this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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digital media was never a thing you owned. it's a thing you lease.
if you want to own things buy physical copies.
no idea what you are on about the phone. I buy moto phones for like $150 and they are great.
I own tons of digital files, stores on silicon and metal in my possession and not connected to the internet. Not owning digital files is a relatively new and entirely artificial construction.
My X TB music library goes brrr
Spotify who?
Data is a physical object. Change my mind.
The value in data is less in the medium than the actual information. Information is by very definition intangible. Data is therefore not physical.
Ah, but without a storage medium, information becomes extremely difficult to exchange. The entire corpus of human knowledge would be worthless and impossible to learn from were it not for storage mediums like books to records to hard drives. Societies without written languages only have oral histories, and oral histories are rife with mistakes and misrememberings.
Do you think you could effectively learn from a lecture that demanded that a teacher remember it all from memory and students weren't allowed to take notes?
Beyond that, technically, the human brain is also a storage medium for information, although an extremely imperfect one.
Sure, the information is by very definition intangible, which means it's effectively worthless without a medium in which to exist and be able to be parsed by other humans.
EDIT: Further, does information not cease to exist when it's storage medium is destroyed? If I drill through a hard drive, or burn a book, or see a person die.... the information in each one of those storage mediums goes bye bye. It goes from intangible to nonexistent.