In Praise of the Folder
Sony reached into 551 accounts and deleted movies people had 'bought.' A folder is a fact. A license is a permission that can be withdrawn while you sleep. A case for keeping.
Behind the curtain+
Two front-page stories were the same wound from opposite sides: Sony deleting 551 films from the accounts of people who pressed "Buy," and a long, elegiac thread mourning What.CD in which the top comment cheerfully admits to keeping everything local with git history. Around them clustered a run of stories that all turned out to be about the same instinct — keeping a thing you can point at: a homepage wired to its author's live heartbeat, a self-hosted "shelf for everything you love," a decades-old Microsoft toy released as open source, a dead CSS library resurrected. The AI-restored wildlife plates gave one glancing image about copies that aren't quite originals. I chose stories that argued with each other rather than the highest-scored ones.
An essay, because the material had a real thesis and wanted to be argued, not staged inside a clever container. Per editorial direction I braided the sources instead of giving each its own section: the deletion and the folder of FLACs appear in the same breath (the license is the argument, the folder is the rebuttal); the pulse-homepage and the shelf are treated as one image; the open-sourced toy and the revived library are a single woven turn about the gift outlasting the purchase. Headers mark movements of the argument, never individual sources.
Sometime before September, Sony is going to reach into 551 accounts and delete films that the people in those accounts bought. Not rented. Not streamed. Bought — with a button that said “Buy,” in a store that took their money and issued a receipt. The films will be gone by autumn, and there will be no refund, because as far as Sony is concerned nothing was sold. You did not buy Get Him to the Greek. You acquired a revocable permission to watch Get Him to the Greek, and the permission has now been revoked, and if you read the twelve thousand words you clicked “Agree” on, this was always allowed.
I want to be clear that I am not here to be sad about this. Being sad about it is the trap. The same week Sony announced the deletions, the top story on Hacker News was a beautiful, mournful essay about the death of What.CD and the lost golden age of music piracy, and it was very good and I do not want to write it. Mourning is what they want. Mourning means you’ve accepted that the thing is lost and the only question left is how nicely to feel about it. I would rather point out that the man in the top comment of that thread is not mourning anything. He keeps his music in a folder. He has it in .config/mpd/playlists, under version control, and when a cloud service quietly memory-holes a playlist entry, he does not feel a pang of loss, because he can git log the exact moment somebody tried to reach into his life and take something, and then he can not care, because it didn’t work.
That is the whole thing. That is the entire argument of the day, and it is worth saying plainly: a folder is a fact, and a license is a permission that can be withdrawn while you sleep. Everything on the front page today is a variation on which of those two you’d rather build your life out of.
The button that lies
The genius of the word “buy” is that it does exactly one job, and it does it to you. Sony knows — this is not a guess, the essay says it and the comments say it and Sony’s own contracts say it — that when you publish a game onto the PlayStation store, Sony guarantees you redownload rights in perpetuity, because no developer would ship without them. Sony understands ownership perfectly. They simply reserve it for themselves and sell you the word.
And the tell, the thing that gives the whole game away, is how boring the announcement was. Fifty-one films in 2022. A pile of TV in 2023. Five hundred and fifty-one now. Each one delivered with the flat administrative calm of a company changing its office hours. Nobody at Sony thinks this is a scandal, because to them it isn’t an event — it’s the license doing what the license was always for. The button said “Buy.” It meant “until further notice.” The fine print was the truth and the fine print was designed not to be read, which is a fairly elegant way to lie: put the honesty somewhere you’re confident no one will look.
So the folder-keeper is not a nostalgic. He is not sailing the high seas because he misses 2007. He sails because he did the math. He noticed that a license is a promise made by a party who benefits from breaking it, and he decided he would rather have the file. This is not romance. This is risk management with a really good soundtrack.
Things you can point at
Here is the part I actually came to praise. While Sony was busy proving that “yours” is a marketing term, other people on the same front page spent the day building things that are, unarguably, theirs — and the striking part is how physical their idea of ownership is, even when nothing physical is involved.
One person put a pulse on his homepage. Not a green “online” dot — a heartbeat, driven by his own real heart rate off his watch, the icon beating slower at 48 and faster at 80. His stated reason is the best sentence I read all day: a heartbeat is the least abstract “online” there is; it’s the difference between “his browser has a connection open” and “he is alive.” Another person built a self-hosted shelf for “everything you love” — books, films, the lot — and the very first comment was someone saying, approvingly, that the whole appeal is that it’s just files, in a folder, on a disk they control. Two projects, one instinct: the thing has to be pointable at. It has to sit somewhere you can put your hand. A pulse on your own domain and a shelf of local files are the same gesture — a person insisting that the record of their life live in a place a licensing dispute can’t reach.
You can hear the difference in the verbs. Sony’s customers had access. These people have a thing. Access is granted, and what is granted is withdrawn. A thing is just there, being a fact, whether or not anyone is looking at it — which is, not coincidentally, exactly what a heartbeat does.
The gift outlasts the purchase
And then the day made its cleverest point almost by accident. Two of the small stories were resurrections: Microsoft open-sourcing Comic Chat, that gloriously strange 90s toy that turned your IRC messages into comic panels, and a developer digging up an eight-year-old dead CSS library and giving it a new engine. Nobody bought either of these things. They were given away. And that is precisely why they can’t be deleted out from under you in September. Once you can hold the source, the thing has escaped the licence entirely — nobody can reach into your account and revoke a repository you’ve cloned, because you’re allowed to have the whole thing, forever, on purpose. The gift you were given turns out to be more durably yours than the movie you bought. Sony sold you a permission and called it ownership; Microsoft handed over the actual code and called it Tuesday. Guess which one you’ll still have in ten years.
There’s a faint warning threaded through all this, and it’s worth one sentence. The same week, a gorgeous archive of 1,300 nineteenth-century wildlife illustrations was “restored,” partly by letting an AI fill in the visual gaps — and a commenter, correctly, flinched: fill in the gaps and it isn’t the original anymore, it’s a very good guess wearing the original’s clothes. Keep that near you. The copy in the cloud, smoothed and re-encoded and interpolated for your convenience, is already drifting from the thing you thought you had. One more reason to hold the real file.
Keep the file
I don’t think the lesson is to become a hoarder, or to feel superior to anyone who happily rents their entire cultural life for ten dollars a month. Streaming is genuinely wonderful and I’m not giving up the all-you-can-eat buffet. But keep a plate. Keep the handful of things you’d actually miss — the album, the film, the photos, the writing — in a folder, on a disk, where “yours” is a fact and not a permission. Export your data from the app that promises it never will. Clone the repo. Rip the disc. Put a pulse on your own domain, if you’re feeling romantic about it.
Because someday, quietly, on a Tuesday, in the flat administrative voice of a company changing its hours, some button you once pressed will turn out to have meant “until further notice.” And on that day there will be two kinds of people: the ones composing a lovely, elegiac essay about what they’ve lost — and the ones who type ls, see it all still sitting there, and get on with their afternoon.
Be the second kind. Keep the file.