you can buy it anywhere
Seriously, no joke: my mom used to drive a truck across the country. She would start out on the East Coast with a truck stacked with new cars, and a couple days later she’d deliver them to some cruddy sand-blown dealership somewhere on the West Coast. One time when I asked her what it was like to drive across the country, she said “It’s depressing, really. Every town you go through, there’s a Pizza Hut, there’s a Walmart, and there’s a Wendy’s. Everything is everywhere.”I used to really enjoy going to used record stores. Whenever I’d visit a new town, the first thing I’d want to do would be to find the comic book shops and the local basement record stores. More often than not, I’d find some cool CD that I could never have found at my scuzzy little local strip-mall Strawberries Music. Same thing with book stores; visiting a used book store in another town might mean finding a rare and out-of-print book for cheap. During my twenties, this hunter-gatherer ritual was incredibly important to me; I liked being the guy with the really cool books and really cool CDs that no one else in my peer group had.
Today, both those activities seem completely pointless. If anyone even slightly tech-savvy still looks for media this way, surely they only attempt it for the anthropological thrill of the physical shopping experience, and not the end result of finding something new. I can now sit on the couch in my apartment, and via Amazon.com, I can have access to a far wider variety of music than could be available in a thousand local indie record stores. And even more efficiently, via the iTunes Music Store, I could get that music sent instantly to my iPod faster than I could even pick up the phone and ask some sullen clerk to check the shelves.
Because all this media — books, music, movies — are being stored digitally and are thus infinitely replicable, nothing will ever go out of print again. There’s no need, since none of it ever actually needed to be “in print” in the first place. From now on, everything we all produce is constantly, universally available. Forever and ever. Amen.
And: it’s almost too bad. For as much convenience as digital distribution gives us all, it also removes every trace of the thrill of the hunt. It removes any special feeling you’d get when you were pretty damn sure you were the only kid in your town with that impossibly cool, incredibly rare CD. It removes any sense of scarcity you might have felt when you saw something so very rare that you simply had to get it, now-ish, or you might never see it again. And it removes the ability to browse someone’s “private stash” of books or CDs, replacing that with aggregates and averages of items “recommended if you like”; recommended if you like completely anonymous fellow consumers and efficient, highly-tuned math equations.
These days? Nowhere is any different than anywhere else, and whatever it is you want, you can be sure you’ll see it again. And you can buy it anywhere.
~jeff
You know, I kinda feel this way. Except I still find cool stuff in bookstores that I haven’t been able to find of Amazon. I don’t know if it’s because those bookstores are just broken in keeping their inventories up to date or what, but it still works.
Not for long, though.
This phenom has pointed out to me the absurdity of tying my identity to what I possess. What I make is much less replicable because that thrill of the hunt is replaced with something unreplaceable: the thrill of constant discovery and learning.
That’s why I write games, build planes, and draw. It’s 100% non-commodity. It takes me out of the cattle category.
In the last few minutes, I’ve heard Eno, Vangelis, Lords of Acid, Talking Heads, Wire, M.I.A., and, God help me, Negativland. I have these because I like them. They don’t make me cool, though there was some hope of that at some point. I think we’re just seeing the vicious, paint-stripper-like removal of consumerist cruft that we’ve though of as our identities for the last half century.
Our big deal stuff is communications gear these days: video games to play with people, TVs to watch movies, stereos to listen to music, phones (and whatever they’re evolving into, Lamark-like) to talk with our friends. It’s about art.
You can consume it, chewing your bitcud, or you can create.
Great post.
It’s got me wondering if the easy access to all products/media is the same as having a Pizza Hut in every miracle mile.
And where will people expend their energy/look for their high now that bin-diving is near obsolete? Or will they look regardless?
I’m really interested in what l-dopans think about this. Any takers on either of those questions?
Oh, and if my wife is reading this, I HAVE been working today. Love you.
Easy access? your saying you have listened to every song and know its where to find it? you’ve seen every image and visited every website? If everything was easy access, no search required nobody would read ldopa.net
I think this is a good thing, you just have to translate it right
ldopa.net, a random website ( the small town bookstore ) dumpster diving for content nobody I know has.
We have just taken the travel out of the equation, now anyone anywhere can browse these millions of websites, searching for digital treasures, and instead of showing them off we share with others.
Social Bookmarking: sharing what we find, sure your not the only one that has it but I don’t really see the fun in that. I prefer search, find, share.
The lack of the hunter-gatherer opportunity, even for geek squad quality items, has weakend our society. We are tickled and entertained by the novelities the internet provides but where are the treasures, the hard-to-find rarities? I guess hunting and gathering, we might start creating ur won treasures for others to find and seek.
Yippee. We can all sit on our fat behinds in front of our $10,000 entertainment systems at home and never leave the house again…