5 ms·

Regardless of the nostalgia factor of old media (whose value is overstated, imo), the only practical alternative these days is not owning any media at all. So w

by mvkel 2y ago

Regardless of the nostalgia factor of old media (whose value is overstated, imo), the only practical alternative these days is not owning any media at all. So when no single streaming service pays the license to stream The Matrix, the film will virtually cease to exist. Fast forward a few hundred years of bit rot, and there's a nonzero chance that the film is lost to time. Think of all the countless valuable film, music, etc that didn't have the acclaim of The Matrix. Gone sooner, and more prolifically.

konfusinomicon 2y ago
thankfully all the pirates of the golden age of physical media and their ancestors who have meticulously tranferred the inherited data to the newest forms of storage have kept countless backups and the legend of neo will live on for years to come
mtoner23 2y ago
Idk, the matrix is in the library of congress, i think it's going to be preserved just fine
- et-al 2y ago
  >Think of all the countless valuable film, music, etc that didn't have the acclaim of The Matrix. Gone sooner, and more prolifically. E.g. Existenz and Strange Days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
  - samplatt 2y ago
    You're saying both of those no longer exist on streaming services? That's a goddamned tragedy (though I have local copies of both). Side note, I first watched Strange Days on a VR headset (the Gear VR) while on a 6hr flight, having no idea the movie would be about virtual reality. That felt pretty damn special.
    - et-al 2y ago
      Ah no. To clarify I was highlighting mvkel's point by pointing out two lesser known films that future film historians would want to access to in addition to The Matrix. Luckily there are plenty of DVDs floating about for those films, but you can imagine a situation where a cult classic released now will not have that physical artifact.
      - sien 2y ago
        With books there is a requirement for to upload all books published in Australia to be put in the Australian National Library. The US has something similar. It's surprising that something like that hasn't been legislated for film and possibly for TV. It would be quite doable today technologically.
        mtoner23 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Registry
  - autoexec 2y ago
    Both readily available on DVD still thankfully, although Existenz is selling for about twice what they want for strange days for some reason.
  - deafpolygon 2y ago
    Existenz is on the MS Store for some reason.
- autoexec 2y ago
  There are a lot of things preserved in the library of congress which remain inaccessible to most people. It's better than having works vanish entirely, but our culture is still poorer and shrinking as a result.
mastazi 2y ago
I remember in the 90's the promise of the Internet was that it would be a resilient repository of all human knowledge and cultural artifacts. I remember people pointing out that the Internet was designed to survive even a nuclear war, so tragedies like the loss of the Library of Alexandria would never happen again. Instead, we got link rot, abandonware IP, and lots of memes.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  I wonder who was promising that. It's a lot more like a postal system where you can mail huge volumes of data instantly and for almost no charge, but mailing your neighbor or friend is incredibly difficult compared to mailing a company and getting a reply. Stuff definitely falls through the cracks. Even the 20-something-year-old promise of Google to "index the world's information" has failed pathetically. I frequently can't find things I'm looking for, because all I have left in my head is a fingerprint of "I'll know it when I see it" and maybe a couple odd keywords that aren't enough to pull any signal out of the noise. In one case I got ChatGPT to help me find a book I'd been missing for years because the generic keywords like "magic staff", "tree", "volcano crater" returned jack shit on common search engines. (It was "The Ancient One" by T. A. Barron, if anyone else is stuck looking for it too) In another case I found a book on Kagi. The Library of Babel is a much closer analogy. Everything _might_ be in there, but you probably aren't gonna find anything worthwhile. lol.
  - wmf 2y ago
    Specifically, AT&T predicted/promised it in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will (directed by Fincher before people knew who he was)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - riffraff 2y ago
    Just an aside: for SF and fantasy, the scifi stack exchange is an invaluable source to identify a story by a few random bits, they have a specific tag/label for questions like that and it never failed for me.
femto 2y ago
I'd counter that multiple copies are out there in the private collections of data hoarders. It's just underground due to the copyright police.
- autoexec 2y ago
  What happens to those private collections when those data hoarders die though? As the data hoarders die off the private collections will too as hard drives fail and surviving family members, less passionate about preservation, inherit media and servers they don't know what to do with, much of which will just end up in the trash. If given enough warning about my own death I might be tempted to pay for a couple seedboxes on bulletproof servers and just hope the files stay up as long as possible and find many new homes before the money runs out. The RIAA/MPA can't come after you once you're dead.
  - dangus 2y ago
    I think at some point we might need to accept that preserving every piece of human creation ever made is not possible and perhaps not even desirable. This is kind of the problem with data hoarding: it’s more about the act of preservation than the content being preserved. The whole practice is based off of anxiety and fear of loss rather than any productive purpose. There’s often low to zero demand for a huge amount of the content. Just like my grandma’s record collection or fine China, it all amounts to a bunch of stuff that meant something to someone else but not to me. It was offered to me in a vain hope that I might enjoy it in the same way, despite the great improbability of that being the case. That’s why those items are siting in a landfill somewhere. I would guess, for example, that most people read very few books that were written before the 1800s. They would be difficult to read, their subject matter would be foreign, and without extensive rewriting/translation/adaptation, they wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense. Most certainly there are many classic works that survive much longer than a few hundred years, but the percentage is a tiny sliver of all the stories people have created. And that’s ultimately perfectly okay. That’s just how things work. Nobody has enough time on earth to consume such a massive amount of content that humans have made, and a lot of it is straight up bad, or just repetitive of other similar content. Lastly, there is also another possibility entirely: that the original creators don’t want future generations to see their work. I think it’s important to remember that all rights are reserved to the creator of the work. As an artist I can sell a print of a painting for a year and decide that it will never be sold again after that. It’s my right to stop selling new copies and my right to prevent people from redistributing copies until the work reaches public domain, because it’s my work. I know in the case of corporate filmmaking the lack of available works is more about apathy to specific old pieces of content basically being worthless to them, but it’s still a little point to keep in mind.
BobbyJo 2y ago
Once we've amassed a volume of artistic media so large that it would take hundreds of human lifetimes to make use of, what is the point? Movies like the matrix have already had an eternal effect on the Zeitgeist of a generation, forever altering human culture in some small way, at the very least. Why worry about it still being on a drive somewhere in 200 years?
- ekianjo 2y ago
  The Matrix had an eternal effect on culture? in what ways?
  - walterbell 2y ago
    "Top 400 Films & Shows in The Matrix Style", https://www.imdb.com/list/ls041343358/ https://www.imdb.com/list/ls041343358/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_time
    - ekianjo 2y ago
      i was asking about everyday culture not Hollywood's
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- walterbell 2y ago
  > Why worry about it still being on a drive somewhere in 200 years? Movies like The Matrix don't materialize out of thin air. They are the cultural and creative descendants of countless prior art pieces. There's a reason why film creators publish commentary about their production process. To neglect history is to starve the future.
  - BobbyJo 2y ago
    > They are the cultural and creative descendants of countless prior art pieces. Yes, but applied in a sliding window with considerable drop out. The world decides every day which art is worth keeping around and which can be allowed to be forgotten. Just because a film is important to the common psyche in 2001 doesn't mean that will be the case in 3001.
SoftTalker 2y ago
> the only practical alternative these days is not owning any media at all This is the approach I've taken. Shelves of records, DVDs, tapes, CDs... all gathering dust and taking up space. Honestly the only music I listen to is a classic rock radio station when I'm driving my car. Whatever they play is what I listen to. It's just not that important to me any more. Movies, music, they are just time-fillers. They are something to do when there's nothing to do. When I was 20 I felt differently.
oceanplexian 2y ago
I think most of the stuff from the era of physical media will survive if cared for. So content pre-2010s will probably be found by archeologists some day, and they will ponder why we stopped making films and TV shows all of a sudden. My collection of DVDs and CDs is still flawless after many decades. I have some VHS approaching 40-50 years (Although it’s slowly degrading).

by mvkel 2y ago

konfusinomicon 2y ago

thankfully all the pirates of the golden age of physical media and their ancestors who have meticulously tranferred the inherited data to the newest forms of storage have kept countless backups and the legend of neo will live on for years to come

mtoner23 2y ago

Idk, the matrix is in the library of congress, i think it's going to be preserved just fine

et-al 2y ago
>Think of all the countless valuable film, music, etc that didn't have the acclaim of The Matrix. Gone sooner, and more prolifically. E.g. Existenz and Strange Days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
- samplatt 2y ago
  You're saying both of those no longer exist on streaming services? That's a goddamned tragedy (though I have local copies of both). Side note, I first watched Strange Days on a VR headset (the Gear VR) while on a 6hr flight, having no idea the movie would be about virtual reality. That felt pretty damn special.
  - et-al 2y ago
    Ah no. To clarify I was highlighting mvkel's point by pointing out two lesser known films that future film historians would want to access to in addition to The Matrix. Luckily there are plenty of DVDs floating about for those films, but you can imagine a situation where a cult classic released now will not have that physical artifact.
    - sien 2y ago
      With books there is a requirement for to upload all books published in Australia to be put in the Australian National Library. The US has something similar. It's surprising that something like that hasn't been legislated for film and possibly for TV. It would be quite doable today technologically.
      - mtoner23 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Registry
- autoexec 2y ago
  Both readily available on DVD still thankfully, although Existenz is selling for about twice what they want for strange days for some reason.
- deafpolygon 2y ago
  Existenz is on the MS Store for some reason.
autoexec 2y ago
There are a lot of things preserved in the library of congress which remain inaccessible to most people. It's better than having works vanish entirely, but our culture is still poorer and shrinking as a result.

mastazi 2y ago

I remember in the 90's the promise of the Internet was that it would be a resilient repository of all human knowledge and cultural artifacts. I remember people pointing out that the Internet was designed to survive even a nuclear war, so tragedies like the loss of the Library of Alexandria would never happen again. Instead, we got link rot, abandonware IP, and lots of memes.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
I wonder who was promising that. It's a lot more like a postal system where you can mail huge volumes of data instantly and for almost no charge, but mailing your neighbor or friend is incredibly difficult compared to mailing a company and getting a reply. Stuff definitely falls through the cracks. Even the 20-something-year-old promise of Google to "index the world's information" has failed pathetically. I frequently can't find things I'm looking for, because all I have left in my head is a fingerprint of "I'll know it when I see it" and maybe a couple odd keywords that aren't enough to pull any signal out of the noise. In one case I got ChatGPT to help me find a book I'd been missing for years because the generic keywords like "magic staff", "tree", "volcano crater" returned jack shit on common search engines. (It was "The Ancient One" by T. A. Barron, if anyone else is stuck looking for it too) In another case I found a book on Kagi. The Library of Babel is a much closer analogy. Everything _might_ be in there, but you probably aren't gonna find anything worthwhile. lol.
- wmf 2y ago
  Specifically, AT&T predicted/promised it in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will (directed by Fincher before people knew who he was)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- riffraff 2y ago
  Just an aside: for SF and fantasy, the scifi stack exchange is an invaluable source to identify a story by a few random bits, they have a specific tag/label for questions like that and it never failed for me.

femto 2y ago

I'd counter that multiple copies are out there in the private collections of data hoarders. It's just underground due to the copyright police.

autoexec 2y ago
What happens to those private collections when those data hoarders die though? As the data hoarders die off the private collections will too as hard drives fail and surviving family members, less passionate about preservation, inherit media and servers they don't know what to do with, much of which will just end up in the trash. If given enough warning about my own death I might be tempted to pay for a couple seedboxes on bulletproof servers and just hope the files stay up as long as possible and find many new homes before the money runs out. The RIAA/MPA can't come after you once you're dead.
- dangus 2y ago
  I think at some point we might need to accept that preserving every piece of human creation ever made is not possible and perhaps not even desirable. This is kind of the problem with data hoarding: it’s more about the act of preservation than the content being preserved. The whole practice is based off of anxiety and fear of loss rather than any productive purpose. There’s often low to zero demand for a huge amount of the content. Just like my grandma’s record collection or fine China, it all amounts to a bunch of stuff that meant something to someone else but not to me. It was offered to me in a vain hope that I might enjoy it in the same way, despite the great improbability of that being the case. That’s why those items are siting in a landfill somewhere. I would guess, for example, that most people read very few books that were written before the 1800s. They would be difficult to read, their subject matter would be foreign, and without extensive rewriting/translation/adaptation, they wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense. Most certainly there are many classic works that survive much longer than a few hundred years, but the percentage is a tiny sliver of all the stories people have created. And that’s ultimately perfectly okay. That’s just how things work. Nobody has enough time on earth to consume such a massive amount of content that humans have made, and a lot of it is straight up bad, or just repetitive of other similar content. Lastly, there is also another possibility entirely: that the original creators don’t want future generations to see their work. I think it’s important to remember that all rights are reserved to the creator of the work. As an artist I can sell a print of a painting for a year and decide that it will never be sold again after that. It’s my right to stop selling new copies and my right to prevent people from redistributing copies until the work reaches public domain, because it’s my work. I know in the case of corporate filmmaking the lack of available works is more about apathy to specific old pieces of content basically being worthless to them, but it’s still a little point to keep in mind.

BobbyJo 2y ago

Once we've amassed a volume of artistic media so large that it would take hundreds of human lifetimes to make use of, what is the point? Movies like the matrix have already had an eternal effect on the Zeitgeist of a generation, forever altering human culture in some small way, at the very least. Why worry about it still being on a drive somewhere in 200 years?

ekianjo 2y ago
The Matrix had an eternal effect on culture? in what ways?
- walterbell 2y ago
  "Top 400 Films & Shows in The Matrix Style", https://www.imdb.com/list/ls041343358/ https://www.imdb.com/list/ls041343358/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_time
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    i was asking about everyday culture not Hollywood's
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
walterbell 2y ago
> Why worry about it still being on a drive somewhere in 200 years? Movies like The Matrix don't materialize out of thin air. They are the cultural and creative descendants of countless prior art pieces. There's a reason why film creators publish commentary about their production process. To neglect history is to starve the future.
- BobbyJo 2y ago
  > They are the cultural and creative descendants of countless prior art pieces. Yes, but applied in a sliding window with considerable drop out. The world decides every day which art is worth keeping around and which can be allowed to be forgotten. Just because a film is important to the common psyche in 2001 doesn't mean that will be the case in 3001.

SoftTalker 2y ago

> the only practical alternative these days is not owning any media at all This is the approach I've taken. Shelves of records, DVDs, tapes, CDs... all gathering dust and taking up space. Honestly the only music I listen to is a classic rock radio station when I'm driving my car. Whatever they play is what I listen to. It's just not that important to me any more. Movies, music, they are just time-fillers. They are something to do when there's nothing to do. When I was 20 I felt differently.

oceanplexian 2y ago

I think most of the stuff from the era of physical media will survive if cared for. So content pre-2010s will probably be found by archeologists some day, and they will ponder why we stopped making films and TV shows all of a sudden. My collection of DVDs and CDs is still flawless after many decades. I have some VHS approaching 40-50 years (Although it’s slowly degrading).