Adorning the Shackles of Materialism

There is a crisis unfolding in my household that started because of a guitar pedal maker's youtube video having nothing to do about pedals. I came across Joshua Heath Scott-- let me rephrase that-- the youtube algorithm put one of Joshua Heath Scott's videos in my face that grabbed my attention. In it he reviewed his top books of 2024. One of those was a book called Non-Things by Byung-Chul Han.

As Scott explained, non-things are things that, while technically objects, don't have any real value to us. They are non-things. Take your cell phone for example. (Do we still put the word "cell" in front of "phone"?) If you accidentally threw your phone into a wood chipper while finally getting your neighbor's dog to shut up once and for all, would you miss the phone? Sure, paying for a replacement would bite but phones themselves mean nothing, especially when they stop working or, god forbid, stop being supported with updates.

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I have to be honest, I decided not to buy Byung-Chul Han's book based on some terrible online reviews. Nonetheless I felt that Scott provided enough of the book's concept to incite a change in me.

When I originally switched to cloud based media it felt liberating. I started streaming music when music streaming services first became available and have been using an e-reader for almost a decade. When I made the switch to consuming media through non-thing devices like cell phones and e-readers it solved multiple problems. A monthly subscription to Rhapsody was the price of one compact disc per month and ebooks were cheaper than their print counterparts. Plus, I could listen to almost any album and download almost any book whenever I wanted. But more importantly, going cloud-digital meant that we could free ourselves from the burden of storing physical media. My wife had recently discovered minimalism and "things", especially those that didn't spark joy, were the enemy.

At first it was freedom, especially the all you can eat buffet of cheap music. New platforms delivered everything we could dream of for close to no money at all. (Ok, this was never good for the actual musicians but stick with me.) But as time went on, the vibe changed. How did more of us not have the foresight to see that the entire internet would enshitify?

With all of the record stores gone and all of the surviving book stores taking in some quantity of water with every breath, Big Tech has replaced the old systems of cultural distribution. And while the old system consisted of middle-men who sold you a hardcopy of the media, the new system consists of Tech charging you an attention fee (ads) or a subscription fee (money) for access to the media. In other words, Tech now holds the music, the movies, the books, and charges us rent to use their copies of them.

I live in an isolated suburb (sub to what urb I do not know) of about 94,000 people. Our Barnes & Noble Booksellers relocated to a new building recently and I decided, against my e-reader's wishes, to visit the new store.

No amount of thumbnails shown on a liquid retina display can replace the sensory experience of walking into a book store like this. Real books? Real books! Real dust collecting, space wasting, redwood forest consuming books by the thousands. How had I forgotten how awesome real books were?

First of all, walking through the bookstore as an adult is like walking through a Toys-R-Us as a kid. The sense of exploration and discovery is overwhelming. Next, reading a real book provides a tactile feeling of connection to something. The cover design, paper stock, font, all of it decided on by people who probably care at least a little. Finally, and this is the most important one, no future update is going to change the text. For better or for worse, your paper version of Adventures of Huckle Berry Finn will always have the n-word in it. Editors can't change the words of the past when physical books exist independently in the wild.

Our City is lacking many qualities but potential is not one of them. As it turns out, there are other magical places in town where one can purchase physical media. How about the fire hazard of a used bookstore nestled in a self-storage facility off the highway? It even has a real store front, right there sandwiched between the roll up doors of neighboring storage units. Or what about the used record store mere blocks from my house in an old strip mall? (It's on a 6 lane stroad that literally should be two lanes so you can imagine how inviting it is for pedestrians to walk there. Is it any wonder I never noticed it as I sped by in my car?) The presence of these places suggests that I'm not alone in wanting physical media back in my life or that some people never went digital. Either way, investing in physical media in 2025 feels like an act of defiance. It feels like taking my cultural freedom back from technology companies that strive to own us all.

And yet the idea of dedicating to physical media feels like going backwards. Breaking the shackles of Tech controlled media means adorning the shackles of materialism: I'll have to be weighed down with more stuff. I don’t miss having piles of magazines and jewel cases littered everywhere like red Solo cups on a Sunday morning. For $50 a month in subscription fees I can own nothing but a pair of headphones and an iPhone while consuming all of the intellectual capital ever created.

That sounds lonely, though.

At least with physical media we can enjoy our freedom from Tech together while we meet in the used bookstore. It just means we'll all have to live like that used bookstore, sandwiched between stored stuff.