Freedom Over Convenience
I was never cool. Not in kindergarten, not in school, not in working life. While everyone around me listened to the latest songs by American hip-hop artists, wore the trendiest Nike Air Max, and took drugs I had never even heard of, I nerded around in my little cosmos, listened to the Chrono Trigger soundtrack on my iPod that was threatening to fall apart, wore Superstars for 15 years straight, and already felt pretty badass if I took a puff from a joint once in a while.
Whenever I wanted to get my hands on music, series, or movies, I was a big fan of torrents. Every month there was an indie rock playlist via download link featuring the most bizarre alternative tracks. I subscribed to anime series via RSS, and movies usually came to me on some shared hard drive on a university server. Life was beautiful. And simple.
When Spotify started getting big, I completely ignored it. I didn’t care. Why should I pay money to rent music that doesn’t even belong to me and that I would never listen to 99 percent of in my life anyway? Spotify was a small, insignificant niche trend that people mocked in forums and that I dismissed with a simple Nope.
While I happily browsed The Pirate Bay for the newest One Piece episodes and celebrated Lykke Li, Bat for Lashes, and Santigold on illegal playlists, the technological climate was changing. More and more of my friends and acquaintances in Berlin suddenly had the dark green Spotify logo on their iPhones and laptops.
Look, I can listen to the new Kanye West album without buying it!
Wooooow…,
I thought. Welcome to my world from ten years ago!
My ignorance turned into mockery. At the time, I had no idea that this Spotify thing would one day lead to a personal crisis in my cozy little nerd world.
While the people around me slowly but surely joined the collective streaming party, I celebrated myself with my beloved MP3 collection, listened my way through albums and singles that some PR agencies sent me for free, and even started buying tracks from artists I really liked on Bandcamp.
My crisis began the day Apple suddenly introduced Apple Music. Before that, iTunes had been a gathering place for personal favorite albums, but now even the computer manufacturer of my choice was celebrating the trend toward streaming. Suddenly streaming was no longer just some parallel world out there—it was invading my personal cosmos.
I might not have been cool, but at least I had always been ahead of the curve technologically. While you were installing Windows XP, I already had my first Mac at home. While you were still jogging with a Discman, I was copying my first 128-kbps MP3s onto my iPod. And while you were drooling in front of NBC’s afternoon programming, I was downloading the latest HBO shows. I wasn’t cool, but I was better.
But thanks to Spotify, Netflix, and Apple Music, I suddenly had the feeling that I was no longer technologically up to date. Owning media was no longer contemporary. Piracy was no longer associated with geeky teenagers but with Polish money launderers. Streaming became the norm; everything else suddenly belonged to the past.
Little by little, more and more high-school dropouts gained access to the internet and continuously demolished it in a way that, in retrospect, I see as an attack on my digital personality. People who had no idea about technology—who used their €800 phones for duckface selfies and Candy Crush—had destroyed my world.
Now technology was no longer made for people who understood it, but for those who were already mentally overwhelmed by a 12-minute YouTube video without a hard cut.
Why can’t I touch the desktop screen?
Why can’t I oppose Facebook’s terms and conditions with a shared image full of spelling mistakes?
Why can’t I vote for the AfD without being considered a dim-witted idiot?
People gradually moved voluntarily into closed ecosystems because the open internet overwhelmed them. Who needs websites if you have Facebook? Who needs blogs if you have YouTube? Who needs MP3s if you have Spotify? Digital freedom is simply too exhausting for most people.
At the latest when Apple began marketing the iPad as a Mac replacement, when people considered Dropbox a real backup substitute, and when Netflix series advanced into universal pop-culture goods, I realized that my technological worldview was threatening to become obsolete. Like paper. Or SMS. Or the fax machine.
So I packed all my files onto an external hard drive, reinstalled my operating system, and tried to live a mobile, torrent-free life. I signed up for Spotify, Netflix, and Dropbox. I wanted to be just like the people celebrating Silicon Valley and swallowing everything it throws out into the world without criticism. How hard can it be?
I asked myself.
From now on I’ll only watch Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and whatever sad licensing leftovers remain on German Crunchyroll. After all, VPNs are for criminals and pedophiles. From now on I’ll only listen to Ed Sheeran, Post Malone, and Joe Rogan. Other people manage it too. And from now on torrents, MP3s, and Mega downloads are taboo. Adults who operate digitally don’t need such things.
The resolution lasted one week. Spotify drove me crazy because I couldn’t find half of my favorite artists and songs disappeared from playlists I had added to my library. Just like that. Without explanation. Some albums had only three playable songs. Most of the songs suggested to me were German rap nonsense and Starbucks background elevator music. Wow.
And when I did find a few songs that I convinced myself were modern and cool, I listened to them twice and then switched back to some nerdy radio station on YouTube. So those ten euros a month were already unnecessary. Yes, I have a pretty strange taste in music—and yes, that doesn’t exactly make life easier.
Most of my time on Netflix was spent lethargically clicking through menus for half an hour because I couldn’t decide whether to watch Mean Girls for the twentieth time or maybe Men in Black. Eventually I had to tell myself that I wasn’t allowed to download Made in Abyss, even though half of Reddit was raving about it.
My new digital self was censored, localized, and useless. It wasn’t just difficult to squeeze myself into these modern cages that were supposed to make life so easy—it was practically impossible. I simply couldn’t flip that mental switch that was supposed to turn me into a new person.
It’s not really about the money. Or about having to subscribe to ten different services at ten euros a month just to simulate even a fraction of the internet’s available bandwidth of consumable content. It’s about the fact that I find it difficult to follow this path of creative restriction.
Maybe it’s easier if you’re born directly into the world of Netflix, Spotify & Co. Or if you simply have a more ordinary taste in music and films and don’t enjoy looking beyond the cultural horizon anyway. I can hardly expect Ed Sheeran fans to protest when they can’t immediately listen to the newest Suran song.
I wanted to be cool and modern and technologically at the forefront. But if being cool and modern and technologically at the forefront means turning away from the infinite expanses of the internet and only consuming the pre-selected bites served to me, then I probably belong to the past now. And I’m not proud of it. Quite the opposite.
It scares me. Because officially that means I now belong to those who can no longer adapt to the future. The ones who demonize Snapchat, hate YouTubers, and think touchscreens are stupid. The ones who want to preserve the status quo as long as possible and react to every innovation by first mocking it, then condemning it, and eventually fighting it.
Streaming would actually be a fantastic invention—if a few gatekeepers like Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon didn’t control what comes out on the other end. The more money we pour into these few corporations, the more dependent we become on them and their corporate manifestos. The internet began as a network of open ideas. We should not allow ourselves to end up in a past disguised as the future.
Soon there will probably be a rift running through society. The majority who feel comfortable in walled gardens and have no problem with pre-chewed, localized, and censored content—and the renegade groups gathering on the dark edges of the brightly lit Spotify, Netflix, and Apple Music theme parks, celebrating the last remnants of a free internet in their tattered clothes. You just have to decide which side you will belong to…