These days, movies can be downloaded from any number of different license providers; Google, Microsoft, Apple and others all have stores that will let you get licenses for movies that you can use on an even larger plethora of devices. You can even subscribe and stream movies or TV from Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max1, Paramount+, Amazon Prime, or even Peacock2. And yet.
And yet.
At one point, not even terribly long ago!, it used to be more common to buy movies on VHS tapes, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs3. By comparison to downloading licenses or streaming, buying Blu-ray discs seems to have a lot of disadvantages. If I’m at a friend’s house, I can’t just AirPlay or Chromecast something over to their TV. If I want a movie I don’t already have, then I can just browse catalogs that together contain a significant fraction of all movies ever made, make some popcorn, and glue my butt to the sofa for two or so hours — all without fussing about going to a store or waiting for a mail-order. Moments later, and I’m happily watching.
And yet.
There’s a physicality to movies as objects that seems to invite a kind of nostalgia; I think it’s worth exploring for a moment why that is.
Often, when designing software and services, engineers will start by making a list of use cases — things that they think users should be able to do with their product. For a movie licensing store, for example, someone might write a use case like “as a movie buff, I want to be able to download and watch any Hollywood movie from the 1970s, so that I can TODO.” Another use case may be something like “as someone with a long commute, I want to be able to watch any TV show episode I have licensed on my phone, so that I can be entertained on the train4.” These kinds of use cases do a great job of capturing what a product should do.
And yet.
Take the example of going to a friend’s house again. If I bring a disc with me, I can leave it there and they can watch it later. Because the disc is a physical object, and I can do stuff with it that I’m used to doing with any other physical object under my control. I can give it away, I can loan it, I can put it on a shelf so that it looks nice in my living room, I can walk over to it and look at it when I want to be inspired by my movie collection, I can pick it up and thoughtfully turn it over in my hands in an attempt to look smart and refined. In short, a disc is a thing, and I can do stuff with my things. Including stuff not captured by a list of use cases.
The same goes for physical books versus e-books, for comic books versus CBZ files, for CDs versus Spotify and YouTube Music, for vinyl records versus CDs. Physical objects invite being used in ways that their creators never anticipated, while digital licenses are manipulated according to the terms of those licenses, those manipulations mediated by service APIs.
I love reading books on my Kindle and reMarkable, but they lack the physicality that allows me to spread books out, leave them in whatever reading nooks, or dog-ear pages that I love to go back to. If you ever want to see the limits of e-books as compared to physical objects, go look at a tabletop RPG — PDFs of a Monster Manual are nowhere near as useful as books that you can easily pass around, stuff ad-hoc bookmarks into, or set next to your character sheet.
To my mind, a lot of the mismatch comes from the “disruption” of replacing objects by licenses — revokable and limited by comparison — but also to the abstraction implicit in having made a list of use cases. Necessarily, a set of use cases represents how we think an object is used, how it’s replacement by software or a service will be used. That similarly necessitates a level of abstraction; the reduction of an object to what we consider to be its most salient and useful features.
Like all abstractions, these necessarily leak. When I write a page of text long-hand, for example, there is information carried by my pen stroke that’s not captured by a representation of that text as UTF-8. If a book has a fold-out map, I can’t include that in a PDF of the book. If the box for a movie or video game has a reversible cover, I can’t represent that in a movie collection on Google Play.
There’s always huge advantages to replacing physical objects with services, but I don’t think people are wrong to be nostalgic for the nuance that leaked through those abstractions. It’s not Luddism to want to do things with your movies, books, comics, games, music — with all the art that you participate in as a reader, listener, or viewer — outside what those abstractions and use cases capture. It’s sometimes hard to even put words to the simple act of setting your cookbook up on a stand near the mixer, or to the act of recalling past baking sections whose memories are immortalized in bits of flour stuck to oft-used pages.
It’s an act of humanity; a humanity that is often treated as just another inefficiency to be optimized away in favor of more performant solutions to a list of use cases.
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The stuff they haven’t deleted, anyway.
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Yep, Peacock is still a thing. Somehow.
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Or LaserDiscs. Or HD-DVDs. Or UMDs. That’s not my point, though.
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It’s my post, let me have my fantasy about the US having reasonable commute options via train.