dear luci

day110 - a long-winded, underargued, and impassioned defence of physical media

part 1: perestroika

the process began long before most of us were born. sometime in the mid 20th century, the western world, now dancing in the thermal flash of the atom bomb, began to think beyond lines drawn on maps. unsatisfied with the disorder of a fractured world, we decided the next great battlefield would be an ideological one. you don't need a history lesson— you live with the consequences close to a century later. at some point the bell was rung and the referee raised the victor's fist in the air. neoliberal capitalism had won. its war of attrition had paid off, and socialism had become a dirty word.

neoliberalism - a biased definition noun a political and economic doctrine which, as described by its more virtuous proponents, sees free-market capitalism as the means to the end of global human prosperity. A de- or at least minimally regulated capitalist system, neoliberals believe, would effectively regulate itself. Wealth would flow more freely, unhampered by the arterial blockages placed by bureaucracy. Corporate competition would produce high-quality and affordable goods and services— consumers would simply avoid inferior or expensive products, and the economic consequences would force the companies offering those products to step in line, or fail.

and capitalists accuse us of having unrealistic expectations.

neoliberalism as a philosophy is one of individualism. you are not a member of a society, you are a contestant in a very big game show. everything is a commodity, and manufactured scarcity ensures there will never be enough to go around. you do not have a choice whether or not you play— the lose condition is death, and the win condition is grotesque opulence at best, and survival at worst. this is not a collaborative attitude. it breeds, even occasionally requires selfishness.

part 2: and its consequences.

so, here we are, decades into the global neoliberal project. statistically, you probably feel lonely, sad, and afraid. you sit alone at night and wonder if your routine is supposed to make you as miserable as it does. apathy is a privilege, particularly benign compared to the hate that many other people in your position have been encouraged by grifters and demagogues alike to channel their discontent into. fascism is in these days. the prime minister of israel is doing a press tour for a genocide. you live your life normally (albeit with a few concessions) while somewhere, countless people are suffering.

you feel guilty and powerless, and you feel guilty for feeling guilty. as if your horror at the state of the world appropriates the pain of those who have it 'worse' .

what will it be? death by a thousand cuts? or by drone strike?

part 3: atomize me, daddy

but your phone pings you to tell you about the latest star wars movie. spotify creates custom playlists for you based on your music tastes. all of your streaming services have curated lists of movies and tv shows just for you.

almost everything you see and interact with on a daily basis has been tailored to you, an elegant algorithmic dance to optimise your experience. your time is precious. don't waste it looking. your data is a commodity now. intangible and ephemeral as it is, all to be collected, analysed, sharpened, and used against you.

it feels like you're being selfish. like you're being told and treated, without asking to be, as if you're the centre of the universe, but you've never felt so insignificant.

this is atomisation. alienation from the rest of the world by way of hyper-individualism. it's not your fault, these are the conditions we live in. neoliberalism praises self-sufficiency, endless self-optimisation as if you're an engine that can be fine-tuned to perfection. but i believe humanity has only gotten this far because of community, trust, and mutual aid. you're not broken— of course you feel lonely. that's the point.

part 4: the case for microplastics

it's important to resist where you can. fighting a war on a million different fronts can make the dumbest simplest things feel radical.

you fight the power, girl. you went outside today instead of eating at your desk.

for me, one of these arbitrary and ineffectual simple forms of resistance is collecting, and in particular, collecting physical media. mousey can have a little commodity fetishism, as a treat.

society has changed its mind a few times in my lifetime about what it considers an acceptable volume of things in one person's possession. recently, we were on that minimalism kick. optimise your bookshelf! get rid of shit! pare down your life to become the most streamlined (read: efficient) version of you there is!

i have spent my evening burning cds. i own some of my favourite albums on vinyl. i have accumulated, over years, a collection of my favourite films. they range from life-changing to smile-inducing.

i visited an electronics store the other day. they didn't have cds, dvds, blu-rays, even vinyl. i realised that not everyone sees the issue with that.

here is why i believe physical media deserves, needs, to exist.

1. ownership

principles - the vibe of the thing

It is abhorrent to me that access to media has become contingent on the consumer's ability to pay for subscription fees indefinitely. I say "fees" plural because in our oversaturated capitalist hellscape, everyone's got a streaming service.

another fucking tangent - vertical integration

In the old Hollywood system, five studios (Paramount, Warner Bros, MGM, RKO, and 20th Century Fox) reigned supreme, no small part due to their control over every stage of the supply chain: from production, to distribution, to exhibition. Almost nothing was outsourced— studios held exclusive contracts for cast and crew, they had their own soundstages, prop, lighting, set, and camera departments, and most of all, their own cinemas. Paramount cinemas screened Paramount pictures. If you were an independent cinema and wanted to screen the next big Paramount film, you could do so on the condition that you ALSO screened an entire block of other films (often less commercially successful ones) pre-selected by the studio. If you knew your patrons weren't going to be interested in some of the other films in the block, too bad! You don't get to negotiate.

In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that vertical organisation in the film industry stifled free competition in the industry, and was therefore illegal. This ruling effectively prevented studios from controlling the exhibition of their films. As a consequence, the independent film scene grew and strengthened, filmmakers had more control over their art, and foreign films grew more popular in the US.

In, 2019, the Court ruled that the Paramount Decree would cease to be upheld, as it believed that the conditions which created the old Hollywood system could not be replicated in the modern day.

Dude.

Watch Disney's 'The Mandalorian', only on Disney+!

So not only is the sanctity of ownership in question, the whole fucking industry is.

Put simply: nobody can revoke the digital licence key for my Bluray. Nobody can take the movie offline, thereby leaving me with a piece of worthless plastic. When I own a book, a film, an album— I can be confident that my ownership cannot be revoked on a whim by a money-hungry corporation. It's convenient, it's accessible, it's mine.

2. aesthetics - behold. my stuff

There is something comforting to me about being able to display my favourite media on my shelf. The Marxist in me understands that I'm probably engaging in some commodity fetishism, assigning magical value to plastic disks, trying to define myself through my purchases. I also believe that it's beyond that. I have to believe that, in some sense here, the value I assign to those disks is an abstraction of my love for the art itself. People don't keep paintings of Jesus around their house because they don't want to forget what he looks like, or because they think it makes them cool (mostly). It's symbolic. It's a ritual object, a talisman.

There's also the matter of the pure sight of the disks on my shelf. I appreciate the cover art, and I like displaying it. It's a mass-market, low-brow type of art collection.

3. fidelity - cinephile isn't a dirty word

this is straightforward. The quality of a film on a streaming service is only as good as your internet connection (or the service's transcoding). With physical media, that's not a concern. Your quality will be consistently high regardless of how good the magic radio signals in the air are.

a kind of unsatisfying conclusion

My collection of books, of films, of albums is a small and frankly meaningless fuck-you to the culture of disposability and hypercapitalism we live amidst. It is a reminder of my love of art, of my love of the human ability to create and collaborate. It gives me the opportunity to share the media I love with the people I love with an immediacy and intimacy that is unique to the format. I am fighting my inclination for hyper-convenient, hyper-individualised consumption. I am building a library of art that I love.

I've left a lot of threads hanging here. I feel I took us through a very low place to get to a high that isn't very inspiring. I hope to write more soon and maybe change that. But nothing I write can really balance out all the misery in the world. A blog won't change the world. In the futility of my act, these words mean something. I wrote them because I needed to. They are psychically, spiritually imperative to me. There is something hopeful about yelling into the wind, waiting for your words to be carried away.

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