I’m not terribly attentive to music or film quality, but the complaints about access to streaming media resonated with me.

Membership in one of my local libraries includes access to Freegal, a kind of janky, third-tier music streaming service. The selection isn’t fantastic, but my tastes in music aren’t exactly mainstream, and over the past four years, I’ve found a lot of music I like available through the service. In fact, because you can download a limited number of tracks per week, I have Indochine songs, Gérard Lenorman albums, and even the Stranger Things soundtrack all saved to my phone so that I can bypass the jankiness of the service and the official app.

I liked the She-Hulk finale, but one thing that’s been irritating me is the way its gimmick reinforces the locking in of content to streaming subscriptions rather than letting people own content. Can you even buy Disney+ stuff on disc?

A week ago today, my MacBook Pro suddenly stopped being able to communicate with its SSD. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I spent most of my Tuesday afternoon wiping everything from the drive and reinstalling macOS so that I could get back to work. While I haven’t kept a physical backup for a couple of years (I accidentally fried mine when moving back into my campus office in Fall 2020), I have all of my most important documents scattered between three cloud services, so this wasn’t too painful of a process.

This is why I’m trying to buy more physical copies of things—or at least DRM-free stuff. I have lots of regrets about the size of my Kindle library, for example.

I mean, there’s still plenty to be worried about when it comes to targeted advertising and smart TVs, but this is a good reminder to take a step back.

I dream of a world where IP laws are liberalized to the point that libraries can provide their own, publicly-funded streaming services.

I have been thinking recently about streaming as a compromise in internet-era IP disputes, but this shows one reason that it’s not good enough a compromise.