It’s almost as fast to download a song as it is to find it in my (pretty fucking big) music collection—and I’m pretty convinced it’s actually better to download than to find the local copy. I’m not quite convinced it’s better to download than it is to store—the internet does occasionally still go away for brief periods, and if I want to hear Joy Division’s first album right now to make me feel better about being offline (after all, it was 1983 when I first heard it, and the internet slumbered somewhere deep inside Defense Department hardware, waiting to be born), I’d be out of luck (unless I somehow found the unlabeled black cassette recording of this album I probably still own, somewhere). But as these things become more and more reliable (and uninterruptible power and always-on omnipresent wireless broadband are on the horizon of ubiquity), I can easily see a day where I’ve got a comparatively tiny hard drive and when I want to hear something, even something as rare as say Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s first release (thirty-three copies on cassette!) I’ll just open a window and pull it out of the net. I said better, too, right? Behold:

I know I have Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” somewhere on my primary hard drive, but I don’t feel like looking for it (I’m still “unpacking” after my move from my old computer—it’s getting to be as protracted a process as if I had actually moved house, and I can easily foresee myself “living out of boxes” for some time yet). So I turn to my usual source for music I don’t yet own, and start searching for Freebird. Within thirty seconds, I’ve got the album version of Freebird downloading, a live version ostensibly from a bootleg recording (you never know with this shit until you download it and listen to it—I’ve seen stuff so mislabeled and fucked up that it makes all the “wikipedia is unreliable” arguments sing and dance in my imagination (same issue: ignorant sources substituting bad guesses or malicious erronity (!!) as definitive data)), another track called “David Cross — Freebird.mp3″ and a cover version (again, pending download, probably a cover version) of Freebird by Cat Power. I think the David Cross thing is a cut from one of his comedy albums. I’ll probably listen to it (again? I vaguely remember it) and discard it. But the Cat Power thing could be awesome. It could be my new favorite version of this song … and if I hadn’t been lazy and misplaced the copy of Skynyrd’s “Freebird” that I already have, I never would have found it.

Music piracy (uh if that was in fact what I was doing instead of uh legally purchasing copies of everything I’ve just mentioned through whatever website(s) you use for that) is an incredibly democratizing and liberating force, if you extend it in its natural directions (I have a huge library of books I’ve downloaded—and the bulk of the ebook material available through peer-to-peer networks is made up of instructional manuals).

I’m profoundly ambivalent about it, and I’m sure the dichotomy doesn’t escape those who regularly read this thing. I’m paranoid enough about my (shitty first draft) writing being ripped off that I hide it behind layers of passworded bullshit, but when I want to feed on the lifework of any recording artist, writer, film production crew, etc., past, present or future, I expect to be able to swing a machete overhead, cut a vine, and suck like an explorer in a Tarzan movie.

I’m not sure if there are any conclusions to be drawn. I’m just rambling. I sometimes try to imagine a world without currency or mortgages or rent, where musicians and writers and trash men and doctors and maybe lawyers (but I’m not so sure about lawyers) do their jobs without pay, and somehow still have nice houses, nice cars, excellent healthcare and opportunity for education and fulfillment … but I can’t make it work in my imagination. So even though it’s rewarding and enlightening for me to sit here and rip off recording artists (assuming, of course, that that is in fact what I was doing and not lawfully blah blah blah), it’s still (probably) immoral and wrong. Oh, and illegal.

But it’s so fucking cool.