Why Digital Downloads Fail

I've mentioned in my rants to listening ears my distaste for the technological advancements that the modern world calls progress. I've seen it in so many places and in so many ways. "There's an App for that" used to be funny to me until I coined a new phrase "appholes" and decided to throw away my cell phone. I can't stand it anymore. Maybe it's my age, but I don't think it's just because I'm older than the so-called progressive people who can't unplug from their devices. Don't get me wrong, I use the internet and I still love what the net offers in the way of shopping and contributing art and work, but I don't believe in anymore technological advancements. They've done enough. We have electric cars now. We have taken computers and cell phones to the upteenth level and it's just so over the top. I used to complain about how as I was running and running to keep up with the proverbial Joneses, I was jumping from vinyl to cassettes to cds to dvds to digital downloads, all the while a crazed guinea pig experimenting with what society was programming me to believe was progressive. I wanted to keep up. I wanted to stay relative and modern. All the while I was spending a fortune trying to understand why technology kept changing and all the while I was frustrated and tormented and not satisfied with any of it. I kept smashing cell phones because I couldn't see, or hear, and what I wanted from them was not being delivered even though they kept getting paid for so-called service. I finally gave up.

Which is where I am right now and feeling a little sad that I have to say goodbye to 41 digitally dowloaded movies on my youtube account. I've always had a library of movies, music, and books --- my favorites that I could refer back to for something I agree with, or something that sparked my interest, or something that I wanted to use as inspiration. I travelled a lot and having a large collection of old records doesn't help me when I'm travelling, so I agreed that cds were easier. Then when digital downloads became a thing, I thought "okay, I can see the merit in that" --- But I was wrong, and I'm going to tell you why I was wrong.

For all the money I spent purchasing the digital downloads to add them to my account library, I was trapping myself into the youtube account connected to a specific email and a specific phone number, which means that I can not access that account if I don't continue to pay for my phone. Which sets up my phone company with a power like a monopoly where if I want to continue to use my youtube account and all that I've done or purchased there, I have to continue to pay whatever the phone company says I have to pay regardless if they suck, regardless if the phone sucks, regardless if my phone gets stolen and no one cares, regardless if their customer service sucks. So I've decided to "Let it Go" and I'm not talking about the app "Let Go". I'm just talking about breaking free from the spell of thinking that I need some things that I absolutely don't need. I don't need old movies in a cloud library. I know what movies made an impression on me and I have my memories. I don't need a cell phone that is overpriced and useless to me because I can't even answer a call when it comes in, nor can I make a call that I need to make with a screen that doesn't even want to acknowledge that I swiped it several times. I don't need to pay for that aggravation and I don't need to be feeling trapped into paying for that aggravation just because I wanted to keep access to an email or an account where I thought I might do some creative videos or keep a small library.

I'm done. I refuse to be bullied by tech geeks who don't care about anything except the money. They don't care about their customers. They don't care about the heart of why the customers wanted their products or services to begin with. I don't even think they really care about progress because Monopoly is just a game, not true progress.