Streaming, Physical Media, and the Failure of Techno-optimism
Feel free to judge my home’s movie collection
This week brought more bad news for the streaming model of entertainment. Paramount+ has canceled multiple series, a common story these days. In another increasingly popular move by corporate media, they are taking older episodes off of their streaming service as a tax dodge. Furthermore, they are not giving these shows a physical media release. Even HBO Max (I ain’t calling Max) has slashed its catalog, something that was supposed to be a selling point.
In recent years it’s been hip for people to brag about throwing away their physical media, and even to mock and sneer at others who still maintain their DVDs and CDs. I’ve always taken this to be a defense mechanism, since those people know deep down they made a risky bet, one that more and more looks like a bad one. Streaming promised the entire library of pop culture at our fingertips, stored forever in the cloud. Once the pied piper lured customers into the cave, the deal changed.
So many people were willing to take this bad bet because they had been conditioned by the ideology of techno-optimism. Techno-optimism holds that technological innovations should always be seen as positives, and that they will inevitbaly bring about improvements to the human condition. In some cases, tech is seen as the ultimate salvation, the thing that is going to stop climate change. It’s the same ideology that made Elon Musk a figure of widespread public adulation before his recent meltdown. It’s the ideology that has educators responding to the threats posed by AI by saying “why don’t we think about how we can use this technology” instead of “how can we do our utmost to limit the damage this technology is already causing.” We are already seeing the circulation of deep-fake pornography, and the lack of legislative action to regulate it is another manifestation of techno-optimism. Regulating it would be admitting that tech does not always know what’s best.
The techno-optimist ideology is a global one, but it is especially strong in the United States. The EU, for example, is already proposing ways to govern the use of AI; no such rules will be forthcoming in the United States. I suspect this is because the ideology of techno-optimism is really just a stalking horse for unfettered capitalism and corporate power, which are also more pronounced in the USA. If tech is our savior, then the people who make it must know best, and they must be left alone while they generate as much profit as possible.
The streaming debacle is a good example. When you buy a piece of physical media, you own it. I can resell my DVDs, BluRays, records and CDs (and often do.) I can get used copies of physical media from others at discount prices. So often when I buy a book I end up loaning it out, donating it, or trading it in for other books. In the streaming model I pay a subscription fee to a service, or pay a service to rent of buy something. The streaming system puts the money and power in the hands of the conglomerates, taking away the small little bit of ownership that consumers once had. It also cuts out independent businesses. Video stores and record stores have become scarce in the past 20 years for this reason. Their loss not only eliminated small businesses, it also meant the destruction of the kind of “third places” that allow people to associate with each other amicably in public.
I want to be clear that I am not a crank or sentimentalist on this issue. I am not writing one of the usual paeans to physical media. Yes, I love the large canvas of LP covers and the discussions that arise when house guests scan my movie shelf. Yes I find myself in bliss going through the shelves of an independent bookstore and my heart leaps when I dig through crates of records. Even if these things do not move you because you have been Kondo-pilled to minimize your belongings, the streaming model has not been the boon it purports to be. In fact, a weirdo record collector with a big shelf of movies like myself had once been a bit of an optimist on digitized media.
The limitations of the streaming model became clear to me about a dozen years ago when I got an iPad and started reading ebooks, thinking it would save space in my house. However, once I read a book I loved, I could not loan it to a friend or trade it in at my local store. This was on top of the inconvenience of needing a charged device to read it and the inability to casually flip through the pages. Like a lot of other people, I buy a lot fewer ebooks nowadays.
I was also an early adopter of iTunes in the 2000s, excited that I could pay a buck to get ahold of my favorite one-hit wonder songs instead of seeking out compilations or buying a whole album for just one track. I soon realized I had been burned. iTunes often had multiple versions of songs for sale, and some were crappy re-recordings. When buying the songs, I was very careful to get the right version, but once they were stored in the cloud, I found they had been replaced with a crap version, erasing what I had bought. (Luckily, my old iPod is still functional.)
It was a hard lesson that the digitized thing you buy or stream is not your thing at all. I noticed this recently while re-watching The French Connection on the Criterion Channel, bracing for some racial slurs from the mouth of Popeye Doyle that never came. While that censorship may have been well-intentioned, it altered the complicated moral universe of the film. We are not supposed to think of Doyle as completely heroic, or of the police as always being the good guys. Disney, which owns 20th Century Fox, which owns The French Connection, decided they could alter a classic Oscar-winning film, its intended meaning be damned.
Beyond altering pre-existing songs and movies, conglomerates are poor caretakers of art. Streaming promised total availability, but many popular movies and TV shows can’t be found anywhere on streaming. (There are multiple things I have purchased on physical media for this very reason.) This mirrors what happened in the transition from VHS to DVD, when many films were not put on DVD, and are very hard to find in any format nowadays. New tech does not automatically translate to more choice.
At the end of the day, tech worship is really about maximizing corporate power. People breathlessly posting about the bad or mediocre stuff barfed out by AI are enabling the conglomerates to fire artists and writers and save money by having shitty AI outputs be accepted by the public. The way was already prepared by people thinking a glitchy, low quality transfer of a movie onto streaming was preferable to a pristine BluRay of the same film. Techno-optimism has so brainwashed us that we accept less thinking that it’s more. Do what you want, I’ll be firing up my DVD box set of the original Planet of the Apes movies this week. (And maybe writing about them soon on here)