crazy, but I think that’s a bad thing.
For one, most immediately, in order to keep the content at the same quality, you’ll be required to pay a fee for the rest of your days. Try and enjoy these things for free, well, good luck. Spotify will make it so you can’t download songs, and on mobile, will shuffle them in random order with ads interspersed throughout. Occasionally, paid account or not, songs will disappear from your library because someone along the chain decided it shouldn’t be on Spotify anymore. Similarly, Amazon has removed books from users’ libraries without their consent in the past, and while they make the claim that this won’t happen again, who’s going to hold Amazon accountable?
And even on the lesser end of the drawbacks spectrum, the spirit of sharing with your friends is gone. I can sell to, or let a friend borrow, game cartridges or CDs. That is, broadly speaking, impossible nowadays. While accessing streamable music is often easy enough (assuming Spotify doesn’t stick them in shuffle mode through the album), good luck sharing games across devices. 15 years ago, if my friend wanted to play through Oblivion, I could just give them the disk and ask for it back, or not. Now? The only way to do that legally with games is to share usernames and passwords on Steam, a risky endeavor to be sure if you’re someone who reuses passwords, and even then, only one of you can play any games from your library at the same time. If your friend’s playing your copy of Borderlands and you want to play Skyrim, you’re shit out of luck unless you’re content playing offline.
And speaking of Skyrim, that’s another example of this phenomenon. Bethesda effectively de-personed the 2011 release of Skyrim in favor of the Special Edition. While there’s some bug fixes and improved graphical fidelity, if you didn’t have the old Skyrim and its DLCs, they’ve become impossible to acquire. Many of the oldest mods for Skyrim are exclusive to the 2011 release and its DLCs, not to mention in ran smoother on older machines. And on this new Special Edition, you’re essentially forced to create an account with Bethesda, should you want to install mods directly through the game.
And on top of all of this?
It’s just exhausting. And it’s bleeding us dry. I doubt I’m a delusional Old(tm), I’ve just recently hit my 20s. I don’t want to pay every month for a Spotify subscription. I want to be able to share my games with friends without needing to bend over backwards. I miss days I wasn’t even on the internet for because pre-2000s, you could own things.You could own your music and your games. The idea that you couldn’t was unheard of. All your music was on some device that you owned. You bought the music once and then never had to again.
Is it wrong, somehow, to yearn for that again? To have your things be yours? I don’t know. But I know that I want to support my favorite artists again for more than $0.003 a listen. And I intend to do just that. I’ll buy CDs, I’ll buy vinyls. Anything to turn this bus around.
