I completely understand the sentiment here, but I have to respectfully disagree with part of your argument.
The internet itself is this fundamentally ephemeral, thing. Our relationship to it, as a medium, has persisted for decades at this point and may continue to do so for a long time. At the same time, it lives and dies by the whims of corporations and millions of other users, and so it’s trajectory is largely beyond the control of any one individual. It’s like this by design: properties like distributed control, flexible routing, easy duplication/destruction of data, give it resilience but also make it temporary. This also makes it a volatile place to keep things permanently, which is a real problem for a lot of different mediums.
With that in mind, there exists a lot of media today that has no non-digital equivalent. So, having a local data cache you control - DVD, BluRay, forvever moving data between online services, even a personal NAS - is the only hedge you can get for the net’s volatility. And even then, that medium has a service life.
So I don’t think it’s a shame, per se, that things are like this now. Rather, it always has been. It’s never been easier to consume (and pirate) media online, but the underlying rules have not changed.
It’s true what you say about volatility. It’s not just the internet, it’s everything digital, even offline storage.
A few months ago I was about to sell/give away a bunch of old childrens books that I had, my reasoning being that I will never want to read them again, and even if did want to for whatever reason, I could always find ebook versions of them.
Ultimately I decided to keep the books – what if, sometime in the future, I wanted to share these books with my (potential) children? Would all of these books have been preserved in digital form? Would I rather be giving my children a physical copy that I owned and read personally, or emailing a PDF? Physical media holds real value.
I completely understand the sentiment here, but I have to respectfully disagree with part of your argument.
The internet itself is this fundamentally ephemeral, thing. Our relationship to it, as a medium, has persisted for decades at this point and may continue to do so for a long time. At the same time, it lives and dies by the whims of corporations and millions of other users, and so it’s trajectory is largely beyond the control of any one individual. It’s like this by design: properties like distributed control, flexible routing, easy duplication/destruction of data, give it resilience but also make it temporary. This also makes it a volatile place to keep things permanently, which is a real problem for a lot of different mediums.
With that in mind, there exists a lot of media today that has no non-digital equivalent. So, having a local data cache you control - DVD, BluRay, forvever moving data between online services, even a personal NAS - is the only hedge you can get for the net’s volatility. And even then, that medium has a service life.
So I don’t think it’s a shame, per se, that things are like this now. Rather, it always has been. It’s never been easier to consume (and pirate) media online, but the underlying rules have not changed.
It’s true what you say about volatility. It’s not just the internet, it’s everything digital, even offline storage.
A few months ago I was about to sell/give away a bunch of old childrens books that I had, my reasoning being that I will never want to read them again, and even if did want to for whatever reason, I could always find ebook versions of them.
Ultimately I decided to keep the books – what if, sometime in the future, I wanted to share these books with my (potential) children? Would all of these books have been preserved in digital form? Would I rather be giving my children a physical copy that I owned and read personally, or emailing a PDF? Physical media holds real value.