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Local Physical Media Producers Defy the Algorithmic Overlords
(www.thestranger.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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Not to be a nitpicker but... Tapes and tape decks are technology? Just like... 50 year old tech? In the scheme of the history of human technology that's a blip. Not using technology would be like sitting in the grass staring at the clouds. Written language is technology, books are technology, and so on. They're just early, simple human tech but they are still tech.
I think it sounds more correct like:
There's nothing wrong with the digital media or streaming technology on its own. It might be even more energy-efficient than some older technologies.
What's wrong is that now the company ~~X~~ Y (sheesh, you can't even use a random alphabet letter anymore without pointing right at one of them!) owns your whole music library, decides what to remove from there and what make you add there, and just by the way also casually sells your personal data and your habits to some other companies, that also decide for you what you should read/watch/listen to/buy.
I completely hear you (and think this “spectrum of technology” perspective should be much more of a thing) … but I feel like there are relatively discrete categories at play here, different types of technology and the tension between what choices we have between them and why. Maybe not just tech and anti-tech.
I'm not so sure. The non-local digital internet is amazing when it allows us to connect to people from across the world to share ideas and stories and to empathize with one another. I am grateful for its existence. I cannot believe that social media is doomed to be structurally bad for people when people can benefit from being social irl, and places like VRChat go a long way towards proving that. Meanwhile local physical media can be tools of hierarchy, such as the 15th century Catholic bible.
I think the locality and physicality of media described here are both forms of protection, a way to take their joy outside of the reach of capitalism which seeks to weaponize it against them. If capitalism could control our physical media more than our digital media then I'm certain hacker culture would be hailed as our one true way to defy the meatspace overlords (like Unimatrix Zero from Star Trek: Voyager).
So in the end, I think the discrete boundary between categories you're looking for boils down to the boring answer "technologies that enable hierarchy" vs "technologies that dismantle hierarchy".
The selfhosting revolution is probably more impactful than people farting around with cassettes
Imo the mp3 era was the perfect balance of energy efficiency and ownership
We can still.do.everything we did back then, and more. People just use corpocrap. A modern smartphone is an excellent mp3 player. So much storage, FLAC if you want, etc. And that's ignoring streaming from your desktop at home with tailscale and navidrome