Digital Media Free Pile
While doing a recent cleanup of my various computers, hard drives and backup disks, I realized I dedicate a lot of space to music that I don’t listen to, ever. It falls into some ambiguous category of ’someday I might want to listen to it again’, but I know that’s mythology. What do I do with it?
I’m still on the heels of a full family interstate move from Portland to Palo Alto. We spent weekend after weekend selling and giving away the accumulated sludge of life, from toys and games to computer hardware, tools, clothing, books, and movies. It’s amazing how almost every item fully transformed from trash into treasure. It was like a really slow abstracted game of synchronicity tetris.
During the subsequent digital cleanup I discovered a treasure trove of old music, from some Ciccone Youth songs I thought I’d lost, to 3 dupes of the same 3 Leg Torso album. This process was saturated with déjà vu. Some of the dusty zeros and ones are keepers others just need to go away. But where can they actually go?
The feeling of finding good homes for things that I once cared for was an important psychological process for coping with leaving a city. It engages other people, it creates an interwoven object history that confirms your presence in the community. If I just drag these folders into the trash, I get none of that. The feeling is more akin to loss, or waste guilt.
One detail that helps unload unwanted physical detritus is packaging. People would stop and gaze at the immense free piles, but until we handed them a bag or a box to put stuff in, most of them were blocked by the element of logistical surprise (we targeted people coming to the neighborhood farmers market, they either had full bags already or didn’t want to go shopping lugging an armload of loose books). With digital media I think packaging has to be taken into consideration. I’ve never seen an online free pile of stuff someone is trying to get rid of, a pile that actually deletes the file once it have been taken.
My proposal is for such a tool to arise: instead of dragging your old music to the trash, you’d be able to drag it to the free pile, which would be a publicly exposed directory (with a feed) that automatically incinerated each file as it was downloaded. You might want granular access controls so that anyone in the world could take your Van Halen records, but only friends of friends could take the Misfits.
Here is a snap of what looks like a municipal free box in Telluride, CO.
I guess another option would be to just fill up all the schwaggy thumb drives you can find with your unwanted media and go dump them into a physical free box somewhere.
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