A couple days ago, I started Duolingo to learn Japanese. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while, but never got around to. I mean, why do things just because you want to and know how? After spending over an hour watching YouTube videos due to momentum, I was finally like, “I might as well use that kind of time tooling around on something I’ll feel better about.” It’s going pretty well, I think. I committed myself to fifteen minutes a day, because thirty seemed like it might not be possible every day, but I’ve spent close to an hour on it the past couple. It’s a pretty fun game.
Whenever I’m sitting at my desk, trying to come up with ideas, I turn at look at my bookshelf. It’s calming and filled with things I love and think a lot about, with varied subjects to catch my eye. Sometimes, with series I’m reading online, I wonder if it’s really worth the money and space to buy the book physically. After all, I can read it any time without having the physical book. That’s sometimes a good argument to have for myself, because I can only get so many books and putting off ones I’ve already read in another form makes sense. More generally, though, I think it’s always worth it. The books I put up on that shelf represent a meaningful experience to me, they’re a statement about what I think is worth investing my time and money in, and they’re experiences I can dive into again and again, in comparison to past memory. If anything, I want more books on my shelf, more movies in my entertainment center, and some format of physical media for music; I stopped using Spotify, but I don’t have a CD or record player, so all my music is digital download.
As a society, we’re too enamored with the idea of our “technological progress,” the shape of which is dictated by the powerful few. Everything is about increasing efficiency and convenience, with an accelerating move towards a fully digital reality. That’s literally the pitch for VR tech, to have a headset that lets you live in your own version of reality, quarantined from everyone else. All while being in debt to a corporate master for the software and memory space. Digital music has largely removed stable income for musicians, since record sales are so far down. Book sales are reduced with e-readers, since Amazon (which controls most digital book sales) successfully encourages customers to return books and claws back multiple royalties per book from authors. One of the big problems with movies these days is that studios don’t have any long term income from video sales, so they only care about what makes a good in theatre experience, one time. “AI,” the technology that isn’t anywhere near intelligent and that we were calling algorithms a couple years ago, is already threatening to replace art and writing. Even digital transactions have an extreme impact on the economy, since it’s so much easier for people to spend more than they have when they don’t have to physically hand over bills and coins, and stock traders can let computers auto-perform complex trades that they can’t explain or track.
Sometimes the move to digital is a good thing and opens a lot of doors we otherwise wouldn’t have. But overall, it’s eaten away at the basic foundations of what we love and need in the world. As the capabilities of the internet to provide streaming and other venues of entertainment developed, we were sold on a dream, that we could see all the TV shows and movies for a single subscription; that we could listen to all the music in exchange for a few ads; that we could buy and return books digitally like a library with collateral. It was never sustainable. Of course Netflix was destined to collapse from the start: There are only so many people who can subscribe, and only so much they’re willing to pay. Spotify was always a deal with the devil, since the record companies bought into it and thus have no incentive to actually sell their artists’ music. They convinced us to buy into the dream because it’s a cheap and convenient alternative to spending money on each individual item; we’re so averse to paying for things we won’t like, considering how little we have, right?
Ultimately, it doesn’t work, not in the way they sold it to us. What we need isn’t a cheaper alternative to entertainment. It’s more money and time to spend on the things we care about. If we want our favorite musicians to make a living on their music, we have to buy it from them; if we want authors to keep writing books, we have to buy them; if we want movies to be good and diverse and whatnot, we have to buy them. It’s a really simple lesson, really, that we have to pay for the things that matter. If money has any actual value, that’s where it lies. All of which is to say, that’s why I am committed to physical media over digital media. I’m not fully divorced from it all, since there are also a lot of original shows and movies I need streaming to access. Plus, there’s a place for digital services in terms of casually following things you wouldn’t otherwise look at, if we can work out the kinks better. It should be supplementary. But I firmly believe that as a society, we need to have a resurgence in physical media, or other systems of directly paying artists for their work.
If that were to happen at the level I’m imagining (which I realize hinges on a lot of other factors, like rising wages), then we would need to rethink how physical media is produced. Books have it a bit easier, in the sense that paper can be recycled, and we can make paper from hemp. If we develop better recycling systems, power them with renewables, and make new paper from hemp fibers instead of wood pulp, we’ll be able to continue making books for a long time with much less impact on the environment. Movies and music have a harder time, though. We would need a version of CDs and…I was about to type DVDs. Blu-rays and CDs that aren’t made of plastic. I’m not in the know, but I imagine there could be a sustainable alternative to vinyl, using plant resins or compressed fibers or something. Movies, though? Even the most analog physical media for movies and shows is plastic film. I’m not sure what a sustainable physical medium for movies looks like. If we find a sustainable disc system, that could work for music, as well.
I’m getting into all that because, like all other aspects of our physical lives, we should shape our physical media in the future to be better for our physical world. That’s the real endgame for all this. The joy of physically holding the thing you love is innate in humanity, as animals. We want something, we go out there, we get it, we hold the prize in our hands, and we enjoy it. There’s still enjoyment in digital entertainment, as experiential as it is, but we can’t replace the physical reality of having the thing we love in our hands, or the ritual of taking it out and putting it into the player. Capitalism sells us on a lot of dreams they have no intention of making true, and one is, ironically, anti-materialism. That’s how they sell us on self-help services and streaming media, as a way to spend money on yourself without “being tied down by things.” But materialism isn’t “having a lot of stuff” or “liking what you have”; it’s “defining your value based on what you own.” Buying stuff based on brand names is materialism; thinking you’re better than others because you make more money or have a fancy work title is materialism; buying a bunch of art and collecting things you love is investing in your passions and supporting those that make it possible. Our lives are material, not some ethereal dream. There’s nothing morally wrong or inferior with buying things from creatives. Whenever they come out with a new system like this, a new, even easier and cheaper way to entertain yourself, remind yourself what’s going on. You don’t need cheaper services, you need to make enough money to live on and enjoy your life; you don’t want to pay a studio or platform just for putting art out, you want to pay the artist who actually made it.
Weekly Thoughts 2/10/2024
Life in the Gutters 