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The Importance of Preserving Physical Media
The Great Reset is proceeding much faster than even the conspiracy theorists could have envisioned. The German Minister of Agriculture recently declared that citizens should accept hunger as the price of saving biodiversity and fighting climate change. (I am not making this up.) I would have thought we were five to ten years from being told to starve for Gaia. But as global governments take steps to deliberately reduce agricultural production (including the “Inflation Reduction Act” just signed by centrist, moderate president Joe Brandon.)
Imagine a global citizen of the mid or perhaps late 21st century; living in a 300-square-foot pod; having electricity only when the wind or the sun cooperate; with a universal basic income; fed on a diet of mealworms and crickets; perhaps drinking sewer water (because the BBC says “It’s good for the environment, so get over it.“) Imagine this THX-1138 of the Post-Reset future the World Economic Forum has planned somehow stumbles a few episodes of the Brady Bunch. Imagine his (or her, or whatever new possessive pronoun) shock at learning people at one time lived in spacious, comfortable houses. Imagine how utterly stunned they would be to see a large family prospering on a single professional income. Imagine how they would feel seeing that middle-class families once owned cars and were allowed to travel to Hawaii on jet planes. Privileges only the wealthy and powerful will enjoy in his time.
Imagine further, they find Blazing Saddles.
The political and economic elite have a vision of the future that can best be described as Neo-Feudalist. The privileged will enjoy essentially the same lifestyle they enjoy now, while the rest of humanity is herded into multistory cattle pens. It would disruptive to their social order if the proles could get any glimpse of the freedom and prosperity of earlier generations. So, all electronic media from the Pre-Reset must and will be erased. And with everything residing on servers and in the cloud, that can be easily accomplished.
The only hope that some of it might be saved is if we take care to own books, and DVDs, and CDs that we can pass on to our children and grandchildren. Perhaps a few lost episodes of The Office or, perish forbid, the yellowed and crumbling pages of 50 Shades of Grey, inspire some future resistance movement to fight to take back the freedom and prosperity what was taken from them.
Published in General
You have described the Ready Player One dystopian world.
Reality often replicates art.
Remember that in Fahrenheit 451, the government didn’t really need to outlaw books because nobody wanted to read them anyway.
Interesting and disturbing remark from Marc Andreessen, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a few months ago:
“Buy physical copies of any book you plan to read in the future. Do it now.”
Link
The drive for censorship in the US is being pushed almost entirely by Democrats and their media, tech, and academic partners.
People who say there is no point in voting because the Republicans are no better than the Dems are making a very serious mistake.
I doubt that anything like free speech can survive if the Democrats are able to retain control of both houses in Congress in November.
This election is very serious, far too serious to use as an exercise in frustration-venting.
Eat the extension officers first.
For (dare I say) most people, streaming of music, tv shows, or movies has replaced physical media such as DVDs or CDs. I regularly get mocked at work for preferring physical media. Yet I see the embrace of streaming as one more part of “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”
There are an awful lot of movies or tv shows that simply are not available on streaming services. The other day I was checking to see where a show from the early 2000s might be streaming, and JustWatch.com didn’t even recognize its existence. It’s like it disappeared into a black hole.
Certainly there are older shows that never made it to DVD, but increasingly newer shows (especially those on the Disney+ service) that are never going on DVD.
Perhaps we were just spoiled for a few decades to be able to have such handy access to the shows and movies we liked. But we’re heading back to the pre-home-video era where you’re dependent on a tv channel to show that movie if you ever wanted to see it. (Remember the once-a-year showings of The Wizard of Oz, for example?)
My generation might be the last generation to remember when TV Guide was a necessary part of owning a television.
Then suddenly you could have anything and everything you ever wanted.
And now . . . now we’re going back the other way. Which is . . . really, really strange to me.
One possible solution is to download those things and make your own physical media of them.
The point isn’t to find a way to overcome the hurdles. The point is that there are hurdles in the first place — whereas once there were not.
And not everyone knows how to access pirated material. I’d rather pay for a legal copy than be forced to create my own pirated copy. But it’s getting to the point where if you really want a physical copy of something, you’re going to have to find a way.
Having to wait a year to see Wizard Of Oz wasn’t a hurdle?
You need to read more closely.
What I said was that once there were such hurdles, and then suddenly there wasn’t. And now there are again. We’re going back to the way things used to be.
I guess, by merging two comments together that looked more separate.
And not just this. Streaming is not just playing something that was recorded in the past and is always the same, but it can be completely made up on the spot (as if to order). It can be content tailored to the individual account within the movie itself. This would be personalized streaming like Virtual Reality, interactive shows, and even unknowingly interactive shows.
Here on Ricochet, I can learn a lot. But if content and comments were tailored to me personally I would know nothing about it, and know nothing of people’s views across the country and the world. It’s the same with VR (which is undoubtedly expected to come).
And apparently it’s only a matter of time before we won’t know which person is real, and which person is computer generated and fed into my feed.
I know, it’s crazy. But it’s either doable now or or in the near future. In fact there is reportedly even now a computer program that creates millions of social media accounts (bots, they call them) and runs personalized interactions with users. And it will only get better and more convincing.
In other words, not one single Matrix, but 100s of millions of individualized matrices.
[edited: second to last paragraph inserted]
You can’t tell? Good. It’s working.
Am I real?
I believe this is a big part of Elon Musk’s issue with Twitter. They won’t tell him exactly what percentage of users are bots.
And I suspect a lot of bots.
Of course not. You’re a figment of the simulation’s imagination. Just go back to sleep and dream.
At least for now, nobody is forced to use Twitter, or VR. And I don’t. Never have.
People are pushing for VR. People are investing a lot of money in it. And they say we will own nothing and be happy. Sounds like the Matrix to me.
Who says I sleep.
Cause and effect.
One of my upcoming purchases is going to be a complete set of printed-books Encylopedia Britanica, the newest edition I can find.
I missed a chance of getting one from the late fifties. My loss.
Oh there are much newer editions available, but still pre-woke. They just aren’t sold door-to-door much any more.
I have a complete Brittanica set (from my parents) from 1913, just before WWI. Very interesting, lots of information, but the small type is difficult to read.
But the stuff in the one I’ve seen. The knowledge that was considered valuable then I’m sure has changed. Vegetarian feeding of obligate carnivores in US zoos during WWII. Things that I’ve never been able to easily look up on-line and I’m afraid have been pushed out by newer more “relevant” information.
The way things are going, some older books on farming pre-petroleum-based fertilizers might be wise, but in general for an encyclopedia I would prefer something more recent.
If it’s any consolation, my OED is unreadable without a magnifying glass. But there is a built in drawer that holds two.
Well! If what you want is currency…!
I want to know what people are not saying today.