Very thoughtful, Kyle, and thanks for bringing Walter Benjamin’s illuminating essay to the fore.
As a child of the 20th century I have often wondered why people turned to posting their personal memorabilia online in the first place—as opposed to keeping their artifacts to themselves, to be shared selectively and in person. It seems to me that the moment one embraces an Internet-enabled technology as a medium for sharing one’s lived experience, one is implicitly relinquishing control over those experiences.
So a prequel to this essay might be a description of one’s first post, to Tumblr or FB or whatever: what it was, what made the poster want to put it out there, and what was gratifying about the experience. And where it went from there: what was accomplished, and how/if the individual was changed by it.
Some people started posting photos of family events to FB to get them out to the event participants faster. It seemed to shorten the distance among family members, both in time and place. That really felt good. That I can understand.
But to me it seems something changed along the way, such that the event, the lived experience, became subordinated to the posting. A recent, tragic example: the “van life” being documented and posted for all the world to see, by those two pathetic, dysfunctional individuals, who ended up losing everything, while their “followers” looked on and multiplied. It’s feels like a new kind of sickness, really.
I don’t have any answers, especially for the music, podcast, and other content subscriptions we’ve all been seduced by. The services offer us extraordinary consumer convenience and choice. But convenience always has its costs, some of which turn out to be hidden and unexpected. And painful.
Thanks for writing this. The cultural shift from active to passive engagement with music (or all art) is notable and unfortunate. There are obvious benefits of something like Spotify, which a tech-optimist would be quick to point out: the ability to discover more new things, the convenience. And we've seemingly made that collective choice. So then we have to ask ourselves whether the convenience principle outweighs the benefits Benjamin is talking about. And even if we think it doesn't, how can we ever go the opposite direction? Personal reckoning and lifestyle change? Or can we collectively somehow overcome the tidal force of convenience as the presumed "most important thing"?
Lovely essay. Thank you. Borges reminded us that not every library will be paradise (see https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/knowledge-compendia/485507/ for another compelling angle on this). Having worked with design teams who championed simplicity, clarity, and usefulness in their digital products I know balancing personalization and stability with broad appeal is challenging. Meeting personalized needs comes at another expense--your data privacy. There will always be businesses that chase evolution and bloat over comfort and reliability (based on risk), just as there will always be freedom to choose greed over empathy. The struggle fewer people bring up is which of my digital and/or physical collections do I pass along after I'm dead? Does it matter how or if I share what I have cherished? Should I catalog each object's personal story on a digital platform that will disappear in a single generation? I used to believe the only companies positioned to manage this might be life insurance companies who would sell you a digital safe deposit box that would preserve working copies of old HyperCard stacks, but since insurance companies are as inept at making their apps work as everyone else, this seems unrealistic. The only thing left is to enjoy what you have while you have it, remain curious about change, and embrace the impermanence of everything.
Excellent article, Kyle. I tend to look at digital collections the same way I view my bookshelf. The books themselves contain far more than the content of their pages; they are objects in the context of my life.
For example, I have a pocket-sized copy of Marcus Aurelius Thoughts that I bought for a dollar from a cart in front of the bookstore downstairs from my apartment. This copy was published in 1898 and had a faux leather cover. That day I rode on the new MAX train between Portland and Beaverton, opening the book for the first time. I found it had been owned by a young student, given to him as he started college.
He'd penciled notes in the margins, questioning certain passages in his spidery old-fashioned handwriting. He'd also written a list of various things about himself he wanted to improve. As I sat on the train in 1998 reading a text written a thousand years before with marginal notes from an anonymous fellow being before there was such a thing as a world war.... you get the idea. This cannot be digitally replicated. And unlike the contents of thrift stores where entire life histories are set upon the shelves stripped of context and story, I know the thread of this one book.
I don't have the same feeling about music, never having collected LPs. I love the digital collection I've acquired, the ability to listen to anything I feel like, anywhere I happen to be.
Beautiful story. In one of my books about Indo-China (I don't remember which one), there is a name inscribed on the inside front cover; underneath the name is written "Saigon, Christmas 1967". I don't know who that person was, but every time I open the book I wonder if they made it all the way through that year to Christmas 1968...
As a record (and book) collector, I remember when I first started buying records in ebay in 1999. Within a year I had purchased most of my "grail" records. Yet it was an uneventful experience. I still have memories of the record store where I found something special, that place in Oklahoma where I found that Glenn Branca record, the stores in Princeton, Denver, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Detroit, or any other of the cities that I shopped in when traveling or moving and found rare or interesting records. These items are like madelines, when I pull them out I'm flooded with the memory of being in that store, talking to the clerks or friends I was with. With ebay it was just another faceless online transaction. The only interaction being if I had to bid on it and how high I was willing to go. I still have my records and CD's in racks and spend time looking at the spines when I'm unsure of what I want to listen to. I have ripped many of the CD's to my computer which is helpful, but I still prefer that tactile experience. My stereo system doesn't do streaming, I have to play an LP or a CD which keeps me engaged rather that something as background music while browsing the internet as it fragments our conscious into an homogenized stream of "content" that all feels the same.
Thank you for reminding me to appreciate my collections that reside with me. They are like family. I realize that I no longer have that desire to physically have the things that used to motivate me to go to a book store or wait in line at the music store for my favorite bands new cd. Tonight I will put down my phone and play some of my cd's on the stereo I have not used in months.
Thank you for this. Lots of thoughts and praise, probably already (better) articulated in the comments below. For now I want to direct you to a scene that this reminded me of from the film The Worst Person in the World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ1wrGmDJ1Y&ab_channel=MadameFlavour
Great piece. I was stupid when I was younger and lost all my CDs. You can get some smoking deals on CDs these days. I've been buying a lot of my favorites back for pennies. I have really come to appreciate physical ownership during the pandemic and have expanded my collection of multiple mediums. We honestly live in a golden age of technology for collectibles right now. I've set up a whole home audio system that integrates every form of music I have in both vintage and digital form - Computer files, streaming services, turntable, CD player, TV, minidisc, etc. The internet allows us to have the best of all worlds. Listening to Neil Young's 1970 Carnegie Hall right now on Qobuz in glorious 24-bit quality. I listened to a Stevie Nicks record on my turntable while I was drinking my coffee this morning. We are really spoiled to have the best of all worlds right now.
This is what I want to say to people when they ask me why I still buy movies on disc. They can never understand it, but it's simply what this article points to: I don't want my access to movies to be dictated by anyone but me. I'll dig into this a little with the first thing that's mentioned by those who disdain my DVDs: NetFlix.
NetFlix has never had what I want. There's a lack of apparent rhyme or reason to the content available on the platform, the bulk of which is made of films and series I would never watch. Those who feel NetFlix's collection is sufficient must be of a different breed, because more often than not, my search for a particular title on NetFlix ends shortly after it begins. It's not as if what I want is esoteric, either: all kinds of popular titles I love are simply missing. So I turn to my hard copies, which I know contain what I want.
NetFlix also has a tendency to clear out large parts of the collection with little warning, and no apparent explanation. Recently they made an addition of a displayed date for the end of availability of a piece, though this is only visible on certain parts of the main page for a show or movie. Series have disappeared in the middle of my watching them, and movies I saw on the interface less than a week ago don't turn up when I search for them. My discs never disappear of my own accord; they are always just where I left them.
Maybe I am old-fashioned, but being able to touch the containers, enjoy the box art, and watch exclusive bonus content is a big part of what I love about TV and movies. It doesn't feel good to have that taken away from me, by the whims of some corporation.
Here is where I'm a bit of a Luddite, I suppose. Collecting says to the world: This is who I am. I do have hundreds of books. I have read all but the short-ish pile that is my waiting list. Anyone walking into my house knows the eclectic art that I prefer and the subjects I read about. It's a visual invitation to know me. I do have digital content, but for what I will re-read, for what is important to me, I will always go for the hard copy.
Great! what you experience in terms of self-organizing cells is this: "zero" are "factually male"; that's what the alphabetically organized spelling "consciousness" identifies: "one" solipsist fantasy proves "everything=else,, "or=else,, (light=surveilance)
For example: if "one thinker" (like Feynman) says "nobody" understands published thoughts, drawing this disproves "him" in favor of all published thoughts: brain cells multiply/divide supervisory fantasies in favor of their observed climate: #FridaysForFuture #Will #Observe between supervisory fantasies (false thought experiments). Look up Physics and Philosophy, page 26 if you doubt that all published thoughts we published by previous, additional, maternal, cells:
so "digital=death" is factually synonymous with predicting "additional=memories,, as "generic=generalizations,, (Google Cantor's diagonal proof if you recognized "generalizing" as "predicting the future in general"): future pointing diagonals (ABCD) disproves "zero-point-zero" future (BeCreatedAndDestroyed) #orElse #everythingElse #will #msf #prevail
That's why I buy special songs from assorted sources and store them on my hard drive. Perhaps that sentence is showing as much age and antiquity as Benjamin's 1930 era remarks. Be it digital music, books, or video, I flat out refuse to trust the services like Spotify, for the precise reasons mentioned in the article.
Even my personal digital collection is not immune to the whims of computer software overlords. Like an earthquake tumbling books and curios off a physical shelf, a few operating system updates have required I resort and reorganize all my material. Luckily, though, they have yet to erase any treasures.
Having been in concerts throughout the 80s and 90s I often wonder what the music must feel like to young people today who have only ever experienced it digitally. To me those memories are noise, passion, smoke filled air, sonic vibrations and a communal spirit that defies a definition, you just had to have been there. Sometimes I feel ancient, I like to talk to people not text. Id rather make a phone call than write an email. I have books (far less now than in the past) and a few items I collect but that collection has been refined to its core.
This is very well written article and It very acutely describes almost exactly my perspective on this subject, thank you for writing it, long live the collectors
Very thoughtful, Kyle, and thanks for bringing Walter Benjamin’s illuminating essay to the fore.
As a child of the 20th century I have often wondered why people turned to posting their personal memorabilia online in the first place—as opposed to keeping their artifacts to themselves, to be shared selectively and in person. It seems to me that the moment one embraces an Internet-enabled technology as a medium for sharing one’s lived experience, one is implicitly relinquishing control over those experiences.
So a prequel to this essay might be a description of one’s first post, to Tumblr or FB or whatever: what it was, what made the poster want to put it out there, and what was gratifying about the experience. And where it went from there: what was accomplished, and how/if the individual was changed by it.
Some people started posting photos of family events to FB to get them out to the event participants faster. It seemed to shorten the distance among family members, both in time and place. That really felt good. That I can understand.
But to me it seems something changed along the way, such that the event, the lived experience, became subordinated to the posting. A recent, tragic example: the “van life” being documented and posted for all the world to see, by those two pathetic, dysfunctional individuals, who ended up losing everything, while their “followers” looked on and multiplied. It’s feels like a new kind of sickness, really.
I don’t have any answers, especially for the music, podcast, and other content subscriptions we’ve all been seduced by. The services offer us extraordinary consumer convenience and choice. But convenience always has its costs, some of which turn out to be hidden and unexpected. And painful.
Yes, I'll second that about Walter Benjamin’s essay...
Thanks for writing this. The cultural shift from active to passive engagement with music (or all art) is notable and unfortunate. There are obvious benefits of something like Spotify, which a tech-optimist would be quick to point out: the ability to discover more new things, the convenience. And we've seemingly made that collective choice. So then we have to ask ourselves whether the convenience principle outweighs the benefits Benjamin is talking about. And even if we think it doesn't, how can we ever go the opposite direction? Personal reckoning and lifestyle change? Or can we collectively somehow overcome the tidal force of convenience as the presumed "most important thing"?
Lovely essay. Thank you. Borges reminded us that not every library will be paradise (see https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/knowledge-compendia/485507/ for another compelling angle on this). Having worked with design teams who championed simplicity, clarity, and usefulness in their digital products I know balancing personalization and stability with broad appeal is challenging. Meeting personalized needs comes at another expense--your data privacy. There will always be businesses that chase evolution and bloat over comfort and reliability (based on risk), just as there will always be freedom to choose greed over empathy. The struggle fewer people bring up is which of my digital and/or physical collections do I pass along after I'm dead? Does it matter how or if I share what I have cherished? Should I catalog each object's personal story on a digital platform that will disappear in a single generation? I used to believe the only companies positioned to manage this might be life insurance companies who would sell you a digital safe deposit box that would preserve working copies of old HyperCard stacks, but since insurance companies are as inept at making their apps work as everyone else, this seems unrealistic. The only thing left is to enjoy what you have while you have it, remain curious about change, and embrace the impermanence of everything.
Excellent article, Kyle. I tend to look at digital collections the same way I view my bookshelf. The books themselves contain far more than the content of their pages; they are objects in the context of my life.
For example, I have a pocket-sized copy of Marcus Aurelius Thoughts that I bought for a dollar from a cart in front of the bookstore downstairs from my apartment. This copy was published in 1898 and had a faux leather cover. That day I rode on the new MAX train between Portland and Beaverton, opening the book for the first time. I found it had been owned by a young student, given to him as he started college.
He'd penciled notes in the margins, questioning certain passages in his spidery old-fashioned handwriting. He'd also written a list of various things about himself he wanted to improve. As I sat on the train in 1998 reading a text written a thousand years before with marginal notes from an anonymous fellow being before there was such a thing as a world war.... you get the idea. This cannot be digitally replicated. And unlike the contents of thrift stores where entire life histories are set upon the shelves stripped of context and story, I know the thread of this one book.
I don't have the same feeling about music, never having collected LPs. I love the digital collection I've acquired, the ability to listen to anything I feel like, anywhere I happen to be.
Beautiful story. In one of my books about Indo-China (I don't remember which one), there is a name inscribed on the inside front cover; underneath the name is written "Saigon, Christmas 1967". I don't know who that person was, but every time I open the book I wonder if they made it all the way through that year to Christmas 1968...
As a record (and book) collector, I remember when I first started buying records in ebay in 1999. Within a year I had purchased most of my "grail" records. Yet it was an uneventful experience. I still have memories of the record store where I found something special, that place in Oklahoma where I found that Glenn Branca record, the stores in Princeton, Denver, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Detroit, or any other of the cities that I shopped in when traveling or moving and found rare or interesting records. These items are like madelines, when I pull them out I'm flooded with the memory of being in that store, talking to the clerks or friends I was with. With ebay it was just another faceless online transaction. The only interaction being if I had to bid on it and how high I was willing to go. I still have my records and CD's in racks and spend time looking at the spines when I'm unsure of what I want to listen to. I have ripped many of the CD's to my computer which is helpful, but I still prefer that tactile experience. My stereo system doesn't do streaming, I have to play an LP or a CD which keeps me engaged rather that something as background music while browsing the internet as it fragments our conscious into an homogenized stream of "content" that all feels the same.
Amen to this, Shausen...I am EXACTLY the same way!
Thank you for reminding me to appreciate my collections that reside with me. They are like family. I realize that I no longer have that desire to physically have the things that used to motivate me to go to a book store or wait in line at the music store for my favorite bands new cd. Tonight I will put down my phone and play some of my cd's on the stereo I have not used in months.
Thank you for this. Lots of thoughts and praise, probably already (better) articulated in the comments below. For now I want to direct you to a scene that this reminded me of from the film The Worst Person in the World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ1wrGmDJ1Y&ab_channel=MadameFlavour
Great piece. I was stupid when I was younger and lost all my CDs. You can get some smoking deals on CDs these days. I've been buying a lot of my favorites back for pennies. I have really come to appreciate physical ownership during the pandemic and have expanded my collection of multiple mediums. We honestly live in a golden age of technology for collectibles right now. I've set up a whole home audio system that integrates every form of music I have in both vintage and digital form - Computer files, streaming services, turntable, CD player, TV, minidisc, etc. The internet allows us to have the best of all worlds. Listening to Neil Young's 1970 Carnegie Hall right now on Qobuz in glorious 24-bit quality. I listened to a Stevie Nicks record on my turntable while I was drinking my coffee this morning. We are really spoiled to have the best of all worlds right now.
This is what I want to say to people when they ask me why I still buy movies on disc. They can never understand it, but it's simply what this article points to: I don't want my access to movies to be dictated by anyone but me. I'll dig into this a little with the first thing that's mentioned by those who disdain my DVDs: NetFlix.
NetFlix has never had what I want. There's a lack of apparent rhyme or reason to the content available on the platform, the bulk of which is made of films and series I would never watch. Those who feel NetFlix's collection is sufficient must be of a different breed, because more often than not, my search for a particular title on NetFlix ends shortly after it begins. It's not as if what I want is esoteric, either: all kinds of popular titles I love are simply missing. So I turn to my hard copies, which I know contain what I want.
NetFlix also has a tendency to clear out large parts of the collection with little warning, and no apparent explanation. Recently they made an addition of a displayed date for the end of availability of a piece, though this is only visible on certain parts of the main page for a show or movie. Series have disappeared in the middle of my watching them, and movies I saw on the interface less than a week ago don't turn up when I search for them. My discs never disappear of my own accord; they are always just where I left them.
Maybe I am old-fashioned, but being able to touch the containers, enjoy the box art, and watch exclusive bonus content is a big part of what I love about TV and movies. It doesn't feel good to have that taken away from me, by the whims of some corporation.
Here is where I'm a bit of a Luddite, I suppose. Collecting says to the world: This is who I am. I do have hundreds of books. I have read all but the short-ish pile that is my waiting list. Anyone walking into my house knows the eclectic art that I prefer and the subjects I read about. It's a visual invitation to know me. I do have digital content, but for what I will re-read, for what is important to me, I will always go for the hard copy.
Great! what you experience in terms of self-organizing cells is this: "zero" are "factually male"; that's what the alphabetically organized spelling "consciousness" identifies: "one" solipsist fantasy proves "everything=else,, "or=else,, (light=surveilance)
For example: if "one thinker" (like Feynman) says "nobody" understands published thoughts, drawing this disproves "him" in favor of all published thoughts: brain cells multiply/divide supervisory fantasies in favor of their observed climate: #FridaysForFuture #Will #Observe between supervisory fantasies (false thought experiments). Look up Physics and Philosophy, page 26 if you doubt that all published thoughts we published by previous, additional, maternal, cells:
"=+I≠-1=,,
so "digital=death" is factually synonymous with predicting "additional=memories,, as "generic=generalizations,, (Google Cantor's diagonal proof if you recognized "generalizing" as "predicting the future in general"): future pointing diagonals (ABCD) disproves "zero-point-zero" future (BeCreatedAndDestroyed) #orElse #everythingElse #will #msf #prevail
if this doesn't make sense, sorry bye :)
Thank you, Kyle, for writing something which reminds me of why I am like I am, and do what I do.
That's why I buy special songs from assorted sources and store them on my hard drive. Perhaps that sentence is showing as much age and antiquity as Benjamin's 1930 era remarks. Be it digital music, books, or video, I flat out refuse to trust the services like Spotify, for the precise reasons mentioned in the article.
Even my personal digital collection is not immune to the whims of computer software overlords. Like an earthquake tumbling books and curios off a physical shelf, a few operating system updates have required I resort and reorganize all my material. Luckily, though, they have yet to erase any treasures.
Having been in concerts throughout the 80s and 90s I often wonder what the music must feel like to young people today who have only ever experienced it digitally. To me those memories are noise, passion, smoke filled air, sonic vibrations and a communal spirit that defies a definition, you just had to have been there. Sometimes I feel ancient, I like to talk to people not text. Id rather make a phone call than write an email. I have books (far less now than in the past) and a few items I collect but that collection has been refined to its core.
This is very well written article and It very acutely describes almost exactly my perspective on this subject, thank you for writing it, long live the collectors
I dread having to deal with my father's book collection when he passes or has to move to a smaller place.