Honestly, I’m late to the game.
A lot of people smarter than me have been preparing for the death of ownership.
They’ve been buying retro hardware. They’ve been developing their offline capabilities. They’ve been preparing for a world where access to the things we love can no longer be taken for granted.
I’m old enough to remember the original PlayStation, when local co-op gaming was the highlight of every child’s summer. Sitting in the same room, passing controllers around, arguing over whose turn it was, it all feels like a distant memory now.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the latest artificial intelligence story to grab the headlines: “Destructive scanning.”
Believe it or not, artificial intelligence companies are buying books printed before 2022 to feed the machine that is AI.
Why?
The system needs data. More specifically, it needs data that hasn’t been corrupted by synthetic generation. And the internet is increasingly full of it.
Fake articles that were neither written nor edited by a human. Content created by machines, rewritten by machines, and shared by machines.
The irony is hard to miss. To build the future, AI is becoming increasingly hungry for the human-made past, and researchers feel compelled to feed it.
That actually isn’t my issue. They go a step further.
Once a book has been scanned, the physical copy can be destroyed and the paper recycled.
Think about that for a second. We take something that has survived for decades, sometimes centuries, turn it into data, and then destroy the original.
With an ordinary paperback, you might shrug. But what happens when the book is rare? When only a handful of physical copies remain?
Knowledge that was once sitting on a shelf, accessible without permission, an account, a subscription, or even electricity, now exists primarily inside a private dataset. And whoever controls that dataset controls access to it.
We’ve spent years worrying about companies owning our films, our music, our games and our software. But books, knowledge itself, feel different.
If we destroy the physical source after digitising it, we aren’t simply changing the format. We’re changing who gets to own the past.
That’s why I believe we’re going to see a resurgence in our love for physical media.
Offline-first. Always accessible. Tactile.
Something you can hold. Something you can own. Something that can’t disappear because a server shuts down, a licence expires, or a company changes its mind.
Research labs are incentivised to cannibalise knowledge: to ingest it, digitise it and ultimately control access to it.
The public, meanwhile, will be compelled to resist that control. And perhaps the simplest form of resistance is ownership itself.