saw this exchange on tumblr today and decided to add a few of my own thoughts:
itâs not just rental stores either. if thereâs no physical version of a film or tv show to acquire, then libraries are trapped in the same IP-licensing hell that all other streaming media is. the kanopy access iâm granted through the seattle public library lets me watch three (3) entire movies per month. three! if youâve got a college library account i think you get ten. itâs the same with books. last summer i wanted to get into ursula k leguin, only to discover that not only were all the physical copies of her books checked out and back-reserved for months, their ebooks were all checked out too! ebooks! the seattle public library ran out of ebooks!!!!!! a digital file that can be reproduced infinitely at zero cost made arbitrarily scarce because greedy publishers want to give us as few legal ways to read stuff for free or at low cost when we could be buying them at full msrp instead. which creates more waste than the alternative, inevitably traps us in digital ecosystems which WILL be destroyed and replaced wholesale within the decade. oh and where do people buy most of their books today? oh amazon, oh thatâs funny, thatâs a cute coincidence.
but let us not forget that blockbuster itself was an invasive corporate parasite that drove countless independent video stores into bankruptcy using the very same business model that defines tech companies today: get big on a national scale, make prices unreasonably cheap and just eat the losses, choke out all the competition, and then hope that when it comes time to actually be profitable that theyâll just be too big to fail. unfortunately it turns out that what actually happens in this case is that when the competition is dead and youâve stripmined every cuttable corner, your profit margins decline and you go bankrupt and now an entire industry is blown to smithereens. golly that does sound familiar! probably wonât happen with any other monopolies though, i mean what happened with blockbuster was sort of a fluke because usually the rate of profit only ever goes up! i think. iâve only ever skimmed marx but iâm pretty sure thatâs what he said
and this whole process exists in concert with the death of broadcast media and syndication. iâve been a film nerd for a long time, i got it from my dad early on because we would watch reruns of hollywood schlock from the 40s and 50s together for hours. tv stations revived countless old undervalued media through rebroadcast. itâs a wonderful life is just one very famous example of a film that was generally disliked in its day but found an audience decades later through syndication. and yes, they did this because it was cheaper than producing new content to fill a 24/7 broadcast schedule (this was before they invented reality tv to scab for a striking writerâs guild), but itâs an undeniably more sustainable business model than what we have now. so much media today is produced for right now specifically. stranger things exists for social media, it exists to be talked about in the week of its release, it exists to bolster netflixâs name and capitalize on the very present-tense nostalgia for 80s aesthetics in an incredibly surface-level, conservative america friendly package that removes everything about the films it worships which once made those very films deeply transgressive and uncomfortable in an outsidery sort of way. and none of this even touches on the matter of how streaming media pays out infinitely less royalties for airing existing media (oh hey kind of like how spotify fucks over musicians, thatâs another weird coincidence)
once a full season of streaming tv is dropped in a single day, yes, sure, hypothetically you can watch it again whenever you want. but do you? when new stuff shows up on the platform constantly, do you really go back and watch what you meant to watch earlier? doesnât it feel like a waste of time to watch something that isnât very immediately in the zeitgeist? so instead of recycling existing media, using the hypothetically infinite reproduceability of digital media to give a new generation of young people unprecedented access to classic films and tv shows, evolving and expanding the framing techniques that made turner classic movies so charming, theyâve opted to infinitely devalue everything which does not obviously meet the metrics of virality in an algorithm they literally paid a guy with a degree in money making to invent out of thin air. if an executive cannot see the immediate obvious shareholder-related value of something, they can choose to throw it in the trash and weâre just stuck with that decision. execs at hbo discovery can indefinitely memoryhole infinity train because it isnât a story to them, it isnât art, it is private property. and in the eyes of the government, that gives them every right to put it in a vault forever if they so desire. at least until it passes into the public domain in, oh, i donât know, eighty years? thanks for that one disney. oh shit, another monopoly! itâs so funny how we keep running into those
physical media is a license that cannot be revoked. a corporation canât invalidate it, take it away from you, make you pay for it again (except by inventing new technologies that utilize a different storage/playback technology), or keep it out of libraries. they only ever tolerated this lack of control over their ~~~intellectual property~~~ in the past because they had no alternative. but now, in the age of infinite digital reproduction, artificial scarcity is more valuable than ever. isnât it funny that the overwhelming media narrative about physical media over the last fifteen years or so has been that itâs dying? always itâs dying. bookstores are dying, rental stores are dying, comic stores are dying. and yet the cause is never actually consumer habits, but market capture and price-fixing by unrestrained and totally unmonitored corporate capitalists. most everyone i talk to prefers reading physical books if given a choice. everyone loves vinyl and tapes despite the fact that they universally sound like shit! even streaming die-hards have copies of their favorite movies on discs.
physical media isnât dying. corporations are deliberately killing it to bolster their bottom line.
