I used to have this really cool CD collection.

Some of it was the stuff everyone had, like No Doubts, Tragic Kingdom, I'm a Wu Tang Forever, what y'all y'all gonna see Sam, I'm the whole Sirens Sounded Tie.

But I also had a lot of mixtapes.

I had this Paul Wall mixtape that was a preview for his debut album Wow and I'm the People's Champ.

My chain light up like a man because now I'm back with the camp.

And it had snippets of the album, but it also just had him talking in the interludes, and it was something that was so cool about it, like you were really behind the scenes of how he was making these songs.

And I was thinking about this CD the other day and I looked it up online, but it's nowhere to be found.

Now there are record that it existed, so I'm not crazy.

It's called The People's Champ Mixtape Sampler, but I can't find the music itself anywhere.

It's not on Spotify, it's not on YouTube or Amazon or even eBay.

No.

Granted, this is my fault.

I'm the one who got rid of my CD collection.

I had just gotten so used to everything being available online that I guess I figured that I'd be able to find anything on some cloud based service somewhere.

What if you could make your own cloud instead of connecting to somebody's computer.

There's the old Linux at age, there is no cloud, It's just someone else's computer, right, And I was like, but what if you had your own computer, like a small computer that was running in your house, and it had all your stuff on it and you could just access it.

Janice Rose is a journalist and an artist, and what she's talking about here is what some people call data hoarding, or she calls digital pack rating.

Instead are relying on Netflix or Spotify or other streaming services.

The digital pack rat, like Janis, stores the library of their favorite movies, TV shows, and music under their own hard drives.

You know something I've been doing for years and years, making personal copies, backing it up on a hard drive, to take more direct control of my sort of digital collection and move it away from these platforms that try to control access to everything and give you content licenses.

Some of us might already do this casually with specific pieces of media that we love.

I mean, I have a lot of my old Nintendo games, including multiple copies of Super Mario Brothers.

But the digital pack rats take it to another level.

There is a subculture of people who don't subscribe to a single streaming service, and for some people, it's not about the money, it's about the principle.

And it goes into the like notion of digital ownership and this notion of non ownership that all of these companies have when it comes to digital rights.

So philosophically, I kind of get what Janis is saying.

If you just surrender your love of film to Netflix, they can raise the prices or even delete films or TV shows off of their service and you can't do anything about it.

So holding all of your media on your own computer it makes sense.

But practically speaking, here is it worth the trouble?

And if you wanted to do this yourself, how would you go about it?

From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts, this is killed switch.

I'm Dectah Thomas.

I'm all right.

So you wrote this article on four or four called the Digital pack rat Manifesto.

What inspired you to write that?

So the immediate impetus was Amazon implementing this new feature where they basically made it harder for you to move your Kindle ebook files around, which is something that we always knew was going to happen more and more.

It's just one of those things that tech companies have been going farther and farther down this road where they essentially assert that the digital files that you buy, whether it's an application or music books, basically their assertion this entire time has been that you don't actually own that, you're just buying a license to it.

Okay, just to back up a little bit, you used to be able to download your Kindle books to your computer just in case.

This was actually a really useful feature for say, people who traveled a lot, or it didn't always have a good Internet connection.

And look, some people probably did use it to pirate books.

I guess that I did.

I'm a professor, and when I teach classes sometimes I'll need my students to read a chapter from a book.

But I don't feel right forcing a bunch of students to buy one hundred and thirty dollars academic text when I need them to read a chapter that's fifteen pages.

So I would buy the kindle book on Amazon, I would download it, convert it, and I would let the students have a PDF of those fifteen pages, kind of like when teachers might make photocopies for you.

But then in February, Amazon removed that feature to be able to download your books to your computer.

So when Janis says you don't own the books, you just buy a license to access the book, that's what she means with.

DRM, with these companies' ability to control how many devices you can put these files on, what you can do with the files, and ultimately the fact that like these platforms where you buy ebooks are entirely controlled by companies like Amazon, and at any time they can just decide they're not going to have that book available anymore, and then it's just gone, and it doesn't matter if you paid for it, it's just not there.

We see this with Netflix all the time.

There was this collection on Netflix called Palestine Stories that was a series of both fiction and nonfiction films made by Palestinian filmmakers, and it was one of their featured collections.

And Netflix is a platform where they're always taking things off the platform and then adding new things to the platform.

But the timing was especially notable, and so the fact that they removed this seemingly in response to pressure.

That was significant, and it was just a really good example of if we entrust all of these digital pieces of art, you know, this is art we're talking about.

People like to use the term content nowadays, which makes me gag honestly, and probably makes other people gag because that's how they see it, right.

They see it as just content.

It's just a thing that can be monetized.

But what we're actually talking about is human effort that has gone through to produce art.

And we're noticing through incidents like that that all of this art is completely at the whim of these platform owners and they can just decide to remove it for any reason or no reason.

So how did we get here?

It might be hard to remember, but there was this moment of digital ownership that came before streaming, before companies like Spotify and Netflix controlled what we had access to, back when it felt like you could find and own anything you wanted.

I'm talking about the era of Napster.

A huge moment for me was obviously Napster.

That was like one of these moments where it was shown how arbitrary it is.

Once somebody has a file, we can just make art and just distribute it.

And you know, at the time it felt very kind of utopian, and for people who grew up with computers like me, it felt like, yeah, of course you can copy a file.

Of course you can send that file to other people.

Napster.

For anyone too young to remember or who just never touched it was like Spotify, but with the added thrill of realizing you might get sued by the RIAA.

In the early two thousands, it was huge, and there were a lot of other similar platforms like LimeWire, Kaza, Morpheus, and then of course that was bit Torrent.

You would download all your favorite music and you would put it on your MP three player, you know, your iPod or your oom for the weird people who had those, And at the time it kind of felt like magic.

I remember the first MP three player I ever bought.

What was it?

I think it was like a Rio player if like the Rio.

Yeah, it could store like thirty five songs or something like that.

You had that I forget.

It was an absurdly or maybe it was like one hundred songs, which was with mind blowing.

I like at the time, I was like whoa, Like, I can't even think of a hundred songs.

Yeah, which ones will I put in here exactly?

And then the sort of backlash against that from record labels and copyright owners, and you know, eventually the response was streaming.

And when streaming started to happen, I think a lot of people, including me, started to have like, oh, okay, this is like kind of cool, Like I actually like this because it means that I don't have to keep all these files, manage all these files, do all this work by myself, but I have access to pretty much any movie I would want to watch, because that's kind of how Netflix was when it started.

The Netflix streaming was pretty robust, and then it was only through time that they started to remove stuff.

And I think that a lot of people who were in that era of keeping empty three libraries were won over at that time.

But then what we realized eventually with like Spotify is that they were essentially taking the model of piracy that was invented by Napster and bit torrent and taking that model and then just placing themselves at the center so that they profited from it and that the artists got nothing.

And that was when we began to see all these problems with the streaming platforms like Spotify, and the way that artists are essentially being exploited and not paid royalties and getting fractions of a penny for a stream.

One of the things about piracy that people don't quite appreciate is that it was actually just the most convenient way to get this.

There were records, and you know, me being into music, there were CDs, there were songs.

You couldn't get those at your local CD store, and you could call around to places and they just straight up didn't have it, and you could be exposed to music that you couldn't pay anybody.

If you wanted to give the artist money, you actually had no way to because of just different ways that things are distributed in different countries.

You just straight up didn't have access to it.

And so if you wanted to listen to something, you heard somebody talking about something and oh, this sounds cool, the only option you had, the most reasonable option you had, was the bootleg it.

The thing that streaming did, as you mentioned, was it streaming was actually easier than piracy.

You didn't have to worry about getting a virus on your computer, which I did a lot of.

Oh my gosh, I did so much of that, and the trade off really truly was great.

I can give Netflix, you know, back the day ten dollars and I don't have to worry about spending three hours trying to find a low quality version of a movie that might give me a virus.

So streaming was more convenient than piracy.

But maybe we're not there anymore.

Yeah, you know, people when they started cord cutting as they call it, where less people were subscribing to cable because a lot of people were complaining, of course, that it's bundled and it's all of this stuff that you don't want, and it's not the stuff that you do want.

And so that was the big draw for streaming is that it had what you want and it was more convenient than doing this whole rigamarole every time to get something.

And then at a certain points, because the streaming services have multiplied and there's so many of them now and they've increased in price over and over and over again, they keep increasing in price, and all this content is now split among seventeen twenty five different streaming services, and now again they're offering bundles.

We're back where we started, except now it's even more expensive.

It's like orders of magnitude more expensive, and we're kind of stuck now where people like don't want this.

People don't want to keep paying more and more for a bunch of stuff they don't want.

But what's the alternative is the question I think some people are asking.

So what is the alternative?

Well, again, for jenis it's digital pack writing.

We'll get into what that means after the break.

So I think when a lot of people hear us talking about storing your own data, storing music, or storing movies, a lot of people immediately think, oh, you're talking about piracy.

You're stealing stuff from the artists.

How do you feel about that, because necessarily we do at some point start talking about piracy that Okay, well, this is taking money out of the artist's pocket.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, and as somebody who's an artist who makes music and other things, I look at what Spotify is currently and how they're a middleman.

They are extracting virtually all profits from music.

At this point, they've inserted themselves as a middleman so effectively that they're essentially taking it from both ends.

They're getting the subscription from the users who are paying to use the service, and then they're also extracting value from the artists themselves because they don't see the art as art.

They see it as content and they need more and more and more of it.

And from that perspective, if that's the norm, I would rather have someone steel the stuff that I made, or pirate the stuff that I made, then access it on Spotify, where I'm getting a fraction of a penny for every stream, and they changed it recently where I think it's like something like sixty plus percent of all artists on Spotify are completely demonetized.

Everything under a thousand streams, it's completely demonetized.

Yeah, I've got an album on all the platforms.

No, granted I'm not a big time artists.

I think I have made sixty seven cents last time I looked, after a year on there.

Yeah, and you know, a couple people were kind enough to buy myself on band Camp, and you know, you could say whatever you want about band Camp, but that was ten bucks, which I didn't expect to make.

And so yeah, I'm honestly at that point bootleg the album whatever, I don't care, download and do whatever you want with it.

I feel you, at least with band Camp, you can make your music free or you can charge for it, and either way you can keep track of people who download your album and then you can send them emails when you have a new album out, and it creates this dialogue and you don't get that.

So I always call Spotify drive by.

It's like a drive by consumption thing.

You just stream it and it's one song and then you're gone.

You're off to the next thing.

Whereas I'm a big fan of albums, I'm a big fan of records, and it's because you get this experience of like really connecting with the art in a way that I just don't think it's possible with streaming.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the tough things about this, right is because you know, I think it comes down sometimes to your connection with the art, frankly, how much you care about the art.

Right where I've seen people put it this way is if this is something that you would be sad if it was gone tomorrow, you should save a copy of it, whatever that is, even if it's just a funny meme or a video on YouTube.

And I've definitely got videos that I used to send to my friends and all of a sudden it's just gone.

Somebody whoever owned it on YouTube just deleted it.

And the thing about all of this is I can definitely imagine somebody saying, Man, I hear what you two are saying, but it's somebody really gonna delete the Beatles' greatest hits, Like it's not gonna go away.

That's not going away.

That's fine.

Like the stuff that I like is not going away.

But then again, and as you mentioned, the show Friends can just as easily leave one platform and go to another platform or whatever the case may be.

So there's that initial I think feeling of again, just that absolute convenience, and I think it's a trade off.

I think technology has largely become a trade off of convenience and control, you know what I mean?

Do I really need full control over whenever I'm going to access this movie?

Maybe I'll just trust that Netflix is going to keep this movie around.

It's fine.

Yeah, Like you were saying, it really depends on what kind of value you place in the stuff.

Like if you see everything the way that these platforms see it, which is content, right, If it's just content to you, then that's why they use that term, because content is a neutral word.

It's just a vessel.

It's a delivery mechanism for something.

If you see art in that way, it's a very capitalistic view.

It's a very like utilitarian view, where it's just interchangeable, and so from that perspective, it doesn't matter you're not going to place enough value in individual pieces of content to bother making sure that you're going to have persistent and continued access to it.

Whereas if you see these things as expressions of human emotions and experiences, which is what art is, then that's a fundamentally different perspective.

And it's a perspective that I, in my darkest moments, I feel is dying a little bit unfortunately.

And I don't think it's like any one reason.

It's the sort of media environment has trained people to because we're so exposed to all kinds of media and it's so accessible, I think it's literally warped our brains and changed the way we think about individual things.

One of my favorite examples from recent is that certain screenings of the Minecraft movie with Jack Black, there's some screenings that they're doing where they're allowing people to talk in the movie theater as if we're just all hanging out.

We're all just friends and we're just like meming and being on our phones and whatever.

I mean, it's not that I find no value in that experience, because I've definitely put on a movie in the background at home with friends and just kind of joked around and passively consumed it in that way.

But to do that in like a commercialized way that suggests this way of watching the film, that's a little scary to me, because if you're not appreciating art enough to like and to be clear, I don't think that the Minecraft movie is like a classic work of art that must be experienced a certain way.

It's not about that specific example so much is the general idea that people's media literacy is extremely bad right now.

And I think that if people are not willing to see these films and different things as art that is made by people, and are just willing to see it as interchangeable content, than in that environment it becomes easier to convince people to not care if something disappears or if they can't access it again, because it's just replaceable with something else.

So, I mean, it almost encurs me that the digital pack red thing that you coined, it's almost more of a cultural thing than a technological thing.

Yeah, right, because you're fundamentally asking somebody to look at art differently than how we have been looking at art for the past decade or so.

Yeah, it's curation.

I see it as curation.

I think that is a huge distinction between what people used to do in this sort of bygone era that we're referring to and what people are being, in some ways condition to do now, which is consuming versus curating.

Curating was required in the past because you had to make these discrete decisions about the one hundred songs that I had on my MP three player.

And I'm not saying that everyone should go back to listening to music on a one hundred song MP three player, but the point that being put into those constraints made the choices of media I consumed more specific.

It allowed a level of appreciation that I don't think is possible when you just have infinite access to every thing that has ever been made by every human who has ever existed on Earth.

That level of access is unprecedented, and it's only been the most recent generation that has come to expect that as if that's normal.

Can we change how we engage with art or is it too late?

And if you want to do this, how do you start your own server?

That's after the break.

Okay, so maybe you've been convinced to try digital pack riding yourself.

How exactly would you do it?

So there are some things that I can't endorse, but I can tell you some ideas you could try.

The first step is you're going to need a computer that you can use as a media server.

And don't worry, you don't have to go out and buy a thousand dollars rack mount server to do this.

A lot of this DIY media server stuff really got going in the mid twenty tens with the wide availability of the Raspberry Pie, which is the tiny, little credit card sized computer.

It's a very cheap computer.

I think it's forty bucks.

You can fairly easily set up a little media server.

But hold up, look, I get it.

There's tariffs the economies where people getting laid off and write and forty dollars is not nothing.

But there is actually a way to do this, potentially for free.

I got an old MacBook that is a decade old.

It's got a crack screen, one of the buttons doesn't work right, but that would actually work, because again, when we say server that just means literally almost any computer.

So once you've got your computer, you'll need to install some software on that computer that you can then remotely access from a different machine.

So, for example, you could be in your living room or your kitchen, or even in another city and you can pull out your phone and still be able to watch your movies or listen to your music remotely.

There are a lot of options for your software here, but the most popular app to do this, and the one that most people recommend just to start off with, is plex pl ex.

For the basic features, it's free and it pretty much just looks like a Netflix interface.

You install the app, do some basic connecting, and you're done.

Oh but you'll actually need to get those digital files that you want and put them onto your computer.

I'll tell you two ways to do this.

First way, if you've got a CD or a DVD line around, here's what you can do.

There's a program called hand to Break, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes, and it's pretty much dummy proof.

You put the disc into your computer, you open the program, click a button, and you've got a file that you can play on your computer.

But what if you don't have any CDs or DVDs or what if you want to download something?

All right, so if this is some media like a movie that you don't actually own yourself, we're getting a little bit outside the realms of what I should legally probably tell you.

But I can say this if you just want to experiment.

Archive dot org has plenty of movies, music, books and stuff that is all public domain.

The copyright has expired, and so it would be legally fine for you to grab and download.

There's old sci fi films, there's cartoons, there's documentaries, classic music, all that sort of thing, And that's the basics.

Seriously, that's it.

Just like Janis was saying the beginning, a cloud is just somebody else's computer.

Spotify is just a big computer with a bunch of music files on it.

Netflix is a big computer run by somebody else with a bunch of movies on it.

And you can have your own computer with your own files on it.

They required a little bit of time and a little bit of effort to get running and to work smoothly, and you know, some of the software it's not the best.

Like have to admit if you know, some of it it's made by nerds and enthusiasts, and a lot of it is like you know, it's not the most seamless experience, but they've gotten a lot better.

And if you spend a little bit of time on it, you can make a little setup and you can have it available.

It's resilient in ways that relying on a company to manage everything for you and just being at their whim, their mercurial whim will never be as robust.

So you really asking for us, as listener of music, or as a viewer of film or whatever it is, to go back to some things that are a little bit more difficult.

I don't like to say that, I'm like asking people to be inconvenience.

What I think a lot of artists right now are asking people to do is to reflect on your own habits of consumption, reflect on the ways that you're engaging with art.

Because I think the Internet has given us this sense of there's no scarcity.

Everything is unlimited and available all the time, and you know, I think in some ways that can be liberating, but in other ways it's changed people's way of engaging with things.

I remember interviewing this executive who worked for a streaming company that no longer exists, which I won't name, And this person told me that essentially the goal of streaming, and this was in like twenty eleven or twenty twelve, so this is like before streaming really took But this person told me that the goal of streaming was to make music into a utility like gas and electricity.

You know, it's just a faucet that it comes out of the fosset.

And the more I thought about that, the more I thought, this is fundamentally antesthetical to how I think about producing art and how everybody I know thinks about making things.

That's not a meaningful way of engaging with anything.

And so, you know, I try to not be snobby about it or anything, but I think that people need to start thinking more about how they engage with stuff, how they engage with art, how they engage with music.

Because ultimately, all of the stuff that I'm talking about doing, like you know, getting a hard drive or whatever, that's just the technical side of it.

It's not because I think that it is fundamentally better to have everything on a hard drive.

It's not about the tech.

It's about the way that you engage with the art, not allowing algorithms to pick for you, like send me chill vibes, lo fi anime, hip hop beats to study to, like, you know, give me more of.

That based on so many people.

Well, it's not even that I that I totally dislike that type of music.

It's just that, like, so, Liz Pelly wrote a book about this mood Machine where she talks about the sort of lo fi chill hip hop aesthetic as popularized by the low fi beats to Study to YouTube channel became this hyper commercialized, highly specific aesthetic that was then fed into an algorithm and then produces more of the same.

And that's how we get derivative, all this stuff that just you're just you just want more of the same, You want the same vibe.

You just want to put in a feeling, and then a computer make me feel this feeling, you know what I mean?

Yeah, So do you think I should become a digital pack rat?

Should I start building my own serve and all that?

I don't think anybody should listen to me.

I don't know.

I mean the reason that I kind of called it the skiky label is because I realize how kind of absurd.

It sounds to be like, here's my little server in me has all my music on it, and I spend hours and hours every day organizing my little files.

I realize how absurd I sound to many people, but there's a mindset behind that.

I find that I can absorb and engage with music and engage with media in a meaningful way that feels good to me.

By trying to do it in this.

Way, I might give this a shot.

Actually, I think you might have won me over.

Yeah.

I mean, there are plenty of resources and you don't have to go like full pack rap.

So yeah, I actually gave it a try.

I grabbed that old mac book, put Plex on it, and it took me half an hour to get up and run it.

I might not be a full fledged digital pack rat just yet, but I have started on backing up some of the stuff that actually mean something to me, so if they disappear off of Netflix or YouTube or whatever, I'll still have it and I won't be in another situation where something that's really important to me is just gone.

Shout out to Janis Rohose once again for writing that article and maybe not fully taking me down that rabbit hole.

But at least lead me to that edge.

And once again you can check the show notes and we'll link to all the software that I mentioned in this episode and also to a couple of tutorials that will break things down for you so that it's easy to follow.

One of the things we want to do with kill Switch is bring some of that DIY spirit back to technology.

You don't have to just accept the services that are given to you.

You should be able to modify things and use them however you want.

And that is it for this one.

Thank you so much for listening to kill Switch.

If you want to email us or at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC.

We're also on Instagram at kill switch pod, and you can also hit me directly at dex Digi that's d e x DGI on Instagram, on Blue Sky, and if you haven't already done it, whatever your favorite podcast platform is, make sure to leave us a review.

Shout out to the people who've been doing that.

I really appreciate it, and those reviews really do help other people find the show.

Kill Switch is hosted by me Dexter Thomas.

It's produced by Shena Ozaki, Darluk Potts and Kate Osborne.

Our theme song is by Me and Kyle Murdoch and Kyle also mixed the show.

From Kaleidoscope, our executive producers are oz Va Lashin, Mangesh Hatikadur and Kate Osborne.

From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki Etur.

Catch on the next one, Goodbye,