Streaming will never stop downloading

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Streaming will never stop downloading

tedroden:

muxtape:

“Why would we voluntarily increase our reliance on expensive, scarce wireless bandwidth delivered by abusive thugs when we are awash in cheap, commodity storage that grows cheaper every day and which we can buy from hundreds of manufacturers and thousands of retailers?”

“Hard problems can’t be solved with technical denialism.”

Isn’t it fairly hardcore denialism to suggest our wireless bandwidth won’t get better?

One way or another we will have access to much faster wireless internet speeds. It’s also not going to keep getting more expensive. Sure, we’re going to take it on the chin for the next couple of years… but bandwidth will not be a limiting factor.

The denialism comes from thinking that perfect, ubiquitous streaming would stop people from wanting to acquire things for their personal collections. It’s human nature to horde and collect things and even be defined by them, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.

There are plenty of technical points of debate, but I liked this article because it underscored the fact that the real problem is a human one. Wireless utopia aside, I don’t want all my music somewhere “out there” where it can be metered, censored, altered, or confiscated at a whim.

Our hoarding instinct serves us well. Amazon’s remote deletion of 1984 absolutely chilled me, but it was also an excellent reminder that the cloud centralizes influence just as efficiently as it distributes technical failure. Insanely cheap storage is an arrow in our quiver against that centralization.

Truly ubiquitous wireless access will be awesome, but it’s never going to replace the books on my shelf or the mp3s on my hard disk. “Having” something is just as much about practical convenience as it is about personal identity and civil liberty.