I was able to find my way around okay with paper maps--but I still prefer having GPS in my phone.
My issue with those passages is that the author is conflating "digital" or "computers are involved" with "Internet". They're not the same.
Worth pointing out how this too is an example of somewhat mistaken value analysis based on libertarian ideals.
The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere.
Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not. Which was one of the points of the linked article.
lots of people perceive higher quality media as having value, in fact there are markets for those people, just not the largest market which values convenience more.
To me, having my music library on an USB stick is convenience. I don't have to worry about whether my car or something in it has an Internet connection just to listen to music.
Not in a free market (which is part of "libertarian ideals", or at least it's supposed to be). In a free market, there is no single "solution"--there are whatever solutions people are willing to pay more than they cost for. If you want your music in the cloud, and you pay for that, and I want my music locally, and I pay for that, that is the libertarian ideal.
Trying to own the entire market and force your "solution" on everyone, just because you happen to have enough users to be able to get away with such bullying, at least for a time, is not a free market. But that's what the tech giants are trying to do.
> Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not.
That the majority of the market does not, yes. But I don't think I'm even close to being the only person that doesn't want to depend on "the cloud" for everything I do.
And far, far too many self-proclaimed libertarians think that any regulations that "encumber" the market take it farther away from being "free", when in fact, there are regulations that help and regulations that harm, and you have to be able to actually understand them and use human judgement, rather than thinking One Simple Rule can be applied in every situation without fail to achieve perfection.
The ability to browse music is very powerful.
I lost my 1 Soundgarden CD 20 years ago. Now I can listen to all their albums.
You can do the entire Beatles catalogue <- this is a different form of listening.
Discover artists I would never have otherwise heard of.
It has it's downsides, but I dont think CD was 'better'.
We just have an imperfect situation.
As someone who spent a lot of his youth carefully avoiding big label acts and trying to support small artists, this is what bothers me the most: there is no way to do that anymore if you use streaming.
[1] https://mertbulan.com/2025/08/10/why-paying-for-spotify-most...
One day, someone will have to face the reckoning of our preferences vs our values.
May I be the one with the courage to meet it; failing which, not be standing around when the bill is due.
The motto of our era.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/blu-ray-victory-means-royalties...
https://blu-raydisc.info/flla-faq.php
> Instead of what - vast data centres full of electronics, consuming huge quantities of electricity, controlled by techno-feudalistic megacorps who keep almost all of the money and supply a pittance to the artists?
So what's your alternative, stocking every single video store in the country with plastic discs with DRMs transported by diesel trucks? Do you seriously think the material cost of manufacturing and transporting a disc is less than what it takes to send its contents over the internet?
I use streaming services. I like the flexibility and ubiquity of access. But my favourite music I still buy on cd or vinyl. Why? Because it means I’m not subject to the whims of a megacorp removing access and it means more goes to the artist. I’ve been buying music for 40 years and still listen to some of stuff I bought then. I hope to live long enough to do the same for the music I buy now.
It seems trivial to see that storing all the music in 1 or more DCs for the entire world is more efficient than a whole industry to create and redistribute plastics and specialized devices to play this plastic.
Eh, not really, it costs it's own storage and care. This is not free even if you have discounted in to the rest of the cost of your life. Not destroying LPs for example is a good bit of work.
With music itself, it's electronic storage is insanely cheap. One middleling server could easily contain just about the entirety of all mankinds works. Parallel distribution really is the bigger factor, and I guess that costs almost nothing itself. Marketing and software around marketing likely is the majority of the cost here.
Trying to compare a cellphone to a record is just not a really workable thing. People are going to have the cellphone anyway. The fact it is a media player is a welcome bonus.
Storing data of any kind in plastic as opposed to silicon metal seems like a meaningless distinction that only comes about from imagining that there is some disembodied, ethereal and platonic notion of digital “data” which is decoupled from any physical substrate. everything is always materialized and mediated through some complex, and probably vaguely arcane, geologically extractive process in some way.
About the only worse case of motivated reasoning I have seen are from NIMBYs straining their brains to claim how any new development would be catastrophic. One notable example being a claim that adding trains would bring in more criminals to the neighborhood and lead to more burglaries.
Also over time friction would build up in the medium, causing the tape to occasionally resist being pulled so strongly that some sections would stretch and introduce a hard to ignore "wah" effect.
Overall not my favourite means of storing information, like you said - it was fine. I've listened to a huge palette of mixes made by friends for friends and the social aspect of this is something I appreciated greatly.
"I have a CD player in my home, a VCR in a closet. But I’m also inclined to think about the work that older devices demand of a person compared with the frictionless present day, when we are told that any and all content is at our fingertips (a myth, but a myth that sells.) And I can’t help but think of the reality that there are many significantly larger and more consequential inconveniences that Americans, plainly, do not have the heart or stomach for. One example might be the inconvenience caused by a mass political uprising, one that risks the security, safety, and comfort of its participants. I have seen glimpses of people’s threshold for that level of friction. "
I recently went on holiday to deepest darkest Wales where phone signal is intermittent. Trying to locate people and get messages to them was such a bloody pain.
I remember thinking in 2003 "surely we should be able to book GP appointments online now", and a mere 20 years later we can (depending on where you live) finally do it. It's so much better.
I would not go back, and I don't think anyone else would if it really came down to it, despite any virtuous anti-technology mantras they might pretend to believe.