Although I won't say that I collect vinyl records, I can certainly tell you that my vinyl record collection has grown over the course of the last 12-18 months. I never had a record player in my youth, but my father and uncle both did—with an enormous collection of records. I'm not sure what happened to my uncle's collection after his passing, but I assume that those records were obtained by my cousin.

It's not just vinyl records that have captured my attention. I've also been looking at retro-cassette Instagram profiles and contemplating a custom mixtape order, and yes, I know that the degradation on cassettes makes it an unworthy media. I lived through the original cassette era—complete with a pencil to rewind unspun tapes.

My nostalgia doesn't extend to CDs—although the CD is a mighty fine media for today. Maybe that's just because of recency. Go ahead and buy yourself some physical media and put it into a real stereo system for a change.

When I moved out of my apartment at 30, I decided to abandon a trove of CDs. I ripped them onto my computer and still have those digital remenants—regardless of quality concerns. My DVDs all came with me though. Corporate greed was making digitizing your DVDs harder by the day, and hard drive space wasn't as cheap or abundant back then.

Recently—and especially since streaming companies have now become worse than cable—I've returned to the physical disc as escapism, using a combination of MakeMKV, Handbrake, and Plex to digitize my library (still a work in progress) and get them up on the local network (in this case, I used an Umbrel Home). Sure, it's still digital media, but the digitization sits on a backbone of physical discs (kept in CD binders).

The physical disc is a lost art and it's unfortunate that big box stores have been threatening to eliminate physical media from their stores. This puts even more power in the hands of the digitizers and the streamers. You can certainly buy digital copies, but the elimination of physical media elimates the browsing experience. It eliminates the hang-out experience. It eliminate the end cap placement and marketing promotions. The magic happens in the interaction.

This is what the music store and/or shopping mall owned. They may have only been selling music, but the physicality of the experience, and the ambience of the store created something whose whole was greater than the sum of parts, and again, I believe that the value was in the interaction. Sam Goody, Musicland, FYE… The small box chain stores littering malls, blasting music… some even had headphones with pre-loaded music so you could sample more than the radio play. Then one day you walked into a Tower Records and your mind was blown.

This actually says nothing of the far superior independent music shop experience, but those were far more city dweller experiences… Suburbia had little in the way of those shops outside of the wealthy towns.

Where does art and experience go when it's been fully digitized? Where is it's sacred space?

Bill Ahern and I ended our run on the Codepunk podcast with a discussion on the nature of virtual reality worlds and ideas on "presence."

Proximity in design tells us that the closer elements are together the more they are functionally related, and as things become functionally similar in design they become closer together until they are right on top of each other. A good example is an elevator panel. There are three elements: the buttons, the numbers, and the lights. The button selects the floor. The number tells you which floor. The light confirms your choice. All three of these are highly integrated and thus the most pervasive elevator panel design has the button, light, and number integrated into one piece. It would make little sense to have a legend of number and button correspondences on the wall that you need to consult in order to know which button you need to select. To say that this would be bad design is an understatement.

As three dimensional entities, position in space matters. Space in general—be it sacred or mundane—is important to experience, and experience and interaction is what shapes growth and spawns new ideas. We've made things easier to access—almost instantaneous. To do so, we've treated all information, experience, entertainment, etc. the same way we treat Internet packets. We've made everything more alike—more mechanistic—in order to speed up delivery and consumption, but what has that done to the value of the experience?

In my Max Headroom piece, I wrote:

Drew Austin has an excellent newsletter called The Kneeling Bus, and in one of his issues, he quotes Richard Meltzer on the notion that rock-and-roll had value until it was everywhere—this is the idea that scarcity breeds contemplation, which breeds catharsis. Radio made music readily available, but still on rotation. Want the song? Buy the album. As technology progressed and the tape deck emerged, you could record off the radio in lieu of buying the whole album. Nowadays, you can just buy songs individually, or stream them whenever you want. Artists who painstakingly crafted everything from the music, the song order, the album cover art, the lyric sheets, and the videos that expanded the message they wanted to convey have been replaced by immediate, single consumption. The crafted story is lost.

The physical act of shopping for music… of getting off your computer and out of your house, driving to a store, interacting with the environment, and experiencing the music… all that has gone away. That "scarcity" of acquisition and interaction had value. But today?

When I did Apotheosis, I often thought of it as a podcast by an aging man angry that things aren't as good as when he was growing up. Some parts of it read that way. Entertainment, video games, music—before everything was commoditized and turned into an algorithm managed by supply-chain spreadsheet formulas. I certainly felt that everything was better when I was younger, even though our current time is the best point in any point in history on average. I have fond memories of the 80's and the 80's/90's culture, and I'm well aware of the difficulties of those times. I had a Mastodon conversation with Mark Pesce about this, and he (being a gay man in the 80's) certainly had no blinders on as to the decade.

There is certaintly degradation in how our culture has genericized itself for the benefits for corporatism, but are we merely mythologizing the past through our imperfect nostalgia?

Recently, I read this passage from England's Hidden Reverse. It was a quote by Current 93 musician David Tibet:

However, I still believe that when I was a child was the last time I was ever happy, I'm constantly looking back to that and trying to recover what made me happy, but at the same time I'm aware that we do romanticise the past and maybe that's fine. Maybe having romanticised it, it becomes true. We have created it in our own image, we've made it what we want it to be, but I think that if we actually did recover it totally, then like all things in life, we'd be disappointed by it. Still, we can't do it, we can never recover it - what is it in humans that make us desire to recover something that is unrecoverable?