Filed under: Meta-Everything
Time continues its inexorable forward arrow, and 2008 is coming to a close. As years go, I’m not a big fan–2007 was better for me–I spent a lot more of this year aimless and heel-dragging. But on a larger scale, hindsight is conferring upon it a certain grudging respect for its importance, its momentum.
I can best explain this in terms of before-and-after. In 2007 I was still losing sleep over darknets and whether they’d work. Amazon MP3 opened late in the year. This year, Hulu. And like that, the copyfight seemed to drop off the face of the planet. Somewhere in there Steve Jobs got a little huffy and tried to be a trend-setter and that turned out just hilariously.
Mind you. There’s a lot of heavy issues still hanging there for a rainy day, sure. But color me hypocritical, it’s hard to stay focused on them once you realize you can discover and test-drive shit guilt-free online and then buy it in 99 cent units, in the proprietary DRM-free format du jour, all the while enjoying selection and fidelity that can’t be beat by DC++.
The moral of the story, apart from that our sense of impending doom can be off by a bit, is that people possess the ingenuity to turn profit even in changing environments. And sometimes it means playing by your terms. The VCR was supposed to be the death of Hollywood. MP3 is not the death of anything, save perhaps the slow painstaking death of album-oriented cash-cow sales strategies. Incidentally, this was also the year for high-profile independent digital releases – Ghosts I-IV, The Slip, In Rainbows and Dr. Horrible.
Also, last year: some Obama person apparently was going to run for president? The awareness and excitement didn’t really kick in until somewhere around the start of the year, but then it got exciting in a hurry. And now I’m sitting in the office with my shiny new copy of Fight with Tools and I have this train ticket to D.C. marked Jan 17? Kinda nuts, innit.