Modern Life, Rented Culture.

I own three DVDs.

They live on the top shelf of a glass cabinet like stubborn, little relics, quietly existing in a house where everything else is streamed, synced, backed up or rented by the month. I could watch any of them right now without Wi-Fi, without passwords, without a sudden “this title is no longer available in your region” message. And it dawned on me that it feels….. oddly powerful. They are all films from my youth. Bugsy Malone, The Wizard Of Oz and The Princess Bride. Before being a shiny DVD they were on VHS tapes in my childhood home. I can still see the artwork on the dog-eared boxes. I remember where I was and more importantly how I felt the first time I watched each one. I will never part with these discs. In every clear out there has been in my house, they have survived.

See it occurred to me that if the internet fell out of the sky and went dark, I wouldn’t actually own any of the films or TV episodes that I love. Not really. No box sets. No favourites. No comfort rewatches. Just a very expensive television and a lot of empty apps asking me to reconnect. The same goes for music too. I own zero CDs by the way.

We don't own our culture anymore - we rent it.

Films, music, books, even memories are streamed to us on borrowed time, quietly removable with a license change or a forgotten password. Somewhere along the way, shelves became logins and carefully acquired collections became subscriptions. We now have the illusion of ownership, we pay but we don't possess.

There was a time when owning a film meant something solid. A plastic case. A cover you could hold and read. A disc you could scratch, lend, lose or treasure. Now our “collections” live behind icons on a screen-neat, invisible, and not actually ours at all. There is something that feels grounding about physical media. The weight of something you own in your hands. It is tangible, permanent. No one can take that item away from you unless you allow them to. You have the control and the choice and a part of that soothes me. Knowing that I will forever more (as long as I own a dvd player) be able to seek out that memory, that moment in time and the comfort associated with those moving images. This isn’t about the great movies or music of all time being lost for future generations, it is more visceral than that. This is about me preserving a part of myself. An ability to return again and again to a place that feels like home when the world around me potentially doesn’t.

As for music, I am not sure I if I will ever return to the stacked walls of CD racks. Stored by genre and then alphabeticalized. But I have started to curate a wonderful vinyl collection. Each record either from a gig we have been to, an album from my life that has stuck with me, the greats I insist my boys hear as they find their own musical wave length or new music that I think will stand the test of time. This has become a very important project to me.

None of this is to say that streaming is bad, far from it. Streaming is convenient, access is incredible and lets face it, not everyone wants shelves of stuff to dust and tidy! Am I happy that I can carry all my favourites on my phone to watch when I want them? Of course. Is it easier to have all your books at your fingertips without giving yourself a hunchback? Absolutely. Does it lift my spirits to access any song my mood needs immediately? 100%. And yet....something has been lost. This is a story about balance. It is a quiet resistance in the name of nostalgia to remember the history of how things came to be. A respect for what came before and appreciation of how things came to be the way they are today.

If everything that surrounds us is temporary, what does that do to us? What message does that send about supporting the work that goes into creating this media, this escapism we all crave from the real world that is on fire around us? Is any thought given to what our children might inherit of this world, of the generations that went before? What will our children hold in their hands and call theirs? What if everything stored and backed up in clouds ceased to exist, including cultural media? Platforms will inevitably disappear and be replaced, I wonder what gets lost with it. Can legacy still exist and what can that look like in a rented world? Maybe this is what rented culture really costs us- not convenience or choice, but permanence. The quiet reassurance that something we love won't vanish overnight.

I don't want to go backwards, and I don't want shelves full of things I don't need.I just want to own something solid. Something that stays.

I will of course settle down to watch some TV tonight on a popular streaming service. But my three DVDs will stay in my glass cabinet, with my growing vinyl collection. Keeping DVDs isn't about resisting progress. It is about resisting the idea that nothing should last.

In a modern life built on subscriptions and temporary access, choosing to own even one thing feels quite radical. And maybe that is enough.