What I mean is: You can type an entire novel on a computer, and oopsie a random cosmic bitflip and system crashes and now its all gone. Or you do a lot of filming and the digital file can get corrupted. Where as stuff like, a typewriter, it’s less likely to just be all gone due to some malfunctions. Same with film, a cosmic bitflip can’t delete all your footage.
Know what I’m sayin’?
Fire can destroy paper, too much light can wreck undeveloped film, a magnet can “brick” tape. All media is ephemeral.
Oh buddy, this is basically my worldview.
I have shelves of vhs tapes and dvds. Almost every common game console since 1975 and the games. 200 records, around 50 reel to reel tape, 250+ cds. I am all about real and authentic. Especially since today everything has been cheapened, strip mined, and sold for parts.
If its not physical, you dont own it (hard drives full of stuff counts too of course but its not quite the same).
cosmic bitflip
ZFS enters the room
A cosmic bitflip is unlikely to lose all the data
In a video, you’ll get one frame of distortion (if it’s a key frame, it may be several seconds of distortion)
Similarly for a text file, picture, etc.
99.999% of the time you wouldn’t notice
I’ll give my smart-ass answer first before deliving into my serious answer.
Smart-ass: Yes…tangible literally means “possible to touch”. So yeah…digital stuff isn’t, by definition “tangible” in the way that records, cds, etc… are. You’ve never “touched” an mp3 file. You’ve never “touched” a streaming movie like you handle a DVD or a VHS tape.
Now…to my serious answer: I’ve long been working on what started as an article, became a treatise, and is now morphing into a non-fiction book about that very concept. Still a very long way to go, and with my stop-and-start creative blocks, it may never get done, but I felt it was important to write it all down while I still have a functioning brain. (I’m not getting any younger)
I’ve added to it for years every time a new thought about it comes to me, talking about what I call “Patina” (the tendency for mechanical things like typewriters and camera lenses to age individually, almost developing a personality as they age) and equating it with the Japanese concept of Tsukomogami (the idea that physical things gain a soul after 100 years)
Physical media does force you to interact with it differently and i do appreciate it in 2026. I like being able to put on an LP or cassette and not be worried about the algorithm telling me what to play or noy being able to easily skip tracks i don’t love. It makes me consider the album as a whole. I like being able to flip through my collection and find a record i haven’t heard in 10 years, that would never get suggestef by an algorithm.
I’m not sure I’d like using a type writer, seems like it real pain in the ass. I’ve used film as a kid and remember it being very fiddly even without doing any of the development myself. I know I ruined more than one roll of film being dumb.
That being said I do like digital devices that replicate that tactile analog feel. I love my remarkable tablet, its just an eink notebook/PDF reader. It helps me think out ideas and keeps me focused. Unlike a paper notebook if I lose it the data is saved to thr cloud. I chose a digital camera that had physical access to the main settings you would adjust, because i hate menu diving. Same with digital synths, get one with close to one function per knob.
analogue*
Bri🤮ish English
/jk
Well, they originated the language
That’s like the equivalent of me, an ethnic Chinese, telling a Japanese person how they should write their words “because their script originated from China”
Mandarin and Japanese are different languages. Correct English and whatever the US is doing are not.
That’s a pretty loose analogy, considering the amount of differences and time of branching.
I feel like you might be young and not have had to actually use analog stuff. Your whole family trip photos could be gone in an instant because you burnt the film accidentally, or you could lose the film before getting it revealed, and although rare (probably as rare as a bit flip destroying data nowadays) it happened that pictures were destroyed during the revealing process, and even if all of that worked the pictures could have been over/under exposed, out of focus, or any other variety of issues.
Typewriters? I wrote stuff in them when I was a kid, granted computers were around back then, but I liked the sound. They would jam the hammers, run out of ink, or just annoyingly one letter would not work. If you’ve made a typo or wanted to edit something the entire page had to be thrown out and rewritten, and if it didn’t fit now the next page would have to be rewritten as well. And now that you’ve finished writing and left the pages on the table a spill could destroy your day’s work, or your dog could eat your homework.
Film? I don’t think anyone here has actually dealt with film unless you work in the industry. For home users we used to use videocassette, which is a digital medium, and a very flimsy at that, dropped soda on it? Gone, it got stuck in your player? Gone, you put a magnet near it? Gone.
On the other hand digital pictures, text and movies you can have multiple backups effortlessly and completely avoid any possible single disaster scenario.
I grew up with all that old tech and it was still more robust. You could repair it. Best part: tech bros didnt control your life and embed ads into your fridge.
You cant repair shit now. And even if you can The code is locked down so hard it will take a shut in in Russia 13 years to hack it.
Analog tape is STILL the highest quality and longest lasting medium for audio. They are still making remastered off 70 year old tapes. Granted, those are fragile around magnets, but so are hdds. But also, even if a tape gets near a magnet, its not deleted. It merely may erase the high frequencies unless you use a bulk eraser magnet. After that, vinyl lasts literally forever, though it degrades as you play it. Cds do get bit rot if stored wrong.
Micro sd cards and ssds die at a milliseconds notice. Ive had tons of them just be dead after a year of sitting. Same with doa hdds, ive gotten more than 10 in the last couple years.
Now typewriters, all mechanical ones weren’t great, but an electric typewriter is the shit. Fast, loud, un corruptible offline writing. I myself would still just opt for a non internet connected linux laptop with auto backup for writing though.
Yea I’m gen z lol
I’m just kinda scared of this AI thing and clientside scanning becoming mandatory in the future.
I mean, you write anti-government stuff on your computer?
Oops, files has been deleted because it “threatens national security”
They could make this AI scanning thing hardware-based bypassing linux (see Intel ME and AMD PSP for example)
There are several ways to counter that sort of thing, but let’s start from the beginning. LLMs (what people call AI) is VERY computational heavy, you need a powerful GPU to run a model locally, and it occupies lots of power and memory. The idea that we’re even remotely close to something like that being embed into hardware without people realizing it is just absurd.
But let’s imagine someone is able to make it, and magically prevents hackers from breaking it and using it as extra free power. This will have to live in the CPU as anywhere else wouldn’t have authority to “delete files”, and even the CPU would have a hard time doing that. Now this LLM needs to distinguish stuff I’m writing with stuff I’m reading, otherwise it would also delete files when someone is observing me. It also needs to reply in sub millisecond otherwise the computer will lag absurdly. It also can’t update it’s local model because it doesn’t have network access, so just use tokens it hasn’t heard of.
In short if someone managed to add a piece of hardware capable of doing that it would have to be significantly more powerful than the piece of hardware it’s embed in, and it would only work until someone breaks it and gives everyone a free hardware upgrade.
You can relax, nothing like that is even remotely close of being theoretically possible.
That being said, Windows doing this or similar is a possibility, your best bet is to use an open source system.
True, until its illegal to use your own hardware and you are required to log into bezosnet from your Amazon issued mandatory dumb terminal (which must always be on and internet connected with camera, basically like alexa that idiots have in their homes).
OP has a right to be un trusting. Im damn glad im not any younger. If I were id be learning everything I can about using open source software and cyber security. Also its proven already that we are being recorded and monitored 24/7 from our smartphones, unless you have a graphene phone.
None of this is an issue when you have data integrity checks and proper backups.
So no, I don’t know what you’re saying.
Digital (as in data) has the ability to be easily copied, modified, searched, encrypted, transferred. Making a backup is trivial and virtually free, with less of an environmental impact.
Digital data always ends up being held on something physical which can be destroyed with the same processes as analog data can - except the digital storage medium can be more resilient to some external factors while being vulnerable to some extra ones which analog is not. In other words: a little bit of fire will not destroy a hard drive, but will burn paper easily. An EMP will destroy a hard drive but do nothing to paper. Both can be protected for either case to a certain degree.
Make backups of data you don’t want to lose (digital or analog). Don’t make the mistake of thinking one is more secure than the other.Can I introduce you to the concept of “fire” :D
A single bitflip wiping your novel is incredibly unlikely, to the point of being almost impossible. Modern OSs and filesystems are fairly resilient, and the data is likely all still there.
Fire? Never happened to the houses I lived in, seems kinda rare ngl (/joke)
But like you ever heard of Microsoft just yoink your files onto OneDrive then deletes your local copy? Then oopsie, ran out of storage, and you didn’t pay subscription, so your cloud is gone too…
I don’t think an evil arsonist can even do that much damage, deleting millions of files across the world.
Maybe not yours, but I’ve had a fire in my life that deleted lots of pictures and stuff, whereas all of the digital media we have is still with us because we copied it to several places so no single event could destroy it. If you only had one copy of an important digital file, you’re doing it wrong.
To be fair, using OneDrive is like using paper that can spontaneously combust at any moment.
It’s on by default lmfao
Your brand new notebook comes pre-gasolined
My laptop came preloaded with Linux.
Haven’t used Windows for anything at home for years now. Even convinced my wife to switch her laptop to Mint when she got fed up. It’s been nice.
OneDrive is absurdly easy to not use. I feel confident saying that if you can’t figure out how to save an MS word file to a non-onedrive folder you should definitely leave it on. A single backup on a cloud service with a local cache is better than a single backup on one physical drive that will eventually fail.
If it’s important, you want at least three backups in two different formats with one physically removed from the others. A copy you save to a thumb stick, a copy you save to OneDrive, and one you print out. (Or, conversely, the physical copy you bought, one electronic copy local, and one copy of that electronic version saved to iCloud or what have you.)
I have heard a lot of people complaining about deleting the Local copy… It seems to mainly be a bad faith argument where deleting the Local copy just refers to the process of freeing up local storage of unused files(?) repeated by people who doesn’t actually use OneDrive but want a unarguable point to why it’s shit.
(Mind you I think it’s bad enough that Microsoft tries to kind of coerce you into handing them your data)
Not really. Your examples work both ways to me. You can loose typewriter stuff as well, like say you spill something all over it. For film I have heard horror stories of it not recording or the film failed so same applies to that as well. If anything stuff like word files now default to save every 5 minutes and honestly if its that important it should be saved both local and some cloud location as well.
I think both sides have pros and cons just like everything and neither are any simpler, at least to me.
I felt like I agreed with the title, but the logic in the explanation doesn’t hold up for me. I don’t think analog or digital are more resistant to various things that may happen – both are susceptible to their own things.
Where I do agree: I can hold a vinyl record in my hand, and it’s MY copy. Mine has a scratch that makes that noise on track 2. The crackle is specific to mine. It is unique in a way that the Spotify equivalent isn’t.
But put that record in the wrong spot, it’ll warp. Everything dies, just in a different way.
PSA: I am not suggesting equivalence. I’ll take analog all day long and it shocks me that people are willing to pay over and over again to access the same content with digital streaming. But yeah, can’t get behind the logic in the post.
Right a big selling point for digital was the ability to make a ton of copies and not have to physically store it in a file cabinet or something
Back in the day there was a fire where they stored military records and a ton of “permenant” records went up in smoke
Really you need the ability to have both in case one fails
Ok…but thats not an arguement for or against analog or digital. You’re just making the case for redundancy. You can achieve the same thing by making a copy of analog files, and simply storing the copies in a different place.
NOW if the permanent records burn, there’s a backup. And that’s the point of redundancy.
Yes, analog is more tangible, if you define it in terms of user experience. For me personally, holding an actual paper book and smelling the paper is an entirely different experience than an ebook-reader (although I do love mine). The act of looking up a piece of music in your collection and playing the physical medium on a device feels more satisfying than simply looking up the digital stream.
However, ‘tangible’ is nice, but ‘intangible’ has its advantages too. I rip my CDs in order to be able to listen to them on my phone (and to have the music in my collection in case the CD breaks). Last time I bought a few CDs, I even got a download linnk for the digital files as well. Neat! Backups are way easier with digital, both on-site and off-site. Finally, the abundance of digital streams makes it easier for me to discover new artists. Digital media have their use cases too. :-)
Does your e-reader use e-ink and an indirect backlight? I’m assuming so, but If not, it’s definitely worth giving a try.
Yes it does.
I get what you’re saying except I am the opposite. I used to do everything analog, but carrying and reading books became too painful. The school or public library used to be my favorite place. I used to draw a lot in analog too, but that became too painful. Nowadays if I want to read, it has to be digital or it won’t be comfortable and too painful. I like being able to resize text and easily search for things. I am also getting more into audiobooks or TTS. I hate when I am asked to write with a pencil and paper, my handwriting has become shit too.
