I realize this piece is 13 years old, but I think what you identify here is a part of a much larger trend encouraging people to be increasingly rootless and live in smaller and smaller spaces, moving around constantly to fulfill the demands of global capital. I regard e.g. the storage space industry, Marie Kondo's organizational fascism, "tiny houses" and Amazon Prime as other manifestations of this phenomenon.
I infer you know that moving one's vinyl collection is a gigantic pain in the ass and have probably experienced it at least once. I'm lucky enough to own a house where I have room for mine. It's very sad to see younger people getting moved around like pawns on a chessboard and their lives being cheapened as a result.
That's an interesting though. Digital coding of information including of artistic works transforms them in interesting ways that certainly affect the way we relate to them, for good or ill.
But owning a large digital collection is very hard. I had a couple of thousand CDs and ripped them and now I have a horrible mess of disorganization and bad metadata. And safely archiving it is another worry. And just keeping burns energy, let alone using it.
Now the immense reductions in the cost of digital storage, processing and transmission and the digital takeover of music supply means a cloud platform that we rent is simpler by far.
The artists are serfs and the consumers are tenants.
But you're onto something by generalizing this beyond artistic works to other things. In the second paragraph of "We Have Always Lived In The Castle", near the beginning, Shirley Jackson wrote,
> "We dealt with the small surface transient objects, the books and the flowers and the spoons, but underneath we had always a solid foundation of stable possessions. We always put things back where they belonged. We dusted and swept under tables and chairs and beds and pictures and rugs and lamps, but we left them where they were; the tortoise-shell toilet set on our mother's dressing table was never off place by so much as a fraction of an inch. Blackwoods had always lived in our house, and kept their things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world."
I realize this piece is 13 years old, but I think what you identify here is a part of a much larger trend encouraging people to be increasingly rootless and live in smaller and smaller spaces, moving around constantly to fulfill the demands of global capital. I regard e.g. the storage space industry, Marie Kondo's organizational fascism, "tiny houses" and Amazon Prime as other manifestations of this phenomenon.
I infer you know that moving one's vinyl collection is a gigantic pain in the ass and have probably experienced it at least once. I'm lucky enough to own a house where I have room for mine. It's very sad to see younger people getting moved around like pawns on a chessboard and their lives being cheapened as a result.
That's an interesting though. Digital coding of information including of artistic works transforms them in interesting ways that certainly affect the way we relate to them, for good or ill.
But owning a large digital collection is very hard. I had a couple of thousand CDs and ripped them and now I have a horrible mess of disorganization and bad metadata. And safely archiving it is another worry. And just keeping burns energy, let alone using it.
Now the immense reductions in the cost of digital storage, processing and transmission and the digital takeover of music supply means a cloud platform that we rent is simpler by far.
The artists are serfs and the consumers are tenants.
But you're onto something by generalizing this beyond artistic works to other things. In the second paragraph of "We Have Always Lived In The Castle", near the beginning, Shirley Jackson wrote,
> "We dealt with the small surface transient objects, the books and the flowers and the spoons, but underneath we had always a solid foundation of stable possessions. We always put things back where they belonged. We dusted and swept under tables and chairs and beds and pictures and rugs and lamps, but we left them where they were; the tortoise-shell toilet set on our mother's dressing table was never off place by so much as a fraction of an inch. Blackwoods had always lived in our house, and kept their things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world."