Computers vs Us with a Dash of Corporate Capitalism

Hey friends. Just waiting on the Kickstarter funds to send PLEASANT LIFE off to the printer. Also busy working on the final 100 pages of the last STARSLAM book. (I got the first 140 done!) I’m remote from home this week, thank the universe. I haven’t left the cold recesses of my brick building home to expose myself to the current extreme heat that has even infested itself upon my traditionally cold state of Michigan. But alas, tomorrow I have to venture to the post office to mail out some ebay sales. (Puts back of hand to forehead) I grow faint!

It’s been great so far, selling off a lot of my nerdy inventory on ebay. It’s keeping finances afloat so I don’t have to get a second job, but also ridding myself of things I don’t need. “Things you own end up owning you,” as a wise man named Tyler Durden once said. But one thing I cannot rid myself of is physical media.

I’m sure you’ve heard the news by now that Sony announced there will be no more physical game discs starting in 2028. It’s not only got the gamers pissed but lots of disc collectors. Some (including myself) use our PS5’s as a player. For me, it aids me in playing the few 4K discs I own. (HEAVY METAL, GHOSTBUSTERS and STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE if you want to know) I’ve been a physical media collector/maker since I was wee. I had mixtapes on Betamax, VHS, Cassette. Then came DVDs and then Blurays. I stopped right there. Pictures can only get so good, right? But then you see a 4k transfer and it blows your fucking mind! But I still refuse to replace all my movies for the 15th time.

As I am whittling down my vast collection, I have been parting with some discs here and there. Some I know I will never get to, some I just probably won’t watch again with the few remaining years I have left here on this timeline with you. But there are some things you just know you will revisit and often! Plus, my youngest is now (FINALLY) getting into watching movies with his old man. He don’t react much to them, but at least he is trying. It’s so hard to please this overstimulated modern generation, isn’t it? They would have no sense of awe and wonder about the stop motion animation in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS like I did when I first saw it. Even the shock at the end of a TWILIGHT ZONE episode gets no reaction. Art of the cinema dies. (So it goes.)

I still have CDs… in fact, I keep getting new ones and even copies of albums I already have digitally. But I gotta have the complete collection. I need the artwork, read the lyrics and liner notes, then look at the pictures of the band being cool. And the cover… oh the artists that have done the covers of these albums! I keep these things to stay connected to art that I enjoy. CDs, DVD/BRs. I did fall into the vinyl trap for a time, but I decided to part with them in favor of my love of CDs. I also keep books I buy and read. I hang these things in my house like trophies, curating a little museum that is me. Some of these things will retain value so that my kids can pawn them for vape pen money when I croak. Perhaps my obsessive nerdiness will become useful after all.

But the writing has been on the wall for some time with these things. Making mass market of things is expensive. And most places don’t even carry discs anymore. Thank goodness for these little companies for acquiring rights to old movies and TV and releasing it via special volumes for us. SEVERIN, ARROW and many others. And now perhaps LIMITED RUN GAMES will take over physical media for some of the beloved game titles to come. Main thing is, it ruins the secondary market. It might make prices on these things increase. Going out into the wild and finding treasure at a resale shop will be a thing of the past. It almost is now, unless you want to pay ebay prices.

The main reason is that corporations want us owning NOTHING. We pay for subscriptions for everything now, always steadily increasing. Even things we purchase, we don’t own. We are merely leasing them to us, only to pull them down and we lose them for good. Corporate capitalism festoons itself with greed, oozing over with rapaciousness. We can defy them all we like, but eventually we will have to fall in line because the old ways are no more. One by one this happens to things and thoughts, creating an Ayn Rand inspired type of society where we are beaten to submission with the pressure to conform, scrapping all traces of potential individualism.

But these are just things, right? Sure there is no deeper meaning to all of it. Perhaps we ultimately don’t “own” anything and that is okay. It wont matter 100 years from now anyway. But you can continue to curate your little corner of the world by surrounding yourself with the art you enjoy, always eager for more. You can argue the convenience of all digital everything and I would certainly see your point. But for me, I don’t want to live in that world. Luckily I won’t have to. At least not for long. I expect to be a complete Luddite in my 70s where my kids will have to sigh and take and show me how to work that new silly gadget that I don’t understand but is necessary for everyday life now. It’s coming. Believe me, I am already starting to feel it. But these corporations are total tops with an extreme, raving and raunchy control fetish. They want total control. And they will use any technology that cuts their bottom line, thus hurting of the peasants that will simp for the thing they got. Ai replaces creativity and skilled labor. Drones do the dirty work. And we all end up bowing to the priests in the Temple of Syrinx. Empty pockets of course. Conform! Conform! “Repent Harlequin” says the Ticktock man.

But what if this all goes away? What if the corporations lose their power and our things go away? We no longer have the things. Can they be remembered well enough to be created again? Perhaps even better? What about a society that has forgotten how to make things. Like in the Phillip K. Dick story, “Pay for the printer.” What then?

Again, these are huge questions to be pondered and answered for people far in the future. These changes are not big enough to effect me in the time I have left. They will literally pull my beloved discs and books out of my cold dead hands. It’s up to them to fuck it up.

Technology can make our world better, but we cannot sacrifice the preservation and curation and even CREATION of art. Even if its a first person shooter video game where you bang hookers and drive taxis to do a sharpshooting mission. Things must be held to be connected to. Feel the old texture of a book page, taking a whiff of the ink that printed it. Look at the band on the cover of the album and you see what human made what you are listening to now. You SIT with the art. You SEE, HEAR, TASTE, TOUCH, SMELL it in real time. You possess it. It isn’t rented. It’s yours. It’s part of a human experience. As we evolve, we cannot lose that about ourselves. We must defy the capitalist pigs and give them an empty trough. We can defy this digital Ai future if we all want to bad enough.

OR we can sit in our WALL-E style hover chairs amusing ourselves to death.

I suppose all of this hits me hard because I am a creator of things. I surround myself with art of all kinds. Art is life. Humans must be allowed to dream and chase a whimsy and not get spoon fed moldy gruel from the digital teat. The elimination of physical media is a step toward that reality. Resist. Give me death over convenience.

But what do I know. I just know what I will continue to hold my physical media dear. And since there is not much new that interests me in movies or music, I think I will be just fine. However, then they announce this new complete Stanley Kubrick collection and I have to have it. https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/9000-the-complete-kubrick (Checks price) HOLY BACON BITS!!!! Uh… Nevermind! Forget I said all of that.

Thanks for reading! -T