Freedom Over Convenience
I’ve never been cool. Not in kindergarten, not at school, not at work. While everyone around me adored the newest American hip-hoppers, wore Nike Air Max, and took drugs whose names I’d never heard, I kept to my small nerdy cosmos: Listening to the Chrono Trigger soundtrack on an iPod falling apart, wearing Superstars for fifteen years, and feeling extreme for taking a single drag. For music, series, or films I lived by torrents: Monthly indie-rock playlists via download links, anime via RSS, and movies from a university shared drive. Life felt nice and simple. When Spotify grew I ignored it. Why pay to rent music I don’t own and mostly won’t listen to? I dismissed it with a simple Nope.
Then the technological climate shifted. More and more of my friends showed the dark-green Spotify logo on phones and laptops. Look, I can play the new Kanye album without buying it!
they said. My dismissal turned to mockery. I didn’t yet see how Spotify would spark a personal crisis in my cozy nerd world. Then Apple launched Apple Music and my safe harbor eroded: iTunes had been the repository of favorite albums, and suddenly even my preferred computer maker celebrated streaming. It crept into my cosmos. I’d once been an early adopter. First Mac while others used Windows XP, an iPod long before most, but now I felt obsolete. Streaming felt inevitable and uncomfortable. Owning media felt passe, piracy seemed seedy.
I tried to adapt. I copied all my MP3s, MKVs, and EPUBs to an external drive, reinstalled my OS and tried a torrent-free life: I signed up for Spotify, Netflix, and Crunchyroll. The resolve lasted a week. Spotify maddened me: Many beloved artists were missing, songs vanished from playlists without explanation, and recommendations skewed toward embarrassing rap or bland muzak. Netflix left me lethargically scrolling menus, unable to choose. My new digital self felt censored, localized, and useless. It wasn’t only about paying for many services but about crossing a creative rupture I couldn’t bridge. Streaming can be brilliant, yet with gatekeepers deciding what reaches us we risk trading an open internet for a future that feels like the past. A rift is forming and I want to be on the right side when everything finally falls apart.