But minidisc didn’t require a wholesale change in how the economy works.

You know what? It was a flippant fuckin' analogy but I've fallen in love with it.

IN THE BEGINNING there were wax cylinders and they were good. Except they weren't, they were shit. So music went to shellac but it couldn't be re-recorded, so wire was used. Thus was God's Musical Universe bifurcated: there was forever recordings, which were quickly monopolized by large corporations who charged a royalty to listen to anything, and temporary recordings, which were always magnetic on whatever medium was tough enough.

Shellac became vinyl and wire became reel-to-reel became 8-track became cassette and God was displeased! For the heathens had discovered that vinyl could be recorded on cassette and played without the monopolies getting their money! But they could also be played in a car and a walkman so now we can sell records and tapes! And God was pleased.

But then vinyl became Compact Discs.

CDs are digital. They are 1:1, forever. They do not wear out - apocryphally, Dark Side of the Moon finally dropped off the Billboard Top 200 only because people stopped wearing out their vinyl. But they aren't great for walking around with, never have been, never really solved that. DAT? Well we tried that but it so frightened the music industry that every DAT tape you bought included royalties to the major labels out of sheer fear and they were literally as technologically complex as a VCR (DAT is a helical-scan technology requiring micron precision) and it was never going to catch on. Digital is just data, we already have hard drives, shit we already have non-volatile memory! But ZOMG a solid-state player with enough memory to hold a song at 10.4MB per minute?

- enter MiniDisc -

Thing 1: it's a magneto-optical storage technology. It's half laser, half magnetic so it doesn't skip much.

Thing 2: it's rewritable over and over again without loss, for a long time, anyway, but not forever.

Thing 3: it's small and portable but will no way not in hell never hold an entire album of music unless you compress it! Huzzah! It's lossy! Like tape!

I had a buddy who bought an I-shit-you-not minidisc deck for his car. "Hey let's listen to this new CD!" "Not until I've copied it by hand on mindisc." He bought it, of course, because Minidiscs were in Strange Days. And we took that car on a 2-week roadtrip around the southwestern United States and despite the fact that I brought down like 300 CDs? We had seven. Seven to listen to because seven minidiscs were all the time we had to make before we left.

I had a minidisc recorder. I bootlegged off the board with it. I recorded environmental with it. And I did so because a Tascam PortaDAT was $4k. And the minute you could buy an SD card with like 32MB on it that shit was fucking done because MP3 existed and Tower Records ate shit and Napster ate the world and what was left bought iPods and suddenly the biggest music store in the world was Apple and Sean Parker bid on Warner Music Group just to piss on its grave.

In the words of Joe Macmillan in Halt & Catch Fire - "It's not the thing. It's the thing that gets us to the thing." Minidisc didn't change the world. Neither did Friendster. Neither did Alta Vista. Neither did Compuserve. Neither did UMatic.

In my estimation “EV” has become a heuristic for “I like the environment” without a lot of depth behind what they are and how they’re made in a practical sense.

No one has ever done that analysis for internal combustion cars and they never will. The fact that the Manhattan Institute and its ilk now demands everyone to understand lithium cradle-to-grave when they have never once in their lives given the first fuck about oil or emissions?

Calls their authenticity into question.