Something to Keep
“Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be.”
Duncan Trussell
A Second Look
During the last couple of weeks, I’ve been setting up single-purpose devices. I now have a Kindle for books, a Kindle Fire tablet for manga, and an iPod Touch for music. The promise of having a device that does it all was promising in the late 00s, but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t feel overwhelmed by their phones now. The advantage of keeping devices that do one thing is that there are no notifications, no distractions, and no escape from doing the thing.
Also, I think it’s important to have a project. I’ve forgotten how much fun getting emulators to work, setting up a Plex server, and jailbreaking an old iPhone can be. I think we went from being completely amazed by technology to hating it. So getting things to work on old devices has been a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it.
Something I Liked
A couple of days ago, I woke up extremely early and worked on the iPod stuff I just mentioned. After bringing the device back to life, I reset it to factory settings, and then I had to figure out what essential music I needed in my life. One reason to do this is to avoid using Spotify, and I have a similar setup on my computer to avoid using Netflix as well. Which leads me to the video at the top of this section.
The rise of subscription-based platforms gave us convenience, but drowned us in choice and took away ownership in return. That’s a bad tradeoff if you ask me. The problem with subscription-based services is that nothing belongs to us, and companies can easily take away content from us. Subscriptions are also extremely expensive in the long run. Then, there’s the matter of choice.
Some of these platforms create the illusion of endless options, but we’re only “choosing” from the options we’ve been given. When it comes to movies and TV shows, the content is fragmented across different services. If you’re not careful, you can find yourself subscribed to a bunch of streaming services you never use.
So the way I’ve been talking about this sounds doom and gloom, but there are ways out of this. The best way to resist streaming platforms is by going back to physical media. While it’s expensive, at least no one can take a vinyl record or a Blu-ray away from you. The best part is curating your collection according to your personal values, not someone else’s. This is something that Chayka discusses at length in his book Filterworld. Even if you choose the digital route, you can always find ways to purchase content that you can keep forever, instead of subscribing to services that might take it away from you at a moment’s notice.