Comment by saulpw
4 days ago
I'm reading "Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld" by Byung-Chul Han, who has things to say about it. "Things" are naturally possessions to be owned; the non-things that we as a society are moving towards are information to be consumed. If you have a physical book, you can pass it along to someone else, margin notes and dogears and all, but the experience of an e-book is fundamentally different. You might feel like you 'own' the bits because they're on your local computer and have no DRM, but your relationship to the actual item is not one of ownership. Just think about leaving your favorite book as .epub to someone in your will to see how non-sensical that would be.
> Just think about leaving your favorite book as .epub to someone in your will to see how non-sensical that would be.
It's not unthinkable to me, but it would have to include your own personal notes or something. The plain example though is nonsense, your're correct in that.
That said, what about leaving an entire NAS media collection to someone in your will? Sure, it's just hard drives with bits on them, but it's probably curated and high quality. There's a technical barrier though, so it makes little sense to leave to anyone who isn't already deeply interested, while if you're left with a collection of vinyl or blu-rays, even if you don't actually care about them, the cultural knowledge of what they are and represent is still around.