Okay, it's not really the point I'm trying to make here, but since you bring it up, actually it does matter that we lose the ability to decipher the meaning of digital storage. That is a problem that has only gotten worse.

More importantly, there is meaning in handwriting. We can learn things from how different people wrote the same thing. And people do try to convey subtleties of meaning through drawing the same letter in different ways, and of course, most importantly, you completely ignored the actual point I was trying to make, that even if we ignore that and assume every B is always the same we aren't talking about content. We are talking about storage media. Smearing ink on paper isn't a digital process even if you're literally just writing 1s and 0s. There have been digital ways of storing information for as long as there have been analog ones. Things like beads or knots in ropes. The reason you never hear about them isn't because they didn't exist. It's because all the information they contain has decayed to nonsense. Digital is very binary that way. It's perfectly retrievable until it's perfectly gone. We have a lot of techniques now to help extend that useful life, but they still all require active maintenance, and most digital storage media has an average lifespan in single digit years. Even for digital information, the oldest stuff we still have around was stored in analog ways.

What makes you think we are perfectly copying the knowledge contained in texts from thousands of years ago? That is... a bold claim. Even if I were to accept that text is always inherently digital for the sake of argument, the storage medium is absolutely analog. You can use analog storage to store digital data just as much as you can use digital storage to store analog data like sound waves.

How do you think that is in any way even remotely relevant to what I said? If the drive your file is on dies and you didn't copy it to another one a checksum won't help you.

I do all those things, but how are you planning on convincing my mom to? I've tried. She doesn't care. The vast majority of people are more like my mom than like you or me. We are weirdos here, and if your plan doesn't involve a better first step than "do a whole bunch of work to change something you're already used to" then it is not actually going to change anything for anyone other than a few weirdos like us.

I do not care if something is useful to advertisers. I care if it reduces harm. Refusing to reduce harm to chase some distant ideal that most people don't care about while not effectively convincing them to care is counterproductive to everything that actually matters.

Digital storage devices have way shorter lifespans than analog ones. Digital information can be more reliably copied, but we are constantly losing massive amounts of information to digital storage loses when it falls out of public consciousness. If no one is actively copying it, it is doomed in the digital age. We still have analog storage that's good enough to be useful from thousands of years ago.

If you've got a better solution then feel free to share, but magically making everybody on Earth simultaneously decide to suddenly stop paying attention to all advertising everywhere forever is not an actual solution.

You know that vinyl is not the only way of recording analog information, right?

True. I wasn't trying to argue that there are no advantages to digital, or even that we should go back to analog. Just that the argument in the post doesn't make sense.

That is an actual fair criticism. Well, part of it. All of our current digital media technology actually degrades over time faster than analog ones, but they're so easy to copy that it's not really a problem for things that people like to make copies of. It is a problem for archiving though. I wasn't trying to argue that digital has no advantages. Just that it's not magically better in every way.

Sure, and there's nothing wrong with that. They're both plenty good enough, and digital is cheaper to copy accurately. It's also actually possible to make a copy of a copy of a copy digitally and have it still be accurate. I wasn't attempting to say we shouldn't use digital, or that it has no advantages, just that the argument in the original post makes no sense.

The only meaningful difference between them is that digital is cheaper to copy. Your ears are analog though, so everything you've ever heard in your entire life is 100% pure analog, and I explicitly said in the post you seem to think that you're disagreeing with that they're both orders of magnitude better than they need to be.

Your speakers are analog. They sound different when they are dusty. Your ears are analog. Things sound different when you have dirty ears. Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem only applies when there are no frequencies outside of the sample range, which doesn't happen in real life. None of this matters, because like I said it's trivial to have orders of magnitude more accuracy than you need. Digital is just way cheaper to copy accurately, so that's why it has become dominant, and that's fine, but the idea that it's inherently more representative of reality is just gibberish.