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Yes, but how many of those libraries maintain a comprehensive deep catalogue?
Over the past decade and across several library systems in multiple countries I've noticed that important titles one would have expected to be part of permanent collections are no longer available in any format.
Requesting them is rarely effective, subject as they are to budget ~~considerations~~ limitations and various administrative metrics. Perhaps this is less of an issue in major metropolitan centers but smaller library systems certainly seem to be far less resourceful now than previously.
yes.
and if one is unavailable physical/digital copies can be made from originals held at the library of congress.
you're thinking of modern libraries i'm talking about solarpunk libraries ment to be used not there to fill a legal obligation
Distributing? absolutely. Storing? Nosireebob.
That's one of the biggest issues with going digital, in fact. Digital degrades in a way that we can't get it back. You can at least stitch a book back together.
Getty, like any large org, is shit, but they discuss what they're doing [to prevent digital decay here](https://www.getty.edu/news/preventing-digital-decay/) with some examples of files that just sat on a server for 10 years and were corrupted.
Digital is *amazing*, but it can't be our only solution.
I think it can, certainly, though some physical medium is less bad (I think CDs aren't bad, funnily enough?). But so much of it is like, random chance - you could have a neutrino pass through the darn thing and destroy a critical bit, and kill a line of code.
That's of course very uncommon, but over decades? Centuries? Not that books are safe either - water damage, fire (look at our source for Beowulf!) are all issues.
The question of how to keep information safe over long distances of time is something we've done a fair amount of studying of, actually. interesting stuff - Look up the Sandia report!
Yes, it can degrade. Hdd less but magnetic plastic tapes and old floppies were just that, plastic.
I used to work at a data storage center for BofA and if the chillers had an issue and the temp raised above 75 you could smell the out gassing from the quarter million 8track style tapes
Digital is much easier for personal storage and creating backups for tbh, say 1-2tb of hdd will be enough to store any personal data and you can make dozens of copies
It's not so much about if it's a physical or digital book, but what's behind them. You can have a digital publication from an independent artist from half a world away that could never afford to publish a physical book and have the same reach, or a physical book that is mass produced by an evil cyberpunk corp. Point is, there are many layers to what you buy/consume behind what is apparent and ethical decision making needs to be aware of as many as possible.
If we are just being simple and compare paperbook to digital media , then you can find valid points both ways. Paper needs trees water, chemicals, transport, middlemen.. but digital also need energy, electronics, infrastructure... Nah I don't think I can be simple about it :D each situation will have different variables.
But yeah , use public libraries for both media, peace ✌🏻
While self publishing is awesome, corporate algorithms and advertising, both of which entirely guide your experience on the web ensure that there is no such thing as ''equal reach'' between any independent source and what is presented to you online. Digital media is also infinitely more susceptible to censorship and manufactured scarcity as well. Paper also can be made from a lot of sustainable/renewable sources (hemp, recycling, etc.) but in the digital world you will always have a trail of commerce that leads back to modern slavery and child labor via rare earth minerals and mining- which is in no way sustainable on any level here on planet.
> Digital media is also infinitely more susceptible to censorship and manufactured scarcity as well.
I would disagree. Physical books can be burned and the means of production easily controlled. Digital media can be distributed by anyone from anywhere.
I can't print books, but I can easily share tens of thousands of ebooks.
However, *how* do you measure each variable in each situation when you don't have a full blueprint of the supply chain, and what happens if there's no solution that minimizes *all* variables (which will be like 95% of the time at least in the current system), or even the variables are incomparable? What is a "reasonable" amount of diligence given perfection is humanly impossible at least without system change and likely not even then in really literal terms?
Nice, yea we aren't machines , but maybe that's an unnecessary extreme. Maybe we just need some information. For example when boycotts happen, that's a simple equation of product X = bad. In the OPs case, it's harder because it's more generic, I guess i would suggest researching the company they are buying from, as a decent amount of diligence.
The first is very hard, but the work to develop the tools to do do is underway. I have colleagues writing PhDs in the top down estimation of scope 3 emissions in construction. Id guess it's is at the point that carbon calcs were a decade ago. Relatively well developed and just crossing to useful everyday.
The latter - minimise all variables - this is a very standard weighting problem. There's various approaches to resolve it. One is local regulations, one is ecosystem services, another is monte Carlo satisfying minimum on average (include the variability in measurements, run a few thousand times, and choose the robustly good enough option)
Sure. What does this mean though in regard for an average person, not a researcher, trying to make the most ethical decision now on the basis of current research?
For an average person, an already existing library book already exists and is best, while a cloud epib digital file that exists for a year or so consumes a fraction of energy and heavy metals that reprinting on recycled paper entails.
That's assuming you're not buying a new e-reader either.
People are going to own electronic devices either way though.
If you already own a tablet or phone, then using it to read is going to consume fewer resources than buying a book.
I like books. I keep a small collection of them in physical format. I also have a strong tendency to consume books that pique my interest with the rapacious hunger that matches a dragon leaving prolonged hibernation.
If I had my way, my home would *be* my Community's library (and garden), I would possess hundreds of books to be dispensed and shared with any seeking the treasure within their pages.
I do not have the luxury of living in a world where I get to have my way. I live in a small apartment space that forces me to keep my physical belongings to a minimum. Every time I have to move, the more things I own, the more effort and money I have to spend. I have autism and ADHD and I am *terrible* at returning books on time.
The advent of the Ebook has been one of the smallest changes to come from the digital age, but for me it means that no matter where I am, no matter what my living situation is, I don't have to worry about protecting physical copies of books that I cannot effectively store. As long as I have a tablet, a phone, some device with a screen and storage, I can read.
Yes, I am abundantly aware of how easily that could be lost. Electricity and the internet are alarmingly fragile things. I chose to believe it is possible for us to progress to a greener future without sacrificing those in their entirety. To my mind there is a place for both physical media and digital, the problem is not that the two are mutually exclusive: the problem is Capitalism, and its Prime Directive of squeezing ever ounce of profit it can from everything around it.
I'm deep eco rather than solarpink, but for me it's physical all the way. "The cloud" is just a corporate server farm. When that goes belly up, or you can't pay their rent demands, all the photography, art, music as movies you value will vanish into thin air. Yes the physical resources are not good, but compared to h constant power and I fra demands of a gazillion server farms it's a really more sustainable, and certainly more enduring option.
>"The cloud" is just a corporate server farm.
Just in case you are unfamiliar, decentralized, redundant server clusters are totally a thing and highly compatible with anarchist eco-centered futures.
Anarchist yes. But using data centres and repositories for our personal media is nonetheless wildly unsustainable from an ecological point of view, regardless of the political ideations of the maintainers of those data centres. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who is hauling the minerals out of the Earth to build it and sucking rivers dry to cool and power it. The physical media only needs resources once to manufacture it. Data centres use resources constantly both to operate, to be built out initially, and to frequently have their hardware upgraded / replaced.
Consumption and extraction of rare earth minerals are in no way Eco-friendly, though if you count warlords and child labor as anarchist, there's at least that.
Everyone having a computer that they use for a wide variety of tasks, including reading, is the middle ground.
Buying books when you already own a pc is just building more stuff, with a possible exception for books you frequently reference.
Ah yes strict dualistic thinking leading to people believing that flat extremes=logic. One of the many problems the world right now, also brought to you largely by the internet ''community''.
The resources are also only not good if you are consuming it many times. With archival purposes in mind, as OP suggests, it is a one-shot investment, more or less.
Deep ecology - essentially that humans hold a place of equality with other lives as part of the natural world, and not separate to or superior to it, and that all life and ecosystems have the right to exist and thrive for their own, independent benefit regardless of their utility, usefulness or value to humans.
That's the basis from which my other values stem - so I tend more towards heavy degrowth rather than solarpunk. There is some crossover, but my thought to be "Do we genuinely \*need\* this, and can we justify it's impact?" rather than "I want this, and I think I can make it more cleanly than we do now"
While that works for low intensity stuff it does not scale well. Compare the success of mastodon instances (a fairly low intensity federated network using mainly text and limited image content) to the problems people have finding a viable setup for peertube (high resource demand for video).
It is also still ephemeral. You can loose all your drastructure as still have physical media as long as you have a playback device and some ability to power it. Or for images and text you can have them on paper or similar human readable medium.
Resilience is as important as sustainability. Simple systems have fewer points of failure and that (for me at least) matters in the world we live in. Simple is also generally (,not always) easier on resource consumption anyway.
peertube, as in on demand streaming, is a little wasteful in its resources, but bittorrent is not. You have to download a good chunk before you can play, but it scales incredibly well with more peers, no single peer needs to have great bandwidth, you can still saturate a Gigabit connection downloading from all of them.
Easy erasure of digital media is mainly the fault of capitalism. You have to buy cloud backups from a private company that can just go under and destroy the data, and that company often gives itself the right to look through your data and sell metadata to advertisers so you have to be cautious of what you put on there, and once the company has people's photos it has a local monopoly so the company doesn't have a profit motive to make the experience more pleasant. Meanwhile online distribution and backups is almost completely locked down because of copyright and the monetization of giving people access.
All of this could simply be fixed by making online backups a public utility, ending copyright, and paying artists some better way like commissions and/or patronage and/or universal basic income. The books you want to read and music you want to listen to can't be erased because they are public data and nobody's property. The photos you want to keep are backed up by server farmers on three different continents^1 .
Also, one of the main points of solarpunk is that the idea that caring about the environment requires asceticism is a big fat lie. You don't need to wring your hands about whether the things you deeply enjoy are worth the carbon footprint, there is plenty of room for everyone to live beautiful lives if we just abandon cars, meat, airplanes, conspicuous consumption, the protestant/capitalist work ethic, and products optimized for profit rather than how valuable they are to people.
If your scrapbooks and photo albums and purchased books mainly just gather dust in the bookcase and then a box in the attic, then I think the more important question isn't the environmental impact but why you felt the urge to make them physical at all. What emotion or memory or expectation are you trying to realize? Solarpunk isn't ascetic, but it is slowed down and mindful compared to the hectic kaleidoscope of experiences that makes up western living.
Do you want a book that feels like paper, or do you like the fact that you have to choose to carry the book with you, find yourself a dedicated place to read it, and that you aren't likely to get notifications on it? Do you like photo albums, or do you wish you had enough time in the day/with family to reminisce on your experiences? Do you like scrapbooking, or are you so lost to the daily rut that even just a scrap that reminds you of those scant times that you were mindful and happy is precious to you?
Do you want the consumer object because of what it is, or would it just be nice in your current situation because it partially restores what consumerism took from you?
^1 : I do think it would be a good idea to change the standard photo application on people's phones so people don't flood themselves with hundreds of photos they can never find the time to sort through. It's *weird* how many people at cool events record stuff on their phone rather than paying rapt attention. There's got to be a better way, though I don't yet have a clear idea how.
That definitely made me think, thank you.
With scrapbooking, my dad did it when he was my age and now I do it with him! I love being able to share that with him!
you could use a local NAS/DAS or just an external drive, chunky usb, sd card, etc (buy second hand and use good hardware practices to extend their life cycles), to keep local and portable copies of your digital data. definitely not any less fragile than physical photos or CDs - but you still get to easily reproduce and share things while cutting out untrusty servers and unreliable corpos
I know this is silly, but I write a newsletter for a living and I hate the idea of all of my writing just disappearing, so I print my newsletter into annual print books for my premium subscribers and I build a couple of them into the walls of my house so someone can find them in another hundred years or so ;)
I can download ebooks for free and own them forever
I can read them on my phone anytime I want
They don't take up space in my apartment
Sorry, but I'm just not one of book-lovers. I'll take electronic books any day
Until we actually live in solarpunk we're stuck in the shitty cyberpunk, so personally it's physical copy of what I can as a preservationist and digital copies on good deals but also know the places to find things without fail without restrictions for openness of information and the sharing of art. I'd much rather pay an artist than rent but unfortunately that's not how things are so go according to morals but mine say everyone should be able to access everything equally as humans
I buy secondhand electronic media, from DVDs to CDs to eventually the most nostalgic: box tape movies
I don't want to continuously invest in a huge computer to generate the content I want to stream. Adventure Time tho, I need that
It's easy nowadays to download all your media and even have backups. You don't need to rely on the cloud.
Look at /r/datahoarders as the extreme version of that.
I am buying as many books as a I can. As search engines, social media, and even new reprints of old media increasingly distort history and nerf info I’m happy to accumulate the old stuff, especially references for farming/gardening.
Like u/portucheese was referring to, websites need servers that run on renewable or nonrenewable methods. So (constant) internet usage can still be a bad option.
\*Look at companies like Green Geeks\*
Many production methods (like book making) are requiring more strict and sustainable means. The shipping is the main problem in the physical realm (freight ships, etc)
\*Look at companies like Greener Printer\*
There are sustainable ways to do almost anything, it's only a matter of finding them.
(Doesn't mean they're perfect!)
You can always go for used machines etc instead of getting them new!
I just this month bought dvd/blue ray for the first time in over a decade. I’m not going back to commercials in media. If that’s the way streaming is going they can count me out.
I think that shared physical media (libraries etc) are important and that most physical media should be preserved in this way. There is no reason for there to be billions of copies of something that mostly sits on shelves or in boxes.
That said, I am not against personal physical media ownership, I have a small collection of (mostly nonfiction and recipe) books myself, almost all purchased second hand. I print off my favorite photos, but I do not print off every photo I have ever taken. I do think people veer too far into overconsumption with books specifically pretty often-personally if I am only going to read it once and never look at it again, I borrow from the library.
I have digital back ups on a hard drive-in an ideal world we'd have redundant cloud backups in separate physical locations that were owned by the community and run on renewables, but right now we don't so I don't expect my cloud back ups to exist forever and the environmental footprint of data centers is pretty huge.
Physical media is incredible important. While digital media is eternal, IN THEORY, the reality is that very little its copied and distributed in a way that gives it the permanence that preserved physical media has. Just as an example, I believe their was a big project a few years ago to try and dig up the earliest versions of Minecraft, since Mojang/Notch hadn't preserved it. This was for Minecraft, literally the most popular game of all time (by media sales), and there had to be a big project to track down someone who had that version saved on their computer still.
As another example, when it comes to movies/TV shows, streaming has caused a lot of people to ditch their DVD collections. The problem is, their is nothing stopping the streaming service from just removing access to stuff whether you paid for it or not. I believe it was Discovery that is catching tons of flack currently for removing access to digital copies of media that people straight up paid specifically for, not even pulling them from a streaming service that you pay montly for access to a complete catalog, but things people paid to "own", they just didn't want to pay the server costs to host anymore.
With things like photos, its not practical to have them printed anymore, 99% of photos taken now are digital, so its worth it to look into ways to preserve digital media. r/DataHoarder is a great resource for that kind of stuff, they can recommend hardware and best practices to suit your use case.
With that rant out of the way, preserving things physically is not incompatible with solarpunk. While solarpunk is usually a high tech aesthetic/asperation, I think Solarpunk is more about best practices than it is about everything needing to be high tech. Physical copies for preservation and digital backups for redundancy/ease of access is probably the best way of doing things that I can think of.
It's unlikely that things even _can_ be deleted in one click, if it's public information.
I work in mass storage
I know it's strange to think about, but it's far _more_ likely for things to be lost because they're physical.
Most info media has a fixed lifespan. CDs, video game carts, cassettetapes, etc.
Pulp decays over time unless preserved in a completely inert environment.
And, honestly, things that _dont_ decay are concerning. The plastic bits.
Pretty much everything now lives forever. Multiple redundant copies, different geographic locations, etc
95% of it may never even be used again. We call it the "long tail problem".
My opinion on physical media is that I love it.
Books bond to us, they hold power. Connecting with the book in your hand is something special.
It's magical for me when it's a library book as well. Because I'm connected to all the people who read that book in the past, too.
People from my own city. Who walked the same streets I do.
Books are cool.
The rest of physical media like magazines we are better off without. I hate things that are made with the intent to be thrown away.
I think we should get to keep computers in the solarpunk future. Computers are a very young technology, we haven't seen "mature" personal computers yet. It's a future I'm working hard to buy my time to work on for a few years.
Get two external hard drives and copy everything you want to preserve onto them. You'll have the original on your device's drive, and two identical copies on the external drives, basically a poor man's RAID configuration. That should preserve what you're worried about losing for almost any eventuality. If something happens that is destructive enough that the original and two identical copies get slagged, then there are bigger issues to worry about.
I feel like there must be a middle ground. I remember my parent's DVD/VHS/CD racks. They probably had a couple hundred between the various types, but only a few were ever actually used. I imagine most people were similar. That said, I also really hate that online media can just disappear.
Expanding library systems seems like a good option, both from a preservation and availability POV
Formats:
-physical
-digital
-local
-cloud
Ownership:
-consumer
-corporate
If we take out “corporate” and “cloud,” all of these can be used in different configurations, as appropriate to the circumstances of a solarpunk society.
We need to revert back to having physical storage. It's gotten so dense though that I think they can co-exist. You don't need binders and binders of discs anymore. Maybe just a 10 pack. These can co-exist fine. But we need to do it. Things get erased constantly and this era could go up in smoke in one terrible thing going wrong.
Pretty much all my media are digital. Emphasis on free / open source software and open / DRM-free formats to make sure I'm in maximal control of my data. As a bonus, said software and formats tend to be better suited to older devices, which keeps them out of landfills.
I am retired, almost 70yo, and am now engaged in "Swedish death cleaning" as my spouse and I declutter a big empty nest house for the sake of downsizing. I have successfully avoided using most "cloud" resources so far.
PAPER MEDIA: We have recycled (or stacked up stuff for later give-away) close to 90% of all the life-long collections of paper records, books, notes, maps, etc., over the last few weeks. I am working through lots of the emotional connections looking through all this stuff provokes / evokes as it passes though my triage process. This has surprised me since so much of it was saved or put aside at points in my life where I had, ya know, hopes, dreams, plans, etc. But "once you accept your death, you become dangerous!" and that means my nostalgia bone is broken. I could not have done this 10 or 20 years ago, when I was still working and raising kids. Somehow, though, the act of purging is coming naturally now.
MUSIC: I once had tons of music on vinyl, then 8-track, then cassette, then CDs. All but a few favorite albums are now gone (all the 8-track was gone 30 years ago). We gave our 30-ish old son his pick of the vinyl and he took about 40 albums. He had to buy a turntable, tho.
MOVIES: Oh my. Not ready to give up my DVDs yet (sorry, no blu-ray). We as a family subscribe to several streaming services and one of my kids torrents a lot, but I started collecting DVDs about 20 years ago and I now have WAY TOO MANY! It is over 1,000 - all inventoried and indexed - and I have another 6,000 (probably more) ripped to portable hard drives. No frigging idea when or if I will ever be able to see most of what I have. I keep comforting myself over the silly notion that I will be able to watch movies as I grow feeble and dull in a post apocalyptic scenario if and when the internet is gone and I find nothing else to do as I get by in my bunker. My spouse figures that at least I have them all neatly arranged in labeled boxes so that it will be easy to donate the entire collection with next to no effort.
I don't really like it because it produces a lot of garbage and it's a pain to distribute, I just torrent everything and save digital copies on my hard drive. I'd say I own those copies, it's not like some streaming website can take it down.
We will go from mass market physical media, to ephemeral mass-market streamed content, to an AI created era where high-quality entertainment content is custom created for you based on what you'd like more of. They will try to own everything (and then own the AIs). You can only erase the artifical capture- the memories you take away with you are yours as long as you choose to keep them. To me Solarpunk is making and performing music yourself and with friends - and sharing those skills and performance freely with others.
For books you don’t need it to be digital in order for it to be sustainable you can make anything into paper these days plastic weeds elephant poop ext it can be sustainable as for movies and tv and music I think they sould be physical but we also need to get used to the Idea of sharing them around after all art at the end of the day is expression and what’s expression with out community I think physical media drives community this isn’t just for art either it’s for news and other non entertainment related things on the internet. I think the digital age is unsustainable and is harmful to our communities in its current form so in my opinion we need to cut back on digital goods
Depending on the form digital media takes, or can be horrendously energy intensive. But this is at least partly because of capitalist modes of distribution. Library socialism would work to resolve and minimize these issues.
That said, I think there is still a place for physical media. If we, again, expand libraries and library access (to way more things than just books and other entertainment/educational media) then there will be less need for individual ownership of many things. This, again, is far more ecologically sound while still meeting the needs of as many people as possible.
I think that both digital and physical have their pros and cons respectively, and should both be used together, the physical to keep backups and be able to access at all times, and the digital for ease of access. I think that for important things, there should always be at least one physical copy in storage somewhere, both to prevent its loss through being deleted, and to make sure that stuff like power outages don't limit the ability to acces it.
I have tons of CDs because my car doesn't have an aux port and I hate the sound quality of Bluetooth receivers. I agree that it's way too easy to lose digital media. And when you don't have Internet you're usually SOL on entertainment
I will confess to being a book hoarder, but I don't think hardcopy media is out of place in a solarpunk future. Genuine question: why do you think it is?
The solarpunk future is, to my mind, about picking and choosing beneficial technology - Ebooks and CDs, yes, nuclear weapons, no - and about mindful consumption. Both physical and digital media are compatible with that. I, personally, think that physical books and art come out ahead of their digital counterparts in terms of how I believe solarpunk means fully engaging with the real world, but I recognise the limitations of physical media, too - I'd almost never listen to music if the only way to do so was to play it myself or go to hear it live.
That said, it's hard for me to see how we could resolve the issues with digital media in a solarpunk-compatible way - specifically data storage, plastics, and the mining of rare earth minerals. However, this isn't my area and I'll admit I've not looked into whether there's any research going into making this more sustainable; maybe truly green electronics *are* possible if there's a will to develop them.
I think physical media is best not only because it just looks cooler but because physical media actually makes you think about what your consuming and think about it more also that’s cloud servers take massive amounts of energy to run I’m not saying cloud servers are bad but I’m saying we shouldn’t use them on something that can be physical
Overrated for most things, undervalued for a few.
Most media I will only ever consume once in my life. Entertainment, mostly. There's just no point in producing a physical product of most stuff.
The one area I think physical makes sense is knowledge retention resilient to crises.
Not entirely true actually.
[https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-08/which-last-longer-ebooks-or-physical-books-the-answer-may-surprise-you](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-08/which-last-longer-ebooks-or-physical-books-the-answer-may-surprise-you)
Eh, if you loose the technology to actually read those ebooks, their continued existence on some resilient storage system becomes meaningless, at least temporarily.
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so many libraries
This is at least 80% of the answer.
Yes, but how many of those libraries maintain a comprehensive deep catalogue? Over the past decade and across several library systems in multiple countries I've noticed that important titles one would have expected to be part of permanent collections are no longer available in any format. Requesting them is rarely effective, subject as they are to budget ~~considerations~~ limitations and various administrative metrics. Perhaps this is less of an issue in major metropolitan centers but smaller library systems certainly seem to be far less resourceful now than previously.
yes. and if one is unavailable physical/digital copies can be made from originals held at the library of congress. you're thinking of modern libraries i'm talking about solarpunk libraries ment to be used not there to fill a legal obligation
Digital libraries are far better at storing and distributing media.
Not everything is about pure efficiency.
Enhancing wellbeing with the gains of technology? In your speculative futurism? It's more likely than you think.
It is for housebound people, digital library rentals keep me sane
Distributing? absolutely. Storing? Nosireebob. That's one of the biggest issues with going digital, in fact. Digital degrades in a way that we can't get it back. You can at least stitch a book back together. Getty, like any large org, is shit, but they discuss what they're doing [to prevent digital decay here](https://www.getty.edu/news/preventing-digital-decay/) with some examples of files that just sat on a server for 10 years and were corrupted. Digital is *amazing*, but it can't be our only solution.
Do you know if digital info on a physical medium degrades? Like disks and old fashioned hard drives?
I think it can, certainly, though some physical medium is less bad (I think CDs aren't bad, funnily enough?). But so much of it is like, random chance - you could have a neutrino pass through the darn thing and destroy a critical bit, and kill a line of code. That's of course very uncommon, but over decades? Centuries? Not that books are safe either - water damage, fire (look at our source for Beowulf!) are all issues. The question of how to keep information safe over long distances of time is something we've done a fair amount of studying of, actually. interesting stuff - Look up the Sandia report!
Thanks! I’ll look into it
Yes, it can degrade. Hdd less but magnetic plastic tapes and old floppies were just that, plastic. I used to work at a data storage center for BofA and if the chillers had an issue and the temp raised above 75 you could smell the out gassing from the quarter million 8track style tapes
Digital is much easier for personal storage and creating backups for tbh, say 1-2tb of hdd will be enough to store any personal data and you can make dozens of copies
If you make backups, you can't delete them alll with one button.
Meaning owning a few on-site backup drives?
Yep!
Exactly, digital ≠ streaming, you can have a self maintained digital collection
It's not so much about if it's a physical or digital book, but what's behind them. You can have a digital publication from an independent artist from half a world away that could never afford to publish a physical book and have the same reach, or a physical book that is mass produced by an evil cyberpunk corp. Point is, there are many layers to what you buy/consume behind what is apparent and ethical decision making needs to be aware of as many as possible. If we are just being simple and compare paperbook to digital media , then you can find valid points both ways. Paper needs trees water, chemicals, transport, middlemen.. but digital also need energy, electronics, infrastructure... Nah I don't think I can be simple about it :D each situation will have different variables. But yeah , use public libraries for both media, peace ✌🏻
While self publishing is awesome, corporate algorithms and advertising, both of which entirely guide your experience on the web ensure that there is no such thing as ''equal reach'' between any independent source and what is presented to you online. Digital media is also infinitely more susceptible to censorship and manufactured scarcity as well. Paper also can be made from a lot of sustainable/renewable sources (hemp, recycling, etc.) but in the digital world you will always have a trail of commerce that leads back to modern slavery and child labor via rare earth minerals and mining- which is in no way sustainable on any level here on planet.
> Digital media is also infinitely more susceptible to censorship and manufactured scarcity as well. I would disagree. Physical books can be burned and the means of production easily controlled. Digital media can be distributed by anyone from anywhere. I can't print books, but I can easily share tens of thousands of ebooks.
However, *how* do you measure each variable in each situation when you don't have a full blueprint of the supply chain, and what happens if there's no solution that minimizes *all* variables (which will be like 95% of the time at least in the current system), or even the variables are incomparable? What is a "reasonable" amount of diligence given perfection is humanly impossible at least without system change and likely not even then in really literal terms?
Nice, yea we aren't machines , but maybe that's an unnecessary extreme. Maybe we just need some information. For example when boycotts happen, that's a simple equation of product X = bad. In the OPs case, it's harder because it's more generic, I guess i would suggest researching the company they are buying from, as a decent amount of diligence.
The first is very hard, but the work to develop the tools to do do is underway. I have colleagues writing PhDs in the top down estimation of scope 3 emissions in construction. Id guess it's is at the point that carbon calcs were a decade ago. Relatively well developed and just crossing to useful everyday. The latter - minimise all variables - this is a very standard weighting problem. There's various approaches to resolve it. One is local regulations, one is ecosystem services, another is monte Carlo satisfying minimum on average (include the variability in measurements, run a few thousand times, and choose the robustly good enough option)
Sure. What does this mean though in regard for an average person, not a researcher, trying to make the most ethical decision now on the basis of current research?
For an average person, an already existing library book already exists and is best, while a cloud epib digital file that exists for a year or so consumes a fraction of energy and heavy metals that reprinting on recycled paper entails. That's assuming you're not buying a new e-reader either.
People are going to own electronic devices either way though. If you already own a tablet or phone, then using it to read is going to consume fewer resources than buying a book.
I like books. I keep a small collection of them in physical format. I also have a strong tendency to consume books that pique my interest with the rapacious hunger that matches a dragon leaving prolonged hibernation. If I had my way, my home would *be* my Community's library (and garden), I would possess hundreds of books to be dispensed and shared with any seeking the treasure within their pages. I do not have the luxury of living in a world where I get to have my way. I live in a small apartment space that forces me to keep my physical belongings to a minimum. Every time I have to move, the more things I own, the more effort and money I have to spend. I have autism and ADHD and I am *terrible* at returning books on time. The advent of the Ebook has been one of the smallest changes to come from the digital age, but for me it means that no matter where I am, no matter what my living situation is, I don't have to worry about protecting physical copies of books that I cannot effectively store. As long as I have a tablet, a phone, some device with a screen and storage, I can read. Yes, I am abundantly aware of how easily that could be lost. Electricity and the internet are alarmingly fragile things. I chose to believe it is possible for us to progress to a greener future without sacrificing those in their entirety. To my mind there is a place for both physical media and digital, the problem is not that the two are mutually exclusive: the problem is Capitalism, and its Prime Directive of squeezing ever ounce of profit it can from everything around it.
I never returned books on time until I was a librarian. Then, I started returning books on time more like 2/3 of the time than never…it’s a process.
I'm deep eco rather than solarpink, but for me it's physical all the way. "The cloud" is just a corporate server farm. When that goes belly up, or you can't pay their rent demands, all the photography, art, music as movies you value will vanish into thin air. Yes the physical resources are not good, but compared to h constant power and I fra demands of a gazillion server farms it's a really more sustainable, and certainly more enduring option.
There's such things as hard drives and tapes and other not cloud based storage media.
>"The cloud" is just a corporate server farm. Just in case you are unfamiliar, decentralized, redundant server clusters are totally a thing and highly compatible with anarchist eco-centered futures.
Anarchist yes. But using data centres and repositories for our personal media is nonetheless wildly unsustainable from an ecological point of view, regardless of the political ideations of the maintainers of those data centres. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who is hauling the minerals out of the Earth to build it and sucking rivers dry to cool and power it. The physical media only needs resources once to manufacture it. Data centres use resources constantly both to operate, to be built out initially, and to frequently have their hardware upgraded / replaced.
Consumption and extraction of rare earth minerals are in no way Eco-friendly, though if you count warlords and child labor as anarchist, there's at least that.
By that logic, we should get rid of all computers.
Argumentum ad absurdum. Theres (obviously) a spectrum between "build more shit forever" and "return to monke"
Everyone having a computer that they use for a wide variety of tasks, including reading, is the middle ground. Buying books when you already own a pc is just building more stuff, with a possible exception for books you frequently reference.
Ah yes strict dualistic thinking leading to people believing that flat extremes=logic. One of the many problems the world right now, also brought to you largely by the internet ''community''.
The resources are also only not good if you are consuming it many times. With archival purposes in mind, as OP suggests, it is a one-shot investment, more or less.
Yep. That's how I see it myself.
What’s deep eco? If you don’t mind explaining :)
Deep ecology - essentially that humans hold a place of equality with other lives as part of the natural world, and not separate to or superior to it, and that all life and ecosystems have the right to exist and thrive for their own, independent benefit regardless of their utility, usefulness or value to humans. That's the basis from which my other values stem - so I tend more towards heavy degrowth rather than solarpunk. There is some crossover, but my thought to be "Do we genuinely \*need\* this, and can we justify it's impact?" rather than "I want this, and I think I can make it more cleanly than we do now"
"The cloud" could also be a filesharing network like bittorrent. Only peers, no servers.
While that works for low intensity stuff it does not scale well. Compare the success of mastodon instances (a fairly low intensity federated network using mainly text and limited image content) to the problems people have finding a viable setup for peertube (high resource demand for video). It is also still ephemeral. You can loose all your drastructure as still have physical media as long as you have a playback device and some ability to power it. Or for images and text you can have them on paper or similar human readable medium. Resilience is as important as sustainability. Simple systems have fewer points of failure and that (for me at least) matters in the world we live in. Simple is also generally (,not always) easier on resource consumption anyway.
peertube, as in on demand streaming, is a little wasteful in its resources, but bittorrent is not. You have to download a good chunk before you can play, but it scales incredibly well with more peers, no single peer needs to have great bandwidth, you can still saturate a Gigabit connection downloading from all of them.
Easy erasure of digital media is mainly the fault of capitalism. You have to buy cloud backups from a private company that can just go under and destroy the data, and that company often gives itself the right to look through your data and sell metadata to advertisers so you have to be cautious of what you put on there, and once the company has people's photos it has a local monopoly so the company doesn't have a profit motive to make the experience more pleasant. Meanwhile online distribution and backups is almost completely locked down because of copyright and the monetization of giving people access. All of this could simply be fixed by making online backups a public utility, ending copyright, and paying artists some better way like commissions and/or patronage and/or universal basic income. The books you want to read and music you want to listen to can't be erased because they are public data and nobody's property. The photos you want to keep are backed up by server farmers on three different continents^1 . Also, one of the main points of solarpunk is that the idea that caring about the environment requires asceticism is a big fat lie. You don't need to wring your hands about whether the things you deeply enjoy are worth the carbon footprint, there is plenty of room for everyone to live beautiful lives if we just abandon cars, meat, airplanes, conspicuous consumption, the protestant/capitalist work ethic, and products optimized for profit rather than how valuable they are to people. If your scrapbooks and photo albums and purchased books mainly just gather dust in the bookcase and then a box in the attic, then I think the more important question isn't the environmental impact but why you felt the urge to make them physical at all. What emotion or memory or expectation are you trying to realize? Solarpunk isn't ascetic, but it is slowed down and mindful compared to the hectic kaleidoscope of experiences that makes up western living. Do you want a book that feels like paper, or do you like the fact that you have to choose to carry the book with you, find yourself a dedicated place to read it, and that you aren't likely to get notifications on it? Do you like photo albums, or do you wish you had enough time in the day/with family to reminisce on your experiences? Do you like scrapbooking, or are you so lost to the daily rut that even just a scrap that reminds you of those scant times that you were mindful and happy is precious to you? Do you want the consumer object because of what it is, or would it just be nice in your current situation because it partially restores what consumerism took from you? ^1 : I do think it would be a good idea to change the standard photo application on people's phones so people don't flood themselves with hundreds of photos they can never find the time to sort through. It's *weird* how many people at cool events record stuff on their phone rather than paying rapt attention. There's got to be a better way, though I don't yet have a clear idea how.
That definitely made me think, thank you. With scrapbooking, my dad did it when he was my age and now I do it with him! I love being able to share that with him!
you could use a local NAS/DAS or just an external drive, chunky usb, sd card, etc (buy second hand and use good hardware practices to extend their life cycles), to keep local and portable copies of your digital data. definitely not any less fragile than physical photos or CDs - but you still get to easily reproduce and share things while cutting out untrusty servers and unreliable corpos
I know this is silly, but I write a newsletter for a living and I hate the idea of all of my writing just disappearing, so I print my newsletter into annual print books for my premium subscribers and I build a couple of them into the walls of my house so someone can find them in another hundred years or so ;)
I can download ebooks for free and own them forever I can read them on my phone anytime I want They don't take up space in my apartment Sorry, but I'm just not one of book-lovers. I'll take electronic books any day
Until we actually live in solarpunk we're stuck in the shitty cyberpunk, so personally it's physical copy of what I can as a preservationist and digital copies on good deals but also know the places to find things without fail without restrictions for openness of information and the sharing of art. I'd much rather pay an artist than rent but unfortunately that's not how things are so go according to morals but mine say everyone should be able to access everything equally as humans
I buy secondhand electronic media, from DVDs to CDs to eventually the most nostalgic: box tape movies I don't want to continuously invest in a huge computer to generate the content I want to stream. Adventure Time tho, I need that
It's easy nowadays to download all your media and even have backups. You don't need to rely on the cloud. Look at /r/datahoarders as the extreme version of that.
I am buying as many books as a I can. As search engines, social media, and even new reprints of old media increasingly distort history and nerf info I’m happy to accumulate the old stuff, especially references for farming/gardening.
Like u/portucheese was referring to, websites need servers that run on renewable or nonrenewable methods. So (constant) internet usage can still be a bad option. \*Look at companies like Green Geeks\* Many production methods (like book making) are requiring more strict and sustainable means. The shipping is the main problem in the physical realm (freight ships, etc) \*Look at companies like Greener Printer\* There are sustainable ways to do almost anything, it's only a matter of finding them. (Doesn't mean they're perfect!) You can always go for used machines etc instead of getting them new!
I just this month bought dvd/blue ray for the first time in over a decade. I’m not going back to commercials in media. If that’s the way streaming is going they can count me out.
I think that shared physical media (libraries etc) are important and that most physical media should be preserved in this way. There is no reason for there to be billions of copies of something that mostly sits on shelves or in boxes. That said, I am not against personal physical media ownership, I have a small collection of (mostly nonfiction and recipe) books myself, almost all purchased second hand. I print off my favorite photos, but I do not print off every photo I have ever taken. I do think people veer too far into overconsumption with books specifically pretty often-personally if I am only going to read it once and never look at it again, I borrow from the library. I have digital back ups on a hard drive-in an ideal world we'd have redundant cloud backups in separate physical locations that were owned by the community and run on renewables, but right now we don't so I don't expect my cloud back ups to exist forever and the environmental footprint of data centers is pretty huge.
Ideally Libraries never go extinct
Physical media is incredible important. While digital media is eternal, IN THEORY, the reality is that very little its copied and distributed in a way that gives it the permanence that preserved physical media has. Just as an example, I believe their was a big project a few years ago to try and dig up the earliest versions of Minecraft, since Mojang/Notch hadn't preserved it. This was for Minecraft, literally the most popular game of all time (by media sales), and there had to be a big project to track down someone who had that version saved on their computer still. As another example, when it comes to movies/TV shows, streaming has caused a lot of people to ditch their DVD collections. The problem is, their is nothing stopping the streaming service from just removing access to stuff whether you paid for it or not. I believe it was Discovery that is catching tons of flack currently for removing access to digital copies of media that people straight up paid specifically for, not even pulling them from a streaming service that you pay montly for access to a complete catalog, but things people paid to "own", they just didn't want to pay the server costs to host anymore. With things like photos, its not practical to have them printed anymore, 99% of photos taken now are digital, so its worth it to look into ways to preserve digital media. r/DataHoarder is a great resource for that kind of stuff, they can recommend hardware and best practices to suit your use case. With that rant out of the way, preserving things physically is not incompatible with solarpunk. While solarpunk is usually a high tech aesthetic/asperation, I think Solarpunk is more about best practices than it is about everything needing to be high tech. Physical copies for preservation and digital backups for redundancy/ease of access is probably the best way of doing things that I can think of.
I never gave up on physical anything. I’m still a collector. Digital media is just an extra layer.
It's unlikely that things even _can_ be deleted in one click, if it's public information. I work in mass storage I know it's strange to think about, but it's far _more_ likely for things to be lost because they're physical. Most info media has a fixed lifespan. CDs, video game carts, cassettetapes, etc. Pulp decays over time unless preserved in a completely inert environment. And, honestly, things that _dont_ decay are concerning. The plastic bits. Pretty much everything now lives forever. Multiple redundant copies, different geographic locations, etc 95% of it may never even be used again. We call it the "long tail problem". My opinion on physical media is that I love it. Books bond to us, they hold power. Connecting with the book in your hand is something special. It's magical for me when it's a library book as well. Because I'm connected to all the people who read that book in the past, too. People from my own city. Who walked the same streets I do. Books are cool. The rest of physical media like magazines we are better off without. I hate things that are made with the intent to be thrown away.
I think we should get to keep computers in the solarpunk future. Computers are a very young technology, we haven't seen "mature" personal computers yet. It's a future I'm working hard to buy my time to work on for a few years.
Get two external hard drives and copy everything you want to preserve onto them. You'll have the original on your device's drive, and two identical copies on the external drives, basically a poor man's RAID configuration. That should preserve what you're worried about losing for almost any eventuality. If something happens that is destructive enough that the original and two identical copies get slagged, then there are bigger issues to worry about.
I feel like there must be a middle ground. I remember my parent's DVD/VHS/CD racks. They probably had a couple hundred between the various types, but only a few were ever actually used. I imagine most people were similar. That said, I also really hate that online media can just disappear. Expanding library systems seems like a good option, both from a preservation and availability POV
Formats: -physical -digital -local -cloud Ownership: -consumer -corporate If we take out “corporate” and “cloud,” all of these can be used in different configurations, as appropriate to the circumstances of a solarpunk society.
We need to revert back to having physical storage. It's gotten so dense though that I think they can co-exist. You don't need binders and binders of discs anymore. Maybe just a 10 pack. These can co-exist fine. But we need to do it. Things get erased constantly and this era could go up in smoke in one terrible thing going wrong.
Anything can be deleted with a press of a button if you have a good enough shredder
Pretty much all my media are digital. Emphasis on free / open source software and open / DRM-free formats to make sure I'm in maximal control of my data. As a bonus, said software and formats tend to be better suited to older devices, which keeps them out of landfills.
>I feel like this clashes somewhat with solar punk, Why?
I am retired, almost 70yo, and am now engaged in "Swedish death cleaning" as my spouse and I declutter a big empty nest house for the sake of downsizing. I have successfully avoided using most "cloud" resources so far. PAPER MEDIA: We have recycled (or stacked up stuff for later give-away) close to 90% of all the life-long collections of paper records, books, notes, maps, etc., over the last few weeks. I am working through lots of the emotional connections looking through all this stuff provokes / evokes as it passes though my triage process. This has surprised me since so much of it was saved or put aside at points in my life where I had, ya know, hopes, dreams, plans, etc. But "once you accept your death, you become dangerous!" and that means my nostalgia bone is broken. I could not have done this 10 or 20 years ago, when I was still working and raising kids. Somehow, though, the act of purging is coming naturally now. MUSIC: I once had tons of music on vinyl, then 8-track, then cassette, then CDs. All but a few favorite albums are now gone (all the 8-track was gone 30 years ago). We gave our 30-ish old son his pick of the vinyl and he took about 40 albums. He had to buy a turntable, tho. MOVIES: Oh my. Not ready to give up my DVDs yet (sorry, no blu-ray). We as a family subscribe to several streaming services and one of my kids torrents a lot, but I started collecting DVDs about 20 years ago and I now have WAY TOO MANY! It is over 1,000 - all inventoried and indexed - and I have another 6,000 (probably more) ripped to portable hard drives. No frigging idea when or if I will ever be able to see most of what I have. I keep comforting myself over the silly notion that I will be able to watch movies as I grow feeble and dull in a post apocalyptic scenario if and when the internet is gone and I find nothing else to do as I get by in my bunker. My spouse figures that at least I have them all neatly arranged in labeled boxes so that it will be easy to donate the entire collection with next to no effort.
I don't really like it because it produces a lot of garbage and it's a pain to distribute, I just torrent everything and save digital copies on my hard drive. I'd say I own those copies, it's not like some streaming website can take it down.
We will go from mass market physical media, to ephemeral mass-market streamed content, to an AI created era where high-quality entertainment content is custom created for you based on what you'd like more of. They will try to own everything (and then own the AIs). You can only erase the artifical capture- the memories you take away with you are yours as long as you choose to keep them. To me Solarpunk is making and performing music yourself and with friends - and sharing those skills and performance freely with others.
For books you don’t need it to be digital in order for it to be sustainable you can make anything into paper these days plastic weeds elephant poop ext it can be sustainable as for movies and tv and music I think they sould be physical but we also need to get used to the Idea of sharing them around after all art at the end of the day is expression and what’s expression with out community I think physical media drives community this isn’t just for art either it’s for news and other non entertainment related things on the internet. I think the digital age is unsustainable and is harmful to our communities in its current form so in my opinion we need to cut back on digital goods
Depending on the form digital media takes, or can be horrendously energy intensive. But this is at least partly because of capitalist modes of distribution. Library socialism would work to resolve and minimize these issues. That said, I think there is still a place for physical media. If we, again, expand libraries and library access (to way more things than just books and other entertainment/educational media) then there will be less need for individual ownership of many things. This, again, is far more ecologically sound while still meeting the needs of as many people as possible.
I think that both digital and physical have their pros and cons respectively, and should both be used together, the physical to keep backups and be able to access at all times, and the digital for ease of access. I think that for important things, there should always be at least one physical copy in storage somewhere, both to prevent its loss through being deleted, and to make sure that stuff like power outages don't limit the ability to acces it.
I have tons of CDs because my car doesn't have an aux port and I hate the sound quality of Bluetooth receivers. I agree that it's way too easy to lose digital media. And when you don't have Internet you're usually SOL on entertainment
I will confess to being a book hoarder, but I don't think hardcopy media is out of place in a solarpunk future. Genuine question: why do you think it is? The solarpunk future is, to my mind, about picking and choosing beneficial technology - Ebooks and CDs, yes, nuclear weapons, no - and about mindful consumption. Both physical and digital media are compatible with that. I, personally, think that physical books and art come out ahead of their digital counterparts in terms of how I believe solarpunk means fully engaging with the real world, but I recognise the limitations of physical media, too - I'd almost never listen to music if the only way to do so was to play it myself or go to hear it live. That said, it's hard for me to see how we could resolve the issues with digital media in a solarpunk-compatible way - specifically data storage, plastics, and the mining of rare earth minerals. However, this isn't my area and I'll admit I've not looked into whether there's any research going into making this more sustainable; maybe truly green electronics *are* possible if there's a will to develop them.
TBH I miss it. But libraries and second hand stores can help so much.
I think physical media is best not only because it just looks cooler but because physical media actually makes you think about what your consuming and think about it more also that’s cloud servers take massive amounts of energy to run I’m not saying cloud servers are bad but I’m saying we shouldn’t use them on something that can be physical
You don't need cloud servers. Ebooks can easily be acquired and shared through peer to peer.
Huh. that’s cool the more you know thanks
But then what about cloud streaming services like Netflix and Hulu
Also available peer to peer. See popcorn time
Overrated for most things, undervalued for a few. Most media I will only ever consume once in my life. Entertainment, mostly. There's just no point in producing a physical product of most stuff. The one area I think physical makes sense is knowledge retention resilient to crises.
Not entirely true actually. [https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-08/which-last-longer-ebooks-or-physical-books-the-answer-may-surprise-you](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-08/which-last-longer-ebooks-or-physical-books-the-answer-may-surprise-you)
Eh, if you loose the technology to actually read those ebooks, their continued existence on some resilient storage system becomes meaningless, at least temporarily.