Many people consider physical media like records and discs to be antiquated technology which have no place in a modern setting with good digital consumer rights. I, however, beg to differ, like please can we have physical media? I, and many of my friends, don’t end up watching or experiencing anything and just end up browsing and then calling it a session. Like please can we not consider physical media something which doesn’t have a place in a better world? I am making this post because I have seen one too many socialist gaming people say ‘digital is future, you can just as borrow a digital game on a playstation. I am glad and proud I bought a digital only ps5’ like come on
I think it’s really important to keep physical media. I’ve heard of cases where people paid for a whole library of films on amazon and then got banned from amazon for some reason, and all those films they paid for were gone. Same thing with any platform. There have also been issues of films becoming unavailable online, or if the government decided to ban something you might never be able to see it again without a hard copy. And of course there’s the fact that all the platforms now are adding adverts, I heard that amazon for instance added them and now you have to pay an extra monthly subscription to get rid of them. They could just keep jacking the price up constantly and unless you keep paying you lose all your films. And the basic fact of it being cheaper long term to buy physical media than pay a lifetime of subscriptions.
People seem to think that a fully automated luxury gay space communist society is around the corner and talk about every topic in that context even in such a society I don’t see why we need to get rid of old technology or ways of communication. Letters are becoming popular again as snail mail because there’s something special in letter writing, people are listening to records again, because there’s a value in having something in hand. I remember watching a clip of Carl Sagen where he showed how little knowledge amount of books we can read in our lifetime and why it is important to choose what we read but digitalization assumes constant consumption and just a flood which leads to again choice paralysis, digitalization isn’t bad but technological progress is held way too much as a virtue without considering its consequences.
I really preferred life before all of this. CDs instead of downloads, going to Blockbuster instead of streaming, post instead of emails, books instead of scrolling. Everyone at school talking about the tv show we all watched last night because there were only 4 channels, whereas now there are so many endless shows that you ask someone have you seen this? And they’ve never heard of it. It unified people, all doing the same things and doing them in person, whereas people are now more isolated all doing different things alone at home online.
That’s so true, I used to play my PS4 a lot. Like I played so many games back but now on digital I own much more than I have played like I just just feel like something is lost from the experience. I have like 22 discs for my PS4 but I have like 50 games on epic games store but I haven’t even played like 5. I watched so many memorable movies on tv, on dvds, even with piracy when dvd of a film wasn’t available but now I have soooooo many options from Netflix and I haven’t watched two films in months. It just seems so weird.
There definitely seems to be some psychological thing going on with humans and too much choice. Back in the 90s when I only had 4 channels and the choice was a bit crap, I would happily watch some boring old thing like Rawhide because that was pretty much all that was on. But with an abundance of choice it’s much harder to find anything to watch.
Yea and no one wants to confront it and create a world with less and less agency. Like we might be the only animals who give up our joy to machines for promise of more joy and entertainment.