Analogue Link-Rot

November 1, 2009

Eventually everything gets digitised

I’ve been looking for this on youtube for years – and I guess part of the reason that it hasn’t turned up, is because there was no video… so who ever has posted this has made their own… which consists entirely of a static-camera shot of the act of digitization.

Which is almost I suppose (through the eyes of corporate lawyers (who like Phil Collins, and Huey Louis and the News)) taking the piss – actually filming the act of would be criminality. Whoever has done this though, isn’t taking the piss… they’re doing it because they fucking love it, and so do I.

So I’m doing my bit, and also (probably) breaking the law. Bad Brains were a fucking mental band – and the soundtrack of my life for a while… and this was my favourite song – that single note guitar bit in the second part of the verse is fucking excellent. Top band. They meant it.

So.

Everything gets digitized in the end, except that which nobody cares about.

Anything that doesn’t get digitized dies. It become analogue link-rot. It’s the 10c bin, which no one even looks at. It smells of old cardboard and will eventually be chucked out.

So… what is being filmed here, isn’t the moment that a song entering the realm of zero-reproduction/zero-distribution costs… and (theoretically, according to the lawyers) having it’s commercial value also pushed to zero – it’s the moment that it is brought to life… rescued from the moth-eaten libraries of New Alexandria.

Anything that anyone cares about enough to copy, becomes immortal. Kindof. If it’s not being copied, it’s dead.


2 Comments » for Analogue Link-Rot
  1. Shelley Noble says:
    November 1, 2009 at 8:48 pm

    I don’t listen to music. But I think you make an excruciatingly important point in this post. Well said. well said.

    “If isn’t being copied, it’s dead.”

    That says it all so succinctly!

  2. admin says:
    November 1, 2009 at 10:46 pm

    Well we’re finding ourselves back in something resembling an Oral Tradition. It’s all based upon people participating rather than passively recieving – and if you’re stopping people from participating… then you’re not in the game.

    Well, not in the game that has all the energy at the moment. The old systems of distribution of metadata were murderously expensive – really, only big players could afford to pay mainstream-radio payola. Being able to route around that is one of the best things ever to happen from an artist’s point of view… although we are possibly just swapping one type of feudalism for another I suspect. But still – The Lords of the New Church aren’t creativity-killing record and movie execs still looking for The New Eagles, or The New Top Gun or whatever… the new gatekeepers are celebrity-otaku. People who really know their stuff.

    The other problem of course is monetisation. Not the fact that we can’t do it, but that we have to.

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