Gonna go off this for a sec because thatâs what I do here, but this book was written in 2007. At that time (or well, a few years before that time) the idea of ownership on the internet seemed almost quaint. Hoarding for its own sake has always been a human vice, but the internet threw its contradictions into stark relief - the songs were *always there*, waiting, on the internet. If you wanted to listen to them, you could just find them! You no longer *had* to own, you could simply need, and dip into the collective to sake the thirst. And of course, the ability of the internet to serve as that collective was only growing, connection speeds and server clusters expanding piece by piece to form the Akashic Record of human creative output.
And it always would continue to expandâŚright?
Hah. Even back then the idea was a bit of a smokescreen, the dumping of endless streams of anime torrents and âzine pdfâs not done by a digital weltgeist but instead by a disparate groups of like 20 guys in Lvov or Hong Kong, who time and boredom could easily destroy. But of course far more sinister in the past twenty years has been the brick-by-brick dismantling of the digital commons to erect paywalled fiefdoms of exclusive DRMâd content. In the face of the dual forces of greed and entropy, your saved links have rotted, your go-to torrent sites flit from registry to registry if they donât die entirely, your favourite alt-rock AMV from middle school that first got you into Inuyasha got DCM-striked in 2014 and you didnât even *notice* until 2018. The Akashic Record turned out to not be a monument, but a front in a war - one that hasnât been lost yet, sure, but *could be lost* at any time, and you wonât receive any more warning than you already have. And once you know this, not by reading words but the only way one can - from the first time you look for something you thought was always there only to find it locked away forever - you canât regain the innocence lost. Now you download out of fear.
The man above is man fully embodying an ethos of a time and place. Not simply because he is obtaining free songs; in the end, if you want the song, you can buy the song, or use spotify, you can find a way to listen! But precisely because he does not care, in the moment, to listen, he has achieved enlightenment; to take with reckless abandon from a moment in history, a moment of spatial infinity and infinitesimal temporality, is worth the sleep deprivation. Maybe you should too, if you still can, while the moment lasts.
romaincrisis
izzy806
dailybridgerton
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
tangentwithtanner
