Extravagant thought for today:
Why own stuff? I don’t need a lawnmower (no lawn!) or a pool table (no space!). My little island doesn’t have room for everything.
But I want to own some stuff. A certain set of books, music & videos helps me feel at home in the world. I want to weave them into my nest.
Digital streaming services want me to get all my media clutter from them – but they don’t offer DVD extras, or obscure releases, or whatever content I want that they’ve recently dropped. Their selection is convenient, but limiting: I fear I’d become just another one of those “Customers who watched this also watched…”
And if I want to watch Star Trek, I don’t want to have to figure out which platform is streaming it this month.
We imagine that technology represents the future, but technology actually confines us to the present. It’s now common for functioning devices to be rendered worthless when contract terms expire. Documents created in old software may be lost forever.
Meanwhile, film archivists point out that the technology best suited for long-term storage is not digital files, but the physical film that’s already existed for a century.
So I’ve been cautiously building a small library of books, CDs and Blu-Ray discs which represent the world I want to live in.
It feels practical: what the market offers today might not be available next year. I know I’ll want to watch certain videos over and over, and I don’t want Netflix’ changing menu to decide whether I can.
But my campaign is clearly driven by something deeper. It’s an art project; it’s a loving embrace; it’s a protest.
I want to grasp onto a world that’s slipping away.
Gathering a few treasures while I can feels like I’m preparing my cabin for a journey through time and space. For better or worse, I am reshaping my tiny world in my own image – and humbly refusing to let Amazon or HBO or YouTube’s algorithms shape it for me.
Clutter aside, my collection of treasures reminds me of something unexpected: the assortment of luxuries gathered in King Tut’s tomb.
This isn’t exactly a coincidence.
The ancient Egyptians shipped their favored citizens into the next world fully equipped to maintain hobbies from this one.
We’ve always been taught that “The Egyptians believed the souls of the dead would use these treasures in the next world…”
…but is that really it?
What if, instead of preparing for an afterlife they’d carefully planned out…
…the pyramids, tombs, and collected treasures were…an art project? A loving embrace? A grandiose protest against the inevitable?