The Importance of Real Things

a few months ago the bookshelf in our apartment collapsed the reason why I wouldn't make a very good mystery novel my roommate Finn decided to double up the books on each shelf because one layer was not enough space for all the books and because what even is weight limit after all books are just like highly processed bricks of wood wrapped in leather anyways it looked like this for a week as we were building the new shelf and scattering through this like mountain of books Finn was like maybe we should get two shelves and I responded

maybe we should have less books I know I love books it's a sad thing to say but no one is tripping over the couch in this apartment to read The 1975 copy of encounter with an Angry God by carbeth lard yes if I focused and if I was diligent and like read every single day I could crank through like maybe 25 of these books in a year I'm going to be honest I'm I'm not I I'm not going to read Alfred Hitchcock's get me to the Wake On Time look at that that's a cover look

at that cover what is he is that a hippo I mentioned my Kindle and the weightless piles of digital books I can read without it being a paper paper weight and I just get the physical copies of the special books that I really want to read and want to keep with me will my other roommate I have three he was in the room with us not helping but he offered his counterargument which was yeah but you don't own it dude is that important to me who I mean who who cares if we own less things

right isn't that a good thing all these things we don't need to own media right right H isn't it just like a little bit weird that your name on social media is right next to a number that says how popular you are isn't that just a little bit a little bit suspicious isn't that a little bit dystopian we're owning less media media that's yours to keep Forever Until the pages wear out or the DVD scratches or it literally breaks down into atoms we're owning less of the media that you keep for the sake of convenience

this isn't a new idea it's being widely observed in the age of streaming and digitalization everything movies TV music our Reliance on digital media could display Le the benefits of owning all this physical stuff that we used to have when I go back to my parents I see the physical media that I had in my childhood like VHS tapes and like GameCube games Game Boy games these are all games that were made like only three decades ago or even two decades ago it's actually a huge problem right now a lot of games made in the

early 2000s are just getting lost to time because there's no copies of it getting made anymore and they're not really available on any platform most games now are just a digital receipt from companies like steam or Playstation some are even approaching a streaming model like Xbox game pass software is hardly bought anymore but it's subscribed to you know what's my favorite thing in the whole wide world signing into things every single day I love accounts and passwords and emails and twostep verifications where they send like a code to your phone I love that Call of

Duty needs a phone number I love that you can't really buy software anymore you just kind of like prove that you still own it and that you're still paying for it and they don't even really make a good software they just keep like adding new stuff to like prove to you that you need to keep spending money on it I love that Apple tries very hard to get you to subscribe to storing your own files and that it's really hard to offload them to a computer I love that it's my favorite thing sorry this is

just a little inside joke and I don't even want to get into the dystopia of Spotify you know why bother having a wonderful beautiful collection of CDs and vinyls and things and support the artist and all that when you can have all of the music ever made in the entire universe at the top of a button these are pretty cool actually I have stacks and Stacks and stacks of Indie music from school you would submit a CD on like the student radio and all that uh and now it's all digitized so my freshman year they

had crates and crates and crates and crates of CDs like free they're getting rid of them and like there were so many of them so I didn't have time to listen to all of it so I mainly went by the album artwork which is crazy to think about now I forgot about this stuff this is the floor of nuance ideas have Gra it we are attracted to them and bigger stronger ideas uh draw Us in more and without a floor we fall until we get to the molten core and we get crushed into a limited

Viewpoint that doesn't take in all of the factors but with a floor with a solid foundation we can feel the gravity of an idea while also accepting that it's not the entire picture so we are going to add some antithesis to our FIS so counter argument one I'm not saying keeping stuff for the sake of keeping things cuz keeping too many things without any thought can lead to hoarding and can lead to all this other stuff there's an argument to be made to not be focused on material possessions we're all going to die someday so

like owning all this stuff for the sake of owning it isn't necessarily what I'm trying to say there are minimalists who have the opposite ideology of to own as little as possible and there are benefits to that the point is mindfulness of what you curate in your collection of things in this world world the second one is accessibility easy cheap access to information is absolutely crucial and the fact that you can rent entertainment for the price of like an afternoon lunch for an entire month and watch all these movies is incredible there's apps like Libby

where you can download ebooks and like audiobooks with a library card it might not necessarily be a college degree but you can go on YouTube and look up a tutorial for anything you could ever possibly want to do media literacy has also gone up we're processing more information more critical consensus of things we're more aware culturally of all the stuff that's going on so all these are good things information should be as accessible and as low of a cost as possible and we don't need to own everything but this access isn't necessarily given to us

it's sold and the price we pay is control over exactly how we want this media to be commodified don't you think it would benefit streaming services to make it seem like there is only one convenient way to access all this stuff it almost seems like there's a manufactured obsolesence happening with this stuff let's take for example the TV series The Crown the Netflix series The Crown aside from putting it in a kill why would you get that on DV well I wouldn't but you maybe maybe my parents I mean it is available this show is

available at anytime 24 hours a day 7 days a week given you have a Netflix subscription yeah you could buy the box set and watch it anytime Forever Without a Wi-Fi connection without ever getting ads hey that's old school why would you want to do something so impractical it's just so much easier to stream it's right there all the time with thousands and thousands of choices on other streaming platforms every episode of every Star Trek show the Thousand episodes of One Piece every single Marvel movie in the cannon and the dozens of multi-season shows that

Disney really really wants you to keep watching the access to the popular movies in the television is so ubiquitous that it's not even novel anymore it's just taken for granted this is the best show on television apart from mine of course I think we all know that the streaming sites are starting to shtin they got that cable TV Funk to them I just feel like this stuff goes so much deeper than streaming services I think it applies to like everything to like art like I think we're looking at the moving picture differently thanks to all

these Services think about how you watch YouTube YouTube wants to keep all of these videos in large quantities and disposable there aren't really social media videos that are like a final artifact that you like keep you wouldn't download a YouTube video or watch it on a physical copy of like best videos of 2024 and you're not meant to it's not even about one video it's a feed it's a stream of content in fact the algorithm which is a terrifying word to use for creativity is built around a large quantity of consistent videos than occasional high

quality art no matter how much work goes into it it doesn't seem to matter as much as the next one an informational kurur kazad video that takes hundreds of hours and a team of researchers has the same weight on YouTube as Dracula flow I'm on them Nashville nibblers the sources of all these videos from like Instagram and YouTube and Tik Tok are so ubiquitous and homogenized and disposable that it's all kind of blending together into one stream of content one way of consuming the content and one way that your content is getting sold this homogenized

service is how Instagram YouTube Tik Tok Facebook they all run and it's in their best interest to feed into creators this idea that you have to be participating you have to continuously make more and more and more it's very strange and it's a little dystopian and I don't know if it's how art should be even though this is kind of the way things are right now I don't know the alternative okay so as I'm making this video I discover that there's a lot of videos that are addressing the exact same thing which is fantastic just

a few weeks ago um there was a huge talk by uh Jack Kant the patreon guy who is literally talking about the same problem about the encouragement of like the shallowness of content creation and like how the stream like separates the follower from the Creator there's companies like patreon that are like actively working with this problem and trying to find a solution it's not the solution obviously the world's more complicated then here's the problem here's the solution but it's cool to know that there are companies that are actively working on this problem there is so

much tension to make for the algorithm everywhere we look as creators today the gravity is just pushing us it's just pushing us toward making for other reasons we open up our our dashboards and we see these metrics on what success is don't let somebody else tell you what you want I want to say something that matters to somebody and have it be true and feel true and have someone else see that and have that person think yes I said a thing that resonated with them and made them feel a little bit less alone so I'm

digressing if you want to learn more about this I can't recommend enough the death of the the follower the talk by Jack Kant I'll link it below it's really cool he can explain it so much better than I can um the point is when we're watching The Daily stream when we Doom scroll it may feel very dystopian and shallow and fake and there's a lot of people that are just trying to get the numbers to go up but it's important to remember that that person is real and you watching it is real most people don't

don't want a million followers 5 million followers and like just want the clout of you know being internet famous and and doing all this stuff because then it's just work honestly what they really want is just a way to support themselves while they're making something that they think is funny that they think is true and they want to connect with the people that are watching it and that is a real thing we can actually build connection with people with this technology we can actually learn with this technology we can actually create with this technology somehow

this relates to books we went on a whole [ __ ] I'm I'm sorry Finn's bookshelf was filled with books that deep down we knew we would never read so we had to clean house since then we took some of those reusable grocery bags and sorted the books into two piles the ones we wanted on the shelf and the ones that we can neatly pack in the basement temporarily of course what the [ __ ] what okay as I was packing this stuff up I just want everyone in the audience to know that we have

not one but two copies of a very heavy book The Mists of Avalon by Maran zmer Bradley the same book The the same book the same why two of the same book that we are probably not going to read but they're so difficult to get rid of because we know deep down how important they are we only have one glimpse into everything that's ever written we only have one life to read all that we have time for so if we don't like something the best we can hope for is to make it public make it

accessible so the next person can pick it up and maybe read it and maybe get some truth out of it where did these come from what are these so a lot of the books that we've had for many years came from your great grandparents your grandmother's grandfather worked for a paper company and he traveled all over the world like around 1910 so he had a lot of books that he collected and and that was one thing when you had an educated family you had a lot of books because you had the resources to have them

and that's where all your information came from too so this series of toll stoy books he brought back from from England but some of the interesting things where it's like the events of the Great War those were written between World War I and World War II and there was only the Great War the small ones are your great-grandfather Clark's books that he used in college so several of them he took Shakespeare uh poems and he also was in the theology school cuz he was a minister the smaller books were yeah he would carry him to

class that's kind of neat to think of your great-grandfather being younger than you and walking around a campus carrying those books yeah it's kind of czy they would write in them too oh wow they made notes in them what is that characteristics of W's poetry deed to get number wait it's tried tried multiple languages multiple languages language of something re rebelled against against un uning UNT taming the treatment of character to understand his writing got a lot Messier it's Andy I never have to worry about people reading my journals just CU I can I can

barely read my own handwriting you can't read your own handwriting yeah his handwriting got worse and worse so he typed everything like I'd get letters from him and they'd be typed on a click CLI click click click yeah yeah it's interesting because there are other books that we didn't keep that I wish we did Grandpa was I mean he was a minister so I mean there was a time when he was writing a a sermon every Sunday and he kept to them and I don't know what happened to them damn you know I mean and

for a long time it's weird because he also in college he would he wrote me a letter every every month and I really cherish the letters I don't know what I did with them I don't know some paper you save and some you get rid of and it's hard to recognize in the moment what's important and what's not important yeah yeah that's true and and maybe that's one of the things with the books maybe that's why we have held on to the books for that long because they they look important they're memories too like I

look and I can see his writing and I remember that I mean you know stuff Fades over time too so but it's still neat to have them yeah so cool that's cool yeah yeah that's about it okay cool cool thank you there's [Music] something Hills or city streets oce to Ocean and all in between it's out there just waiting on you and me look waiting fores on the other side of we don't know take it you and I born