Half of Life is Developing a Theory For What You Are Already Going to Do Anyway

If you're a geezer, I'm a geezer's grandad. I have hundreds of CDs & while I have occasionally bought digital copies from Amazon & iTunes, these don't feel real to me. Now I'm old enough to remember the little records with the big hole in the middle, which probably disqualifies me for further discussion of the matter, but there seems to be some fundamental ontological leap involved that I'm just not willing to make. But then that's just another way of creating a theory to cover what I already believe, too.

It seems there might also be an occasion for a Stephen Potter-like Gamesmanship ploy based on your theory. E.g., "Oh, no, I'm such a Luddite, I never know when they'll tell me to change everything over again" -- the idea being to leave the updater feeling that they are but a tool of the System.

But putting faith in the Giant Digital-o-plex to update EVERYTHING seems more than a little foolish, and if scepticism about corporate technology makes me a Luddite, well, where do I sign up with my piece of pointed charcoal? How much vinyl never made it to CD? How many videotapes aren't getting transferred to DVD? There's very little money in re-formatting a ton of this stuff -- almost everything Scott likes, I suspect. (We're keeping tabs.) And I recall the basement of one university library I worked at that had weird, neglected mounds of previous tech solutions to library storage problems -- microdot readers, that sort of thing. A techno-evolutionary Jurassic dead end -- but who knew? So now we get to watch how fast the blu-ray format goes obsolete.

In the end, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash model of the future library, where everything has been digitalized, is a fantasy webheads love but which I suspect has large, dusty holes in it. Where most of my (precious!!) collections will wind up.

Going digital isn't all it's cracked up to be. I've spent ages getting most of the music I could possibly ever want onto my computer, and the drive it was on, although it was the newest, just died on me. Even the cleverest undelete software can't find more than about 10 albums out of the 135Gb that was once there.

Go CDs! At least I have some of it still available to me.