"This Service Is Not Available In Your Area"

This is a love letter, if by love letter one means that something shouldn’t just die and be gone but should have never existed in the first place, should be erased from our cumulative social memory in a kind of wizardly retribution that is particularly existential in its wrath.

This is the year that we collectively acknowledge the death of tactile media and the age of accessibility that this death heralds. Never mind that this is the sort of shit that’s been heralded since DARPA developed a network so that military brass could communicate from underground bunkers after the world was turned into a toxic toilet pummeled by quasi-intelligent T-800s and that one robot with a gun for a head and motorcycles in its legs. Forget that. This is utopia waiting to happen. Let’s stream some free music.

Except “This Service Is Not Available In Your Area.” My area! How quaint a notion. What the fuck is an area? I live in a post-space mental abstraction where my pop-cultural tastes are presented to me in granola bar form; I have dreadlocks made of pure light; the sequel to Tron is coming out—as a nostalgia piece. Don’t talk to me about countries. Countries are where ideas go to die.

Clicking on LaLa and being told that I can’t listen to the song, or trying to watch a streaming video and being told to watch it on television because I’m in Canada (nestled away next to the Netherlands) is the equivalent of writing an e-mail and upon hitting “Send” being told to go to the store and buy some stamps and paper to write a letter. As if I even know how to use a pen anymore.

So c’mon, internet warlords (Bill Gates, Deadspin, Kanye West). Enough of your data dowry, your dragonlike insistence that I pay you tribute (or anything for that matter). We’re living in a post-money world. I want all my content free, all the time. I don’t even want to pay for storage. Just stream me a bill. I’ll include it in the sci-fi novel I’m writing using only air and a hover-stylus. Let me live on the internet with you.