Pbeidy
Earlier this year, I engaged in a fairly standard activity for a man my age with aging parents: I cleaned out a bunch of crap that was lying around their house dating back from when I was a teenager. While I have on occasion returned to the parental abode in the unnumbered (for I refuse to count them) decades since I left my teens behind me, I had always seemed to leave more things there then I ended up taking with me. This was likely largely due to the Global Nomad existence I was engaged in from my late teens well into my 30s. Which is a long way of me saying that I had accumulated a lot of detritus to clear out.
Some of these things were touching. Birthday cards from friends, some of whom I still hold dear, others who have drifted away on the currents of time. Some were love letters, others jokes. One significant batch constituted a years worth of paper correspondence with a girl I had met at summer boarding school. I was obviously deeply smitten with her and do hold to the the fanciful notion that she might have thought a little fondly of me. Why else all the letters? I kept most of these writings, even though I have a wife and children now. I feel that they are the greatest testament to my existence. Proof, that I lived and met people and influenced them as much as they influenced me. All of it expressed via ink on paper. Maybe one day my children will read them and learn that this is who Dad was before he met Mom. These are the people who loved him and what they thought of him. This is who he was when he was us.
Or maybe they will toss them away, as we all must do periodically. Evicting the old to bring in the new.
But sometimes, by rediscovering old stuff, it can launch you into a new project of self discovery. Unearthing an old piece of clothing, a beloved book you thought you had lost, that you rediscover, unearthing the feelings you had when you first read it.
For my part, I discovered that my siblings and I had left a metric fuck ton of CDs at my parents house. And that got me thinking.
A bit of context is necessary here. I have always been a keen follower of the trends in digital products and services. Never the early adopter and always prone to skepticism where others tended to exuberance, but certain to embrace the new world whenever it had passed whatever arbitrary point I decided it needed to in order to merit my attention and money. Often this meant I started using these things just before they took off in the mainstream. It is a pattern I have noted with myself in a number of different unrelated instances but that is for a later post. In any case, after many years of joyful participation in the global online community I had found my love of these products and the companies that build them to slowly wear thin.
It started with giving up on Facebook. It was not a conscientious decision, I just kind stopped one day around 2017-2018. This was followed by me ceasing to post on Instagram in 2019, following the birth of my son. My wife had requested I don’t post any pictures of him on to a public social media network and I could not come up with any good reason why I should be posting at all. In truth, what I was feeling were the first tendrils of a phenomenon that would lack a coherent descriptor until 2024, when Cory Doctrow once more proved the magical power of names by coining an exceptionally powerful neologism: Enshitification.
As happens when you first find a name for something and can point it out with knife sharp clarity, you end up seeing it everywhere. And so I did. I saw and felt clearly the degradation of every experience I had online. How the joy of sharing and discovery had become grey and miserable and constrictive and expensive. I realized that between my wife and I, we were subscribed to 4 streaming services and Spotify and often could not watch what we wanted to watch or were forced to listen to Leon Bridges’s Take me to the River until it echoed in our bones because the algorithm had decided it needed to be in every generated playlist and there was no convincing it otherwise. One evening, I went looking for Once Upon a Time in the West. Surely, one of these bloody services must have one of the best westerns ever in their catalogue, no? I pay hundreds of Euros a year and the movie is older than I am by almost a decade or more. One of them must have allow me to watch it?
No. It was only available to purchase. I returned to Netflix and saw that Goodfellas would be leaving the service within the week. I was incensed. We were paying out the nose for movies, series and music that were compressed to hell and back. That sounded tinny and looked muddy. And at any moment theses companies could just take it away. And then they started putting ad breaks in the shows. And every playlist became plugged with so much AI slop it started to ooze out of the speakers like pus. I was disgusted, I was angry, i was done. But where else would I go?
And then on a warm March Sunday, I stood in front of the piles of CDs that I, my brother and my sister had carelessly abandoned at my parents house and that my parents had never thrown away. It represented hundreds of hours of music. More than that in monetary terms. High quality music that we owned, that no company could take away from us.
In the cobweb draped machinery of my mind, something began to tick…