More and more people are talking about the need to protect physical media. Buy real books. Keep your CDs and LPs. Print your photos. Do not let everything become digital. Do not let AI, platforms, and data centres swallow everything.
The worry is not only that companies may take our things away. It is also that we do not truly own much of what we think we own. If something happened to the digital world, such as a war, disaster, “solar event,” company collapse … much of it could disappear.
I relate to this rant, but I worry it may actually be unhelpful. It echoes a fear many of us share: losing control of things we feel should be ours. But it may not simply respond to that fear. It may reinforce the fear that digital abundance has already created.
Fifty years ago, when I was born, most families did not own much content. At home, we had one small rack of books, a few cassette tapes, no VCR. We listened to music on the radio, watched programmes on television, read newspapers, and borrowed books from libraries.
We had one camera, but photographs were expensive, so we took them only on special occasions. We had three albums, with perhaps 40 photographs in each: my brother’s and my childhood, my parents’ wedding, and not much else. Everything else lived in memory.
Things went on like this until the 1990s, when we got our first VCR and began recording television programmes and films. We had video-game machines, CD players, LaserDisc players, and MiniDisc players. We accumulated more cassettes, CDs, and discs, and began recording ourselves more: first photos, then audio on cassette and later MiniDisc, then video on videotape.
By the mid-1990s, the internet arrived, and music and video became files: .wav, .mp3, .avi, .mpg, .mov. In the early 2000s, we got our first digital camera, and photos became .jpg, .gif, .png, occasionally .tiff.
I do not need to keep explaining the history from there.
What changed was not only that media became digital. We began to have far more of it. We could capture more, copy more, download more, buy more, and save more. Before that, we owned things too, but not in this quantity.
This abundance makes it hard to know what is truly valuable to us. When everything can be saved, everything starts to feel as if it might be important. We become afraid to let things go because we think, “What if I need this one day?” or “What if this becomes meaningful later?”
It is like trying to delete old photos. You know most of them are probably not special. Blurry images, screenshots, pictures you will never look at again. But you stop deleting them because you worry one of them might matter later. So you keep them all. The result is not necessarily better memory or more meaning. It is overwhelm.
Because so much is available to us, we start to feel we are supposed to own and protect more and more. We begin to treat every possible future loss as an urgent threat. That fear can become disproportionate. It is not always an accurate measure of what truly matters to us–it can be a response to having too much offered to us.
This is why I feel uneasy about these rants to buy and own physical media. No one can realistically become their own library, museum, archive, and disaster-recovery system. If every fear about digital loss leads us to own and maintain more objects, we may simply turn digital overload into physical overload.
We should push back against companies having too much control over what we can consume and keep. But I am not sure the answer is for every person to own more and more stuff. I think the problem we ought to tackle for ourselves is to see that abundance is weakening our ability to discern what’s truly valuable and turning letting go into a source of anxiety.
Do we actually own as much stuff as we think?
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