Preserving History and Finding Empowerment

Have you ever searched for an old comfort show after a long day? Only to realize it's been moved to Prime Video or Peacock or whatever new streaming service you don't have and don't want to pay for? Or maybe you're on some vacation trying to get the perfect photo of Golden Hour and that dreaded pop up appears on your screen. You're running out of storage . You're not alone. From beloved shows being wiped completely off of platform to buying storage for thousand dollars smartphones, it feels like we're at the whim of the tech companies charging us nine ninety nine cents a month or more to get access to our things. But if I'm honest , I get the sense that we want more than just access . We want to own our things again . We stream songs and shows and films , but we used to just have CDs, box sets, and blu rays. I, for instance, have taken up buying vinyls and DVDs to maintain a collection of the art I cherish most . We want access that can't suddenly be taken away. And this speaks to a larger trend of young people in particular, driving physical media sales in an effort to confront their dependence on streaming services and build their own independent archives instead. But as AI, big tech and media platforms dominate more of our digital lives, I have to wonder does agency look like for media consumers like us ? To answer that question, digital archivist Katie Kemp and culture writer at the Cut, Kat Zang joined the show to break down how our digital world is much more precarious than we realize and how physical media and buildable tech could empower us to envision a better future. Kat, KD, welcome to It's Vinny Minute. Thanks for having us. Thanks Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Lewis and you're listening to It's Bit Amin from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident . I wonder like was there a moment for either of you where you were like, okay, I'm done with this or like I got to try things another way. I can't sign up for another streaming service or I can't like lose track of another one of my favorite movies. Or was there a moment that sort of made it click for you that you wanted to do things differently? Yeah, when Donald Trump got reelected so like the beginning of twenty twenty five , it became so clear how platforms were just completely destroying our ability to communicate shaping discourse in a way that was really distressing. I felt like I could never see any protest footage and then affected people's sense of hope and willingness to fight the status quo. You know, the content just became so much worse and like AI companies and AI content started coming into fashion . And so I feel like twenty twenty five was the year that people really vowed to start like logging off and reassessing their relationship to tech because we sa howw the tech oligarchs had ingratiated themselves with Trump and what impact that was having on our democracy, but also we were just feeling like overloaded by brain rot content and bad news headlines and there was just no sense of rest whatsoever. And what about you, Katie? I don't know if I can point to like one specific moment, but I remember, you know, we get those emails from our subscription services that say, hi there , we're raising the price . We're raising it again. Well, now we have this tier. It's the lowest tier and you have to pay, but you'll have advertisements. And so that was kind of happening to me. I want to say probably starting around like twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four . And I got really frustrated and I just thought why am I paying to watch ads basically ? Especially now as we've seen in the last years , these companies have started shifting into policies that really are at odds with what a lot of us value and the way that they're selling our data and our information . There was a TV show on Netflix called Medici, which was about the Medici family. It was like a period drama. It's very it's Italian and it was like yeah really wonderful show and it was going away and I think that was the inciting moment when I thought I need physical copies of the media that I love because I don't want this to happen for other things that I care about. I want to be able to continue accessing them for as long as I want. I don't want them to be altered without my consent . I don't want them to be taken away without my consent . That really was the push for me of saying I'm going to start collecting these things . Conventional wisdom for the past like ten to twenty years has been that digitizing things like documents, family photos, old home movies on VHS , our music catalogs. That is the gold standard for pres ervation, but KD, you say that's not necessarily the case. Why is that? Yeah, I think there's kind of two schools when it comes to digital preservation . So there's the digitization and the preservation of things that existed physically, like you're saying family videos or family photos . But then there's also this new thing that's happening where we have digital content that has never been made physical. And often these things are, you know, behind streaming services and other kinds of platforms, these proprietary platforms, and we subscribe to access them, but we don't actually own them . And so when those things go away, we lose access to that. And that's the thing I'm more concerned about these days than the stuff that's physical that hasn't been digitized. It's the stuff that's never been made physical. This phenomenon of endangered digital media feels really present, I think whenever like a beloved TV show or movie gets unceremoniously removed from a streaming service like the Disney plus Sero series Willow , which was taken off the platform in twenty twenty three, like two months after it was canceled. In some cases, extremely popular films, like twenty eight days later, personal favorite of mine . They're missing from platform s for years at a time or not available to stream anywhere . Much of Ali's music catalog wasn't available on streaming or download platforms for decades due to legal disputes . I wonder how has this changed our relationship to the media that we consume and love? A cat, I'd love to start with you on this one. Yeah, I think because we treat music and media as something that there's an abundance of and something that we can like access instantaneously, then we don't spend the time to like invest in our relationship with like individual pieces of m edia when platforms have so much control over the distribution of media and your access to it . They can dictate your personal relationship and cultural memory . For journalists, you know, we're seeing something where you work for a flashy media startup and then the billion the owner decides it doesn't like the startup anymore. And then all of the stuff that you wrote for the platform disappears . And so then there's no record of your work or as an internet writer , it's like sometimes I'll cite influential TikToks or YouTube videos or things like that, comments, and they get deleted or corrupted in some way . And so it's becoming really difficult to actually process and have a relationship with media. There's another aspect of this that it's kind of bugging me like, okay, like TV shows and movies , they come and go on these platforms and some are nowhere to be found, some that you would think would be easy to find are nowhere to be found. But also like in the past, TV shows and movies came and went all the time. Like shows could be canceled and never made available on home video formats. And some movies didn't even have enough audience show up in theaters to even justify a DVD press. It's like they come out of the theaters and maybe you see it and maybe you wouldn't. Maybe it'd play on cable later . And we kind of like moved on with life, but now audiences feel differently. I mean, I feel differently. Why is that? Yeah, I think it's just the speed and the churn that feels extremely disorienting and I see a parallel with fast fashion where it's like okay there's this a trend happening and then Xia or Zar or whatever company gives you the blouse or whatever. And then you move on . And I think a lot of people are lamenting the decline in quality of clothing, even among sort of like more upper tier clothing brands where now you have a lot of conversations about like natural fibers. We want things that are one hundred percent cotton. Like we want like vintage sweaters from the nineties because those were actually made to last . And it just feels like every people are feeling like they're just getting a worse deal . The other thing I wondered too, is like we've all been kind of trained by streaming platforms over the years to like ditch our DVD Ditch RDVD players and CD players and that we can basically summon pretty much whatever we want from the apps whenever we want. I think like before there was streaming, there was like DVR and Tivo. Like people have always wanted to be able to enjoy things asynchronously . To a certain degree, I do think that some of my cultural appet ite has kind of been reshaped by the sort of always available always on stream platforms. So when they do kind of remove things or move them around or take a film or a TV show off for a few years or whatever . It is kind of jarring, I think. And I imagine that might be some of what also is kind of coloring these responses is like we all have kind of been remade and retrained to expect to be able to find whatever we want whenever we want all of the time. Yeah , you know, to your point about this idea that you can get anything on streaming. I sort of have the soundbite. I like to think that, you know , they've sold us convenience, but it's coming at the price of our autonomy over things. And I don't think that it's actually that convenient. So we like to think like, oh, it was it was so inconvenient to have to go up to, you know, blockbuster or the video rental store and pick out the movie and inevitably somebody else had rented it. It's so much easier now to just go online and see where it's streaming, but it's actually really not that convenient. You have to look across like eight different platforms , hope that you're subscribed to one of them, and then inevitably it's not there, so you can't watch it. So I think that's part of the surge that we're seeing. People feel they're finally starting to feel that they've had that loss of autonomy. Whether it's like to Kat's point, the company is doing things that they don't value. They disagree with how the company, the direction it's going or the way that they're spending the money that we're giving them or they just don't like that they don't have access to the things that they've purchased that they feel entitled to. I wonder like what agency do audiences have when big media companies and platform s have so much power over what we can watch. I know you both have been exploring some possible solutions to this . Please share with the class . Well, one thing that's really interesting I just saw . I'm not a subscriber to Disney Plus, but I get served their ads on Instagram and TikTok. And I saw that they just finally put the movie life size on streaming , the one with Tyranne Panks and Lindsey Lohan. Yeah , life size came out in like two thousand . It's been a while. That's been considered, you know, quote, unquote, lost media for years because it's only existed physically. And in my mind , yeah. And it like it's such a great movie. And and like the DVDs sell for like over a hundred dollars , it's it's been really hard to watch that film. And so Disney made a huge to do releasing this on streaming. And I think that kind of speaks to the agency that consumers have, like, we have demanded this so much. Same thing happened with twenty eight days later. That was only physical for years and finally just in the last year got released on streaming. And I think that's directly as a result of this kind of resurgence that we're seeing with consumer demand. Yeah, I think we need to learn how to boycott and divest our attention. Like as a culture writer, there's some things that I am expected to know, but I think I've over the years become a lot more disciplined at just being like, there is this story right now. It absolutely does not matter and I'm going to choose to like focus on something else. Obviously that's like subject to economic wins. But I think we can start thinking that way of like these companies like only exist in so far as like we accept them into our lives. Like they need a consumer base . We're going to take a quick break, but first, if you're a longtime listener or brand new to it's been a min ute. Be sure to come back every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday for brand new episodes. And did you know you can make it even easier to get new episodes by hitting the follow or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app , whether you're a new friend or a loyal bestie, join the team by subscribing today . Coming up after the break . They feel entitled to have the right to continue to access or the right to repair. And I absolutely think that's what's underpinning all of this with cyber decks and physical media and all of that. Stick around Kat, you wrote about the way women and queer people online have tried to take agency into their own hands by building cyber decks. Like when I think about any kind of buildable tech, a lot of very male , very specific kinds of spaces come to mind, but that's changing. So for those who aren't on cyber deck TikTok, can you explain what a cyber deck is? A cyber deck is av deice that comes from the nineteen eighty four book Neuromancer by William Gibson. And in the book it's just like this mini device that hackers use to plug into the matrix . The current day iteration is basically like a customizable portable mini laptop. Usually they're like about game boy sized. Typically they run off a raspberry p ie, which is a single board computer . Another part of it is like you usually ideally want to use like scrap parts or secondhand electronics . Do you want to decorate it to your style and then you want to use open source software. So software that is transparent. You can look at the code. You can alter it to your needs. It's free, it's not like proprietary , you know, black box situation. I know some people have built cyber decks to store their favorite films or fan fiction. Like I've even seen people put encrypted messaging on their devices so their text communication can't be traced. Like bearing all that in mind, in your view, how are the builders of these cyber decks and the decks themselves pushing back against the influence of AI and big tech? Yeah, so I think something that we're learning is like we don't hate work and we don't hate learning . We just hate being alienated from our labor to use like kind of like Marxist phrase. Like we hate like feeling like we've contributed so much of ourselves to like jobs that we don't believe in . Like because of this like current stage of social media where it's like feeding you things as opposed to you even like typing into a search bar or doing a more active research in the past or visiting personal blogs. Like people have forgotten that like the internet is a resource and a place where you can actually learn a whole bunch of stuff . And so I think that's where Cyberdex came in where it's like trying to reclaim some of the energy and optimism of the nineties and two thousands when it was about like having a personal relationship to technology, about the wonder of exploration, about imagining the future. Now it feels like these tech oligarchs colonizing our future and they're saying the future looks gray, minimalist, AI run , unimaginative. And the only and they're the future is like, we'll make things more quote unquote, like efficient for you at the expense of the environment or whatever else it is. There is no actually imagination of like what if we made our society better and we afforded people more leisure time so that they can pursue more rigorous projects or have the mental capacity to view things that are not TikTok soundbites or something. Katie, I know that you like you use and work with a lot of like analog technology and in a very compelling and like exciting way. Like how are you thinking about all of this? Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those things where like nowadays you can't go on the internet without being sold something or encountering something generated by AI . And I think people are really, really tired of that. Like it's becoming unfun to go online. Like there always used to be that little bit of a dopamine hit. That's why these tools are addictive. That's why we keep going back to them and using them. They're fun. Like some of some of the greatest things that I've discovered have come through the algorithm like learning how to repair walkmans and like this thing with cyber decks. That's all fed to me through the algorithm, but now I have to sift through junk to get to that. And that's really frustrating and I think people are broadly experiencing that and feeling that which is what's pushing them to start seeking out alternatives. And again, I go back to that word autonomy, but I think it's really driven by this desire to have autonomy over your media and over your technology and to have the right to repair things . I think Amazon was just in the news because it completely phased out a whole swath of Kindles from like twenty twelve, which really was not that long ago. And I think people feel, especially when they've purchased something, they feel entitled to have the right to continue to access or the right to repair. And I absolutely think that's what's underpinning all of this with cyber decks and physical media and all of that. Something else I've been wondering as well, how does politics play into all of this? It's like, for example, something that's been on my mind a lot in preparing for this conversation is thinking about how Dela R wases like the first black woman I think to host a daytime talk show back in nineteen sixty nine . And we don't have any episodes available to watch because the reels from that show were used for another show. So that history got taped over . Now I don't know how that decision to tape over her show got made, but I do think about whose voices matter, whose work gets archived, and who falls by the wayside. And whether that's intentional or not, it is still political. And now with so many of our major media networks owned by right wing billionaires, like I'm concerned that politics is also shaping what we see and have access to, and we are, in turn, shaped by that media. What do you both make of that? So that's something like as an archivist, we constantly have that sort of philosophical discussion of what gets preserved and more importantly thinking about what wasn't preserved. And when you look back historically to the profession and who was in that profession, you can see why so many voices were not preserved throughout history. And I think just within the field, there has been more of a surge in recent years of capturing marginalized voices or traditionally underrepresented voices , but we've also seen it start to swing back , you know, the other direction. And that's where I think it's really important for the efforts of like citizen archivists or guerrilla archivists. And I like to say that honestly every,body is an archivist . And one of the use cases that I think of is the story of Marianne Stokes, who you've probably heard recorded tens of thousands of VHS tapes of news , you know, TV news , and she just did it out of love and out of passion and that's a collection that probably doesn't exist anywhere else. And so now it 's been, you know, dutifully cataloged, and it's being preserved and it's being digitized. But that was just one person who saw the importance of capturing that information and chose to. And I think everybody has the capacity to be able to do that for a subject that they care about or a point in history that they care about, they can bear witness to it and they can be the ones that preserve it and archive it. Yeah, I want to talk more about that. I mean, a lot of people listen to this coningvers ation might not want to build a cyber deck or a massive DVD collection . They might not want to buy another CD ever again, but they also might want to hold on to some physical media that's meaningful to them , but they don't know where to start. What do you say to them? I think just whatever it is that you're passionate about and it could be family photos, it could be family home movies, it could be your personal papers from school or really anything that interests you . And holding on to that and making sure that it stays safe from degradation and is stored properly and I think utilizing things too . I am very much of the belief of using these collections. And I know there are people who collect kind of for the aesthetic and for the nostalgia. And there's that piece there for me too, but every single one of these tapes behind me is something that I proactively watch and enjoy . And I think if somebody has those pieces in their lives of, you know, like I said, family home movies that they want to be able to continue enjoying, then preserving that and digitizing it is the best way to go. What has been revelatory about witnessing the cyberduct trend and exploring physical media for me is just the way that it changes my relationship to my environment and I start to see things based on their creative potential . And it has also like changed my relationship to the outdoors where now I'm just like mentally noting in my head like you know that's the Green Point Library where they have a bunch of to ols, and that's where I can rent tools. Or like, here's a record store or like maybe I could ask someone for help. And so I've started to see to be kind of corny about it, like to see the world as my internet. I have the tools to build a cyber deck, but I'm not in a rush. I'm more interested in actually learning about what communities could help me in the hypothetical situation I wanted to make one or something different. So there's New York City Resistor in Bor am Hill, it's like a hacker collective. They could probably fix your two thousand nine laptop . And I think I just walk around feeling more empowered because I know what to do if I need help with something , and I can feel like I can very easily connect other people to that too. So I made myself a personal website and I actually have like a resources page to kind of direct people to some of these hubs. Oh my gosh. KD Kat, thank you both so much for coming on the show. You have inspired me. Y'all inspired me today. I love to get in my soapbox about this stuff. Yeah, likewise . That was digital archivist KD Kemp and culture writer for the cut, Kat Zang. Kat's article Can CyberDecks Help us reclaim control from Big Tech is available on the cut right now . This episode of It's Bit A Minute was produced by Alexis Williams. This episode was edited by Nina Potug. Our supervising producer is Sheriff Vincent . Our executive producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VPA programming is Yolanda Sangueni. All right , that's all for this episode of It's Bit Amin from NPR. I'm Brittney Luis. Talk soon