WHY WE WERE SO STUPID TO EVER CONVINCE OURSELVES THAT DVDs & VHS WERE “OBSOLETE” TECHNOLOGY
“All we own, we owe...”, “All we own, we owe...” was once a humorous interpretation by The Simpsons of the nonsensical chant by the guards in The Wizard Of Oz back in 1993, but thirty-three years later, it has become an eerily accurate statement about our modern lives.
Like most of you reading this, I’m sure, I like to watch a bit of telly of an evening, and like most of you, my television habits have changed drastically over the years as the technology has ‘improved’. Or has it?
First of all, I’m from England, and I’m from the OLDEN DAYS (the 1990s), where for the first half of the decade, we only had FOUR terrestrial television channels to choose from, and some of us (or our parents) owned a small collection of VHS tapes, and later, possibly the odd DVD.
We bought them. We owned them. We watched them whenever we wanted, and we passed them on to whomever we chose to.
Then, as the 2000s progressed, DVDs took off massively, replaced the VHS, brought us oodles of extras, and became an industry worth tens of billions of dollars a year. Even average earners could easily amass a personal DVD collection over the years worth thousands, and those discs could last for eons.
We bought. We owned. End of process.
But then some very clever developers and network executives decided that this was far too simple a solution, that ownership of our own purchases gave us far too much control, and so they took it upon themselves to 'improve' our lives by making all of our collections obsolete - pushing us first into digital downloads that we cannot physically touch, and now finally into streaming. Thus, the transition was complete.
We pay. We never own. We keep paying. Process never ends.
I might be a bit late to the party, but I’ve recently fallen in love with the unconventional dark comedy series, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, starring Danny DeVito, Charlie Day, and a seriously talented cast.
The humour can be very edgy, the plots are wildly unpredictable, and the characters are almost entirely unrepentant, but for all my sins, I just adore it, and I’m not the only one, because ...Sunny now stands as the longest running live-action sitcom of ALL TIME (having first launched in 2005). It has a very dedicated fanbase, and being able to watch it is one of the main reasons why I – like plenty of others - choose the specific streaming service I’ve signed up for.
As I binged my way through eighteen seasons of the series, I was dismayed to find I wasn’t allowed to watch a certain episode I wanted to see. Then another one. And then another!
They were 'banned'.
We pay solely for this content, over and over again with monthly subscriptions, only to have it taken away from us when some progressive ideology later concludes that we can't be depended on to decide for ourselves if we want to watch it or not. Isn't that for us to determine? Isn't it a choice? Is it really right that these streaming companies take it upon themselves to decide my moral sensitivities on MY behalf, by banning me from watching certain content!?
We were SO STUPID to ever convince ourselves that DVDs and VHS were "obsolete" technology...
Because with discs and tapes, we paid once, owned forever, and could make our own choices. They couldn't change the rules retrospectively. They couldn't physically take the discs from us. Now with streaming, we pay forever, never own, and aren't allowed or even trusted to make certain choices for our own chosen content.
And it’s not just It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. The same happened to The Simpsons, who found one of their more popular early episodes now banned from the general public.
South Park have no fewer than five episodes banned so far. 30 Rock – four episodes banned.
Even the cheesy, feel-good gentle humour of The Golden Girls hasn’t been spared, with one of their episodes deemed too edgy for modern audiences!
They take our money, AND they take our choices!
You might think that this all sounds rather trivial, - “first world problems”, as it were - but it speaks to a much wider trend of corporations using the digital age to extract endless payments from us, to hold us hostage by their technological stranglehold, and convincing us that personal ownership is now somehow outdated and irrelevant.
Case in point is BMW, who launched the Series 2 Active Tourer, the X1, and various other models back in 2022, with standard heated seats installed – a fairly common feature for cars in this range – only for them to decide to hide it behind a subscription wall!
Drivers had to pay £15 EVERY MONTH for the very privilege of pushing a button that activated a fairly basic feature in the cars that they had already purchased – for which they had paid tens of thousands of pounds – and had to give their account data and personal information to do so.
There’s a modern Volvo SUV this year that will only let you open the glovebox by using their patented software via the large screen computer (an infotainment system designed so that you have to skip seven different pages if you want to operate the controls without giving them your online account information). How exactly is that an 'improvement' on a simple latch that can be used anytime, by anyone, for free, and can last forever?
Or the Mercedes EV that won’t even allow owners to open their own bonnet without first paying one of their own expensive specialists?
With every unnecessary technological ‘improvement’, one trend remains the same...
We pay more, and we own less.
On a positive note, BMW’s hated 'heated seats subscription service' was eventually axed after a massive customer pushback, but other subscription features remain, and in my opinion, that was only one small step back against the inevitable tide of endless subscriptions, planned obsolescence, and excessive corporate control of our own personal choices.
Who knows? Maybe we’ll see enough resistance and pushback from consumers that these corporations will start to reign in their undue control. It has certainly happened in the past.
In 1789, French workers destroyed cotton-spinning mechanism that threatened their jobs. In 1811, British textile workers did the same thing.1831, female shawl-cutters protested and destroyed machinery that was threatening their livelihoods and control.
Is it too much to hope for a 21st Century revolution against the headlock of digital technology?
I don’t know, but small steps are not to be sniffed at, and if I’m to leave you with anything, it is this advice...
Buy yourself a DVD player!
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