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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
Having an older version TOO might be good, but if I had to choose from, say, the 1913 set mentioned by David Foster and something from the 1990s, and I could only have ONE, I’d pick 1990s. The 1913 set is just missing too much. Seems like in 1913 surgeons might still have been resenting the suggestion that they wash their hands.
But that brings up a good point. Another book I miss is my grandmother’s 1910(?) Science Catechism. In it they refer to planet Herschel, and they also point out that though the sun was once thought to be hot, we now know it is cool, and probably phosphorescent or coolly luminous; as we now know that the temperature on mountain tops is cooler than at sea level, and though the tops of mountains are closer to the sun, and if the sun were a source of heat, the mountain tops should be warmer than at sea level.
When I look on-line I haven’t seen Pluto referred to as Herschel except once years ago, a reference to it was on wikipedia, but never since.
I think all this stuff should be easily knowable. The world has changed so much in a hundred years! And yet today it seems that most people don’t have any idea what a buggy whip was used for, or how advanced we have it, or how fragile — and unnatural — this lifestyle we have is. We have lost a sense of our past.
Libraries – perhaps including small libraries kept by the “intellectuals” in each town – should have a lot more variety, but again if I’m limited to one set of encyclopedias, I’ll take 1990s over 1913.
You mean I have to share?
You don’t need to let people in to read or borrow, to have them available.
Cull the bureaucratic herd first!!
As far as I know, I am real.
I’m interested in preserving the bit of physical media that’s sitting in my office chair, typing this comment on Ricochet right now.
Well of course that’s what you think, that’s how you were programmed.
On the other hand, not many of the newer shows are destined to be classic, must-see content.
I believe I have a hardback copy of Atlas Shrugged around here, somewhere. Talk about samizdat!
I actually enjoyed the recent movies, just a shame they didn’t use the same cast for all three parts. For some reason, the cast for part 3 was especially disappointing.
That’s a great line!
Multi-story cattle pens that they may have confiscated from Hilton etc.
The denser they are, the easier they are to nuke.
well… swap the THX-1138 for a Cherry 2000 and I would bet 80% of the male population removes itself quietly from the public sphere.
The elites or the cattle pens?
Yes.