Nothing Is Forever

"No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it." - Philip K. Dick

I've found over the years I've been doing this that it's generally not a great idea to turn a knee-jerk reaction to a post I've read somewhere else into an immediate reply here but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm guessing it won't be a long post, either, because I don't really have a lot to say. Just more than seems reasonable to stuff into a comment on someone else's blog.

That all makes it sound like I'm going to lay into another blogger for saying something I didn't like but I'm about to do the exact opposite. I'm going to violently agree with them instead. Also, I have a feeling I've ranted about this before. Oh well. No-one's going to remember if I have...

This morning, Tobold posted about an article in PC Gamer that one of his readers had tipped him to, a piece in which Tyler Wilde has some fun with the revelation that you can see exactly how much money you've given Valve by way of your Steam account since you set it up. If you want to go check yours you'll find it at Help > Steam support > My account > Data related to your Steam account > External funds used.  

I immediately checked mine and found I'd spent $414.43 over the thirteen years I've had a Steam account, which comes to a little less than $32 a year. Seems positively frugal.

The article itself is a perfectly serviceable fluff piece that for some reason manages to raise Tobold's hackles, apparently because the author spun it up out of a reddit thread. Tobold seems to think that breaches some notional standards of video game journalism, which seems like a bit of an over-reaction to me. It's not even as if Tyler tried to pass any of it off as his own work - the attribution is right there in the piece, complete with hyper-links, which seems like exemplary journalistic professionalism to me.

But I digress. I didn't come here to engage in a critique of either Tobold's post or the article that inspired it, nor to make ponderous comparisons between the onus of responsibility placed on professional journalists vis a vis the license allowed to bloggers. I'm more interested in Tobold's substantive point, as outlined in the title of his post, namely "You Can't Take It With You".

"You Can't Take It With You."

Here's what I don't get about all the endless complaints that we no longer own the media we think we've bought and which we most certainly have paid for: in what previous timeline did we ever own anything in perpetuity? We own things for precisely as long as we can hang on to them and keep them safe and that's just how it's always been. 

I'm not specifically talking about inheritance although that's a point that keeps coming up in these discussions. That's a special case. As Tobold points out, there is a significant difference between physical and digital "property" in that we cannot, at least in some jurisdictions and at the time of writing, legally pass on our "ownership" of such things to our heirs after we die. That's a situation that may change at some point and which will almost certainly keep changing. As with all legal protection, how it presents depends entirely on where and when we happen to be when we have recourse to call on it.

As far as I can see, the main difference between what happens to your physical and digital goods after you've gone is that your friends and relatives won't find it quite so easy to fight over the digital stuff, either in the courts or in person. They'll more effectively cease to exist along with you than the awkward physical items you'll unavoidably leave behind, which I suppose means that in one sense you will be able to take them with you. Into the void, that is.

And that may be just as well. When I was a child I watched my aunt and uncle literally drag a large sideboard into the garden to set it on fire, just so my other aunt and uncle couldn't get their hands on it after my grandparents died. The second uncle arrived just in time to see it go up in flames and he managed to rescue an unburnt  piece, which he kept on display in his house as mute evidence of the occasion ever afterwards. As far as I know it was still there nearly sixty years later, when he died at the age of 96.

I have quite a few more stories like that although none quite as dramatic. I'm certain there have already been many tussles over ownership of digital property, regardless of the legal rights involved. Equally, I'm sure plenty of people are "illegally" enjoying the digital possessions of their deceased loved ones, regardless of the niceties.

"When I was a child I watched my aunt and uncle literally drag a large sideboard into the garden to set it on fire"

Again, all of that is a side issue to my main point, which is that there seems to be some expectation placed on the ownership of digital assets that would never be applied to their physical counterparts. It doesn't just apply to ownership but to continual usage, as we've seen in the recent attempts to force developers to maintain servers for games they no longer produce or sell so that people, who bought them years ago can keep on playing. I've even seen demands that developers ensure no changes made to software in the future invalidate the ability of current users to carry on using it on whatever hardware they happen to have installed it on already.

This kind of wilful denial of natural obsolescence seems irrational. The underlying precept of all of these actions seems to be an expectation that digital content will persist in perpetuity in a way nothing else ever has. It's true some things last longer than others but everything turns to dust eventually.

There seems to be an assumption that a mere exchange of funds implies something eternal. Some people are shocked that if they "buy" a movie on a streaming service, for example, they may not be able to watch it, functionally, forever. I see only a quantitative, not a qualitative difference between something I paid to watch or listen to or play becoming unavailable at some point in the future due to the service that it relied on having been withdrawn and all those vinyl albums I bought and played in the nineteen-seventies and 'eighties having already become unlistenable due to wear and tear from them having been, in fact, played. (And being left all over the floor at parties and occasionally used as frisbees but we won't dwell on that...)

Physical media are subject to both entropy and accident in ways digital media, at least in the shorter term, are not. In that way, we're already more protected from loss than we used to be. You could drop your brand-new paperback in the bath before you get to the end of the first chapter and the bookshop who sold it to you isn't going to give you another for free. If your game file corrupts, though, you can just uninstall and reinstall.

Tobold makes a somewhat unhelpful comparison with consumables, specifically food and drink. I doubt anyone ever expected a single trip to the supermarket would keep them fed and watered for life. Digital entertainment media, though, is much more amenable to comparisons with analog versions of the same. 

"a single trip to the supermarket would keep them fed and watered for life"

An eBook has the same informational content as its printed counter-part (It doesn't, necessarily or exactly, but we'll pretend it does for the purposes of argument.) and it's true you can lend or give a physical book to someone else or sell it when you're done reading it. That does give some weight to the belief that the same options should apply to each and I'm sympathetic to that level of digital "ownership". If you paid for a download you probably should be able to shift the file around in much the same way you'd handle a printed copy.

If your digital product or service relies wholly for its active existence on hardware that you don't yourself own, however, like online games or content on streaming services, it seems to me self-evident that what you've bought is access to those services and specific content thereon, rather than the content itself. The companies running the services are now trying to make that difference plain, something they probably should have thought of long ago, instead of burying it in the terms and conditions they've always known almost no-one reads. It's hard to be sympathetic to their concerns but annoyance at their false marketing doesn't change the underlying reality: none of it was ever yours in the first place.

There's good advice being given these days to make sure you have a hard copy of any digital content you value. I follow it myself. If you want to be sure you can still watch Buffy next year, get the Box Set, don't trust it'll still be waiting for you on whichever streaming service has the rights right now. (It's on Disney+ in the UK as I type this, FYI.) 

Don't, however, make the mistake of thinking that box set gives you ownership of the seminal series forever, let alone that your great-great-great-grandchildren will be able to wonder at the astonishing mores and fashions of their ancestors through the lens of Sunnydale High handed down to them as a family heirloom by a distant ancestor.  It's not so much that by then there won't be a machine left that plays DVDs by then as that at some point one of your descendants will surely have left the box in the loft when they moved house and now no-one left alive will even remember it existed in the first place.

As Tobold rightly says, you can't take it with you. The real problem is that, most of the time, you can't even hang on to it while you've got it.   

Notes on the AI used in this post

What did we do for illustrations before AI, those of us who write long-form blog posts and can't draw? Stole something off the internet, mostly. Or used something from stock, either public or personal, that didn't really add anything but broke up the text.

Oh, and look! Here we are in this bold, new age of artificial intelligence (Did you hear that ChatGPT has passed the Turing Test? Does that mean it's officially sentient, now?) and what have we got? Some images from the internet, arguably stolen although not legally considered so, yet, that break up the text without adding anything much at all. 

Fun though, isn't it? As the crowds at the Colliseum used to say.

Anyway...

All images were produced using Flux Schnell (Because it's cheap and so am I.) on default settings except I asked for 4:3 on all, with Medium run time on the first two and Long on the last. The prompts were as the captions, all taken directly from the text, but with "Line art. 1950s magazine illustration" appended to get an aesthetic that pleases me.

The AI then added a huge wodge of extra detail to the prompt, something that fascinates me now it's been revealed. I assume it was always there in the background but I never knew about before. Here's the full text for all three illustrations, in the order they appear in the post. 

Absolutely none of this has anything to do with me, least of all the very precise and specific references to named artists, something I've studiously tried to avoid when prompting. Some of it makes sense, like the repeated references to Norman (Fucking) Rockwell but what Paul Klee has to do with 1950s magazine illustration beats me. As for the extraordinary amount of descriptive detail, where that's coming from I have absolutely no idea. How an LLM can extrapolate any of it from the brief phrases I've given it is a total mystery.

What's more, when you see these hugely detailed prompts and compare them with the results, it's clear the AI mostly ignores it's own instructions...

"Whimsical 1950s family scene, surrounded by chaotic clutter, reminiscent of Norman Rockwell's warm, inviting style, blended with the satirical wit of Paul Klee's vibrant, geometric shapes, and the expressive, emotive brushstrokes of Robert McCloskey's classic illustrations, with a vintage, distressed texture and muted color palette, evoking a sense of nostalgia and playful, madcap energy."

"A nostalgic scene of a woman and man, dressed in 1950s attire, physically dragging a large sideboard across a lush green lawn, surrounded by trees and vibrant garden flowers, towards a fiery inferno in the background, amidst a warm, sun-drenched atmosphere. The woman wears a floral dress and pearls, while the man sports a button-down shirt and trousers, both with worried yet determined expressions. The sideboard, adorned with intricate carvings, is slightly askew, as if being pulled in opposite directions. The illustration style is reminiscent of Norman Rockwell, with bold lines, warm colors, and a touch of humor, blended with the witty, satirical flair of Ronald Searle, and the elegant, curvilinear lines of Mary Blair. The line art should be expressive, with varying weights and textures, evoking a sense of energy and movement."

"A lonely, yet wholesome elderly couple, dressed in modest 1950s attire, standing in front of a quaint, vintage-style supermarket, with a few humble groceries in hand, surrounded by a nostalgic, sun-kissed atmosphere, reminiscent of classic Norman Rockwell illustrations, with bold lines, playful textures, and a warm color palette, evoking a sense of simplicity and contentment, in the style of iconic mid-century illustrators like Coby Whitmore and Albert Dorne, with a touch of nostalgic Americana."

I'm fascinated by how this works. I'm going to have to do a whole post about it one day.