Tesla Model 3s in Canada.

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I've had this topic on my mind with notes in my phone for quite a long time. But one email this month told me now was the time to write it. So this past December we lost my mother-in-law. Earlier this month I get an email from Apple stating “Shelly is no longer participating in Family Sharing. Any movies, TV shows, books, and apps you have previously downloaded from Shelly…will stop working unless you choose to purchase them.”

Apple probably didn't know why she was removed, but I doubt it would have made a difference. Apple’s shift to subscription based services has been an effort to extract as much profit as possible from the consumer. A few years ago I lost my ability to play all the songs I had on my CD collection and purchased as mp3s from iTunes and was forced into Apple Music through a software update. Sure, they have a lot of stuff I didn't have, but I also miss Garth Brooks. I'm not sure why his entire catalog is missing from the service, but it is, and I'm paying $8 a month for the privilege of missing out on one of the greatest country musicians of all time.

Sometimes subscription services are a convenience, like using Netflix instead of driving to Blockbuster. Maybe I'd have willingly switched to Apple Music if it had been offered as optional. Sometimes subscriptions are sold as a convenience, which is Subaru’s Starlink sales pitch: “Hey, no need to carry a separate remote start fob, it’s in your phone now! Oh, but we’re going to charge $9.95 monthly to connect to the app.”

At least Subaru is supposedly charging for an actual service, maintaining the connection between your phone and the vehicle itself, and not charging to activate a switch inside the vehicle for an accessory you've already purchased. Looking at you, BMW.

My big question for the next several years is, what happens if a car company that built heavily digitized cars goes out of business? We've seen the video game industry just abandon servers and make previously purchased games unplayable. If Subaru goes bankrupt and their version of Starlink (yeah, that's confusing) goes offline I lose my remote start, and the proprietary Subaru navigation's maps won't ever update, but my Ascent should start & run just fine and I already use Apple CarPlay for navigation.

What happens if Tesla goes bankrupt? Of all the major automakers Tesla seems to depend the most on the cars connecting to the manufacturer on a regular basis, while also being the most volatile company because of its leadership. I'd imagine that owners are going to have issues with any software like FSD that requires the vehicle periodically check with the manufacturer to see if it's still paid for. Sentry Mode probably won't work remotely anymore, but will it work at all...can you even download a video directly off of the car without going through the app?

So everything digital has a temporary feel to it. We still use the phrase “written in stone” because putting something into physical media just feels more permanent.

On the history side of things the new lament among media collectors is that the switch from physical media to subscription based services is creating an environment where things can be “disappeared.” Services can edit existing media or fully pull titles from their catalogs and they're just gone to us. They have new incentive to do so after Warner Bros. proved the business model on a large scale when they destroyed Batgirl after deciding it would be more valuable as a tax break than a film release. The directors said the footage was deleted from the servers, and that would make sense, I can't imagine the IRS would look kindly upon any profitable use of film that was taken as a write off.

Last year director Christopher Nolan said “There is a danger, these days, that if things only exist in the streaming version they do get taken down, they come and go.” Guillermo del Toro quote tweeted that and added “Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility. If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love... you are the custodian of those films for generations to come.”

But this isn't new. It’s always been this way.

The earliest Hollywood films, created long before the computer was invented, were lost because they weren't cared for after they were no longer profitable. My book collection is heavy on the 80s and 90s because that's what's at used book sales, most copies of older books that aren't preserved in institutions are just gone to the ravages of time. A lot of media from the VHS era didn't make it onto DVD and the remaining copies are degraded.

In part, I agree with the sentiment that we are preserving the past and present for the future. It’s why I buy every two dollar book I can find at every used book sale I can get to and place them all in a humidity-controlled environment. But the digital present actually offers a few options for preservation that the past didn't.

In the past, recording something you were watching or listening to always required some specialized, often expensive equipment and even then it always resulted in some degradation of the source material. The translation from an analog source to analog signal and back, and translating that into another analog signal on the recording media resulted in a lot of the scratchiness that makes 80s videos stand out in the digital age.

It’s also why that famous video of the first moon landing is in such bad shape. The original was lost when NASA erased it to re-use the tape. What’s left is a recording from a camera pointed at a television.

In the digital age, regardless of any encryption or app security, any signal that you're seeing has to have been decoded on your end to be displayed across the pixels of your screen and it’s just a matter of having the right software to capture it with minimal loss. Someone with the right software and a lot of hard drive space could copy thousands of hours of videos from Netflix, YouTube, Tubi, Hulu, and live television and preserve them in a quality that wasn't possible in the past. The same goes for music and Spotify.

Someone else, I should add, since I don’t have the technical knowledge to do the data capture and I don't have the money for the equipment. Aside from saving a few podcasts that I like, my budget for historic preservation has all been going into Billy bookshelves and two dollar hardcovers, and my time is focused on the things I can legally share on CarsAndRacingStuff.com.

But thanks streaming services' search for content I've been discovering a lot of really obscure automotive films that I don't recall seeing in all my years spent browsing Best Buy and Circuit City's racks. I've been adding dozens of these to the Library's Video Guide, and there's a backlog of hundreds of songs to go on the Audio Playlist.

Of course anyone who saves these files can't share them legally, but it’s always been true that you can't copy books or DVDs that are still in copyright, either. People will hang on to these downloads, though. “Data hoarders” are going to preserve them on collections of hard drives, share them among their friends, and occasionally someone will share it through torrent or illicit video upload site where it'll get saved by more people before it gets taken down. Maybe someday they'll make it onto The Internet Archive.

If not, they'll wait for the public domain, like Steamboat Willie did this year. But it’s not like folks had to wait for Disney to offer the film in a convenient downloadable format before they could do anything with it. It was everywhere, all at once on January 1, because pirated copies were everywhere. Folks just couldn't do anything publicly with them until the calendar said 2024.

If anything, people today have so many more options for historic preservation that weren't available to the generations that lived on acetate & vinyl. The streaming business model, for all its annoyances, is desperate for the little bits of content that others don't have and they're sending film experts to dig up rare films from offline archives the public can't access and making them fairly easy to download to the right preservation-minded people. I think part of the tragedy artists like Nolan and del Toro fear is that great or important works can be buried for profit or nefarious purposes. But for historic preservation nerds who are thinking in the long term, the streaming era feels like a gold rush and our pockets & hard drives aren't nearly big enough.

And by creating so many copies in so many places on all kinds of digital storage media, we're ensuring that at least one copy of a particular film or song will survive the coming years, something that the libraries of the acetate & vinyl era also couldn't achieve.

History Beyond the Bumpers

The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights interesting topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.

So while doing mold remediation a few weeks ago for the new Library office, I had a chance to listen to a New York Times Sunday Read podcast about the Criterion Collection. It’s so much more than the Columbia House for obscure film that I thought it was.

It prompted me to browse their catalog, and I've found a few more films to add to the Video Guide. Also, for those films they have selected I've added Criterion Collection links alongside the links to Wikipedia and IMDb.

Their selections within the scope of The Crittenden Automotive Library are: Chop Shop, Detour, Drive My Car, Easy Rider, Repo Man, Theives’ Highway, Trafic, Two-Lane Blacktop, and Wim Wender’s road movie trilogy.

This also prompted me to create a Staff Picks section. Yeah, it’s just me here, but the name reminds me of the old Blockbuster days. It’s a short list of my favorite films from the Video Guide.

629.2

The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.

It's an all-movie themed month here. I had to do “truck things” with the new Maverick and swap a broken piece of Ikea furniture. I took the opportunity to drive down to WeatherTech and get hard plastic floor mats for the truck, and grabbed some cheap blue ambient LED lighting at Walmart on the way home.

I also made a stop at a Disc Replay for the first time in over a decade, and their clearance section had some really obscure titles. Motorcycle racing, trucking, and a couple of...are C-movies a thing? They're not even B-movies. Four for six dollars, because I couldn't bring myself to carry a couple copies of Gigli out the door just to take advantage of their 10 for $10 deal.

CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are basically plastic covered metal discs with etchings that are read as the 1s and 0s of binary computer files. All of these media just hold different volumes of computer files, and with the right software they can be copied off of the discs onto hard drives. So while I'll pick up multiple copies of books, I tend to stick to just one good copy of movies and documentaries for my own use. They just exist in a different business model. Most books never come back once they go out of print, while most Hollywood movies will get a few million copies dumped into the market every time a studio feels it can make some money by cranking out more discs. Most books won't have PDF versions available, while disc media lends itself to easy copying & backups. Even the non-Hollywood films that can't get re-issued because the studio no longer exists seem to be more likely to be saved, just anecdotally based on how many times they pop up on YouTube after their copyright system takes them down. So I focus where I think my money will have more of an impact.

But maybe I'll change my mind on that a little once the DVD collection starts to look more impressive after it gets set up in the new office with all of the new additions from the past year. It'd be amazing to have a little space like Criterion's closet but with weird automotive films.

Telemetry

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