people have been begging twitter for an edit button for years. and the problem with that is that you could do a perfectly innocent tweet, like the ever-popular “you mean to tell me a shrimp fried this rice” and then once it hits viral status you could change it to say something absurd or, known twitter and the internet, hella racist and terrible. so it’s generally best to let things be how they were published.
last month author, casey mcquestion, removed JK Rowling/Harry Potter references from their book Red, White, and Royal Blue. it’s a super popular series about a prince and his boyfriend and was published in 2019. and now the digital versions of the book have scrubbed it. and the new print ones probably will too.
when we buy one of those $80 PS5 games, it takes at least 4 hours to play it because the games are not ready and you need to download all the patches and updates from the internet.
lizzo was confronted for having the word sp*zz in one of her recent hits so she just changed the lyric (probably like re-recorded that line?) and now the song just doesn’t have it anymore. just today, beyonce has removed an interpolation and told y’all to stop quitting your jobs on her new album (she too removed “sp*zz”). monica lewinsky right now this minute is asking for a reference to her to be removed from the same album. (Update: it’s not from Renaissance, it’s from a line in Partition, like 1000 years old now)
i buy digital copies of movies so I don’t have to get up off the couch to search through our dvd’s but all we’re ever really doing is paying monthly fees to have rental access to content. it’s a strange phenomenon that we accepted so quickly. because again, we don’t have to get off the couch. but when they yank my comfort movies from one streamer to the next I get upset. addy got so mad she couldn’t find the 2017 Ninja Turtle series, she spent all her Christmas iTunes money.
the more our society goes digital, the more i need to hold on to analog tools. yes this is what i tell myself everytime i buy another notebook or spend too much in the bookstore or records store, but it’s a little hard for those things to get changed (for now). a permanent record of where things were in time. like when i watch Trading Places the content warning is for “Outdated Cultural References”. they don’t change the movie they’re just like “eh it’s pretty racist,” and you watch at your own risk. (I watch it any time I see it on Starz)
i understand the irony of discussing the ability to edit published work ON THE INTERNET but everything is giving me Ministry of Truth vibes.
You and I are >>here<<. It's probably why we keep personal blogs while everyone pours their randomness into the algorithm, then gets upset when their Internet Overlords switch something up.
This makes me want to purchase CDs again. And buy a Blu-Ray.
I bought a CD player from Amazon like a month ago. There is a large chunk of movies and music from like 2000-2010 that is not available to stream. And a certain nostalgia that comes from remembering where your cd used to skip.