I personally prefer owning my content, physical books, and having local copies.

But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streaming world. The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online.

Don’t get me wrong: I prefer having my own copies and so on. However, when people start throwing around concepts like “digital feudalism” and trying to draw parallels to the enlightenment it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.

> Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for

Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge.

> The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track.

You might not forget what you learned from a book you read 5 years ago after it gets stolen from you, but it does mean that others are cut off from that same information. Worse is that what you saw 5 years ago might still be made avilable, but only in censored/altered forms which could easily have you questioning your memory of something you read or saw just 5 years ago.

It's not just an abstract philosophical debate that books and other forms of media are being changed, censored, or removed entirely. Or that gatekeepers want to decide what we're allowed to see and extract rent from us every time that we do. The dangers are real and understood and very much present in today's world.

> Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streaming world. The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online.

The real problem with this is that there are vested interests at play in managing what information you see first - push something to the 2nd or 3rd page of google results and it becomes effectively invisible, especially when you have pages and pages of results that seem to push the narrative that those vested interests want you to see.

I tend to think that Huxley was right over Orwell, information is lost in the shuffle of distraction and rigged systems. The "truth" is there to find, but it's a needle in a haystack of believable lies, and those lies were crafted specifically to obfuscate that nugget of truth.

So the amount of information moving around is irrelevant if it's not useful, or it's intentionally misleading from something that might upset those who benefit from the status quo.

> But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole.

I dunno, when Roald Dahl e-books auto-updated to censored versions with no way to rollback it did feel distinctly dystopian.

If you think beyond kids, when a certain book is ruled illegal in a certain country it will disappear from internet-connected devices overnight. Seizing physical copies from people's homes is orders of magnitude harder.

> from a quick search online

I would have agreed with you a few years ago. But now Google, DuckDuckGo etc. at most provide 3 pages of results, with many irrelevant or wrong. There are alternatives:

https://wiby.me/ https://clew.se/ https://kagi.com/

But that's not the majority experience and more importantly, it shows that it really can be "taken" from us.

I think when people say "digital feudalism", they usually mean that the spaces where we do things digitally are increasingly owned by private entities that operate them for their own benefit. It's an analogy which can't be expected to align perfectly with historical feudalism.

Physical book I can give to my children.

Steam library not so much, most likely they will have to re-buy the games because even if they inherit or I just leave credentials and 2FA I can imagine someone there in business thinking "hey this account is 100 years old, we should clean that up, unless guy sends us birth certificate and proof he is still alive.".

Knowledge is not proliferating faster than ever. It's being gobbled up and locked down by companies whose sole interest is making as much money as they can instead of improving the world and profiting from the improvement.

Media is being deleted or locked in vaults.

Games are being shut down with no way to restore them.

The written word that has been vetted by people with domain specific knowledge is being locked behind paywalls and not being advertised, while AI machines directly lie to the curious and the seekers of knowledge.

I can throw a digital stone in any direction and hit something that is worse off thanks to the modern internet.

/People of North Korea entered the chat

Oh wait, they didn’t.

As one example, if the Internet Archive goes offline, a massive corpus of the last two decades is gone forever. As another, I had a friend who bought hundreds of dollars of PlaysForSure music only to have the store shut down and the license revoked within the span of 12 months. Hope you didn’t care too much about those 3DS, Wii and Wii-U eshop games. (And on and on.)

We currently live in a world of abundance and access. Even with that, there are movies that can no longer be seen, music that can’t be listened to, and books that can’t be read because they were never widely or publicly available.

> Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever […]

Thanks to Anna’s Archive and similar sources, but that doesn’t contradict the general trend toward “feudalism” (not generally having permanent unrestricted access to the source of information).

> it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.

To judge what's happening in the world, you need a framework. And the frameworks provided by the ubiquitous commercial and political interests are all biased in comparable ways. Abstract philosophical debate is just what the doctor ordered to get you away from the incessant assault of propaganda and brain washing.