by francopoli

For about ten years, I’ve been warning people, “hang onto your media. One day, you won’t buy a movie. You’ll buy the right to watch a movie, and that movie will be served to you. If the companies serving the movie don’t want you to see it, or they want to change something, they will have the power to do so. They can alter history, and they can make you keep paying for things that you formerly could have bought. Information will be a utility rather than a possession. Even information that you yourself have created will require unending, recurring payments just to access.”

The other valuable lesson to learn here is BACK UP YOUR SHIT PEOPLE. But man, I hate Apple for a ton of reasons, many even legitimate. This is insane that they would pull your music collection, upload it to their servers then demand you use WiFi to listen to stuff you had on a local drive.

The third lesson here is that forcing people to upload and stream shows just how cheap storage and transmission of data has become. You'd think, if you have been around a while, that storing stuff used to be crazy expensive. This hits me finally. I have a desktop with 10TB (terabytes) of storage for my astronomy data, yet this story is what makes me realize exactly how cheap stuff has become.