As a scholar of Arthurian literature, particularly that of England in the 15th century, I have a professional appreciation for the existence of physical media. If, instead of diligently writing out his Le Morte Darthur, Sir Thomas Malory had only told his story aloud to friends, relatives, and his gaoler, we almost certainly would not have had the benefit of it over the intervening centuries that have passed since his death. Like so many other fascinating but ephemeral pieces of the past, it would have entirely disappeared, leaving future generations deprived of that which they did not even have the chance to know.
Physical connexions to the past are not only of interest to scholars of literature and history; both well-known texts and more recent discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library are obvious examples of how ancient written works quite clearly continue to influence the modern world, shaping the religious beliefs and practises of countless people. Such physical records are vital for providing insight into contemporary differences and debates, but they also serve as an objective authority that can speak for the past in a way that no credible scholar can simply dismiss without cause. It is for this reason that George Orwell’s 1984, with its nightmare vision of a totalitarian future, portrays a world in which The Party endlessly destroys and rewrites every record of the past. Once history is destroyed, truth ceases to be a matter of conformity to objective facts and becomes instead a matter of compliance with the powerful.
Cultures of the past instinctively recognised, as Orwell did, the connexion between physicality and objective truth. It is for this reason that the ancient Egyptians carved their words into stone and erected impressive monuments intended to endure not for a season or a lifetime, but for an eternity. When the pharaoh Akhenaten instituted a new religion of sun worship but died without ensuring its continuation, the reversal of his innovations led to efforts to eradicate him from history: his image was scratched out, his tomb defaced, and the record of his deeds expunged. By erasing the physical proofs of his existence, his misguided successors sought to erase the man himself, his deeds, and—most importantly—any lingering effect that he had upon society. Similar motivations drive similarly misguided modern iconoclasts, who believe, like their ancient predecessors, that the reins of history can be seized with enough effort put into erasing the truth of the past.
That lesson has never been lost on the masters of government, from the ancient to the modern era. Stalin infamously had Nikolai Yezhov removed from a photograph taken in front of the Moscow canal, in an image that has today become symbolic of political efforts to rewrite history. The outrage associated with these efforts to manipulate the past shows that physical media has always been an ally to and guardian of the truth, and an enemy of those who would misrepresent the past for political reasons.
Physical media not only performs a protective role not only for the political rights of a people but also for some portion of their rights to property, which are engendered in the medium itself. The only way to deprive people of their physical media is to locate it, access it, and physically confiscate it. Although the modern era offers an alternative to that security in the form of convenient, space-saving digital purchases, those digital purchases have no substantial grounding in physical reality. As with so many modern innovations, much is sacrificed in exchange for the dubious benefits of convenience and space-saving design. Consequently, digital media requires technical compatibility, the appropriate software, and even decryption. Still less permanent are streaming services, for which the media are not even stored in digital form on the user’s device. Indeed, the terms of service for such offerings explicitly indicate that their users are not owners of the media. At the push of a button, the service can be terminated without so much as a by-your-leave, depriving the ‘user’ of access without recourse or any sort of due process.
As these services were rolled out at the beginning of the millennium, extraordinarily naïve—not to say foolish—arguments were offered to the effect that no sensible, reputable company would ever undertake to deprive its users of access in such a way. After all, the word would get around, and they would lose so many of their customers to their competitors that it would prove an economically suicidal manoeuvre, whatever appeal it might have in the short term. But such arguments only make sense in a world where companies do not take leads from one another when it comes to exploiting consumers in order to increase their profit margin. Once one company crossed the Rubicon, the other major players swiftly followed, ensuring that consumers had no alternative to which they could turn (something similar played out again and again in the very different world of social media, when the major services all adopted a similar political position, ensuring their conservative users would have nowhere else to go).
The gormless view that companies would not turn off consumer access to media met its Waterloo in the industry that has for several decades been the proving ground for anti-consumer innovation: video games. Because gamers have a fidelity both to certain hardware consoles and to long-running franchises, hardware and software developers wagered that players would be willing to sacrifice their consumer rights as the cost of continuing to play their beloved titles on their favourite system. It helped that, far from being advocates for the consumers whom they ostensibly serve, video game ‘journalists’ are servile public relations agents of the industry in all but name, beholden not to the consumers who are their readers (and whom they hold in contempt) but rather to the hardware and software developers whom they idolise.
All too predictably, when consumer advocates, such as this author, sounded the alarm about the potential for abuse that was inherent in a digital-only environment, those concerns were dismissed or ignored. Instead, the PR line for major corporations was funnelled through the gaming media. And when one company, and then another, switched off their digital services, depriving people of access to their libraries of purchased titles without refunds or recourse, the same media rushed to the defence not of the users but of the corporations that had flipped the switch. At first, these actions were undertaken for ostensibly technical reasons; then for reasons related to copyright; then for no particular reason at all. Scarcely anyone in the media batted an eye when Activision Blizzard—the maker of popular titles like World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and StarCraft—began banning users from its platform (thereby depriving them of their purchased titles), not because of their behaviour in its games but rather because of their social media posts. The fact that the majority of those users had expressed conservative views will come as a surprise to no one.
Once the video game industry had served its canary-in-the-coal-mine purpose for the broader media industry, publishing houses and video streaming services gleefully followed suit. In a series of infamous moves, the works of Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss, amongst others, were subjected to CCP-style ‘sensitivity rewrites’ by woke apparatchiks keen to bring the beloved authors of the past into line with the new ideological hobby horses. When challenged, publishing houses have doubled down,refusing to keep the original editions in print and even going so far as to insist that second-hand copies be automatically pulled from venues like Amazon and eBay. That publishers did so might seem hypocritical to the point of absurdity, considering how they decried ‘book bans’ that amounted to little more than withdrawing from middle-school libraries a small selection of sexually explicit texts that remained widely available everywhere else. But rather than mere hypocrisy, their actions are an expression of their hierarchical worldview, in which their views and political positions occupy a privileged status.
As these anti-consumer manoeuvres have become more, not less, intrusive and egregious, the politicians of both the Left and Right have been utterly supine in the face of industry lobbying, although devotees of both parties have much to fear from these digital developments. Should the Right gain ascendancy, as it slowly seems to be doing across the Western world, it could just as easily turn the screws on the Left, with companies following suit in order to placate the new administrations of the future. Politicians from across the political spectrum should resist the demands of the media industry and put into place robust legal defences that prevent consumers from being deprived of their digital purchases through industry actions—often appearing to be politically motivated—that constitute a kind of brazen theft by cultural commissars. But because these policies cannot be expected in the foreseeable future and because they must be enforced (often at great cost to the consumer via an expensive court action) in order to be worth anything, consumers must take matters into their own hands.
For the moment, that can be done by eschewing the ‘digital future’ in favour of a physical present. The publishing houses cannot yet knock down one’s door and rewrite one’s books in the middle of the night. The movie, music, and video game companies cannot steal into one’s home and abscond, Grinch-like, with bags full of prized discs and cartridges. Because of the comparatively low demand that exists at the moment, physical music, films, and books are at historically low prices, and video games usually sell at much lower than retail cost when purchased second-hand. Physical, visual, and audio media can be easily and quickly (and legally) digitised (‘ripped’), allowing its convenient use in a digital form on one’s phone, computer, or the like without forgoing the security and dependability of having a physical copy on hand. And as for books, they are just better in a physical form, suitable for bookmarks, margin notes, and personal defence (a hardcover book makes a far better weapon than a Kindle).
In a thousand years, it is unlikely that much of our ephemeral digital media will survive. Most of the websites that existed just ten years ago have gone, Wayback Machine notwithstanding, and virtually no one can still use RealPlayer audio files, ScreamTracker S3M files, and so on. What will survive are the physical media we create, especially the analogue media that can be accessed mechanically or directly: books, vinyl albums, and movies shot on actual film. Even if we, as consumers, might not be able to go ‘full analogue’ (it’s not practical to get one’s hands on a film reel of The Lord of the Rings), we should still do our best whenever possible to choose the physical instead of the digital, the persistent instead of the transient, and ownership instead of perpetual rentorship. In doing so, we will better protect our rights and preserve our history, and we will also diminish the power of a media industry directed and facilitated by people who have time and again shown themselves to be cynical, greedy, and duplicitous.
