> Reminding Us Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours

Wrong, Kotaku. Lots of digital things are ours. Digital files on our personally owned HDDs and SSDs. Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves. Digital ISO files on hard drives that are ripped from the aforementioned digital physical DVDs.

What you meant to say is, streaming content is not ours - and that is true by definition, because the data is streamed from somewhere else. Someone else can always delete files, take down servers, or go out of business entirely.

The word digital contrasts with analog. Digital and physical are two independent axes - there are digital physical things, digital virtual things, analog physical things, and analog virtual things.

I think you're playing language games here. What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?

Digital = expressed by discrete bits of encoded digits (1s and 0s). Analog = lossy and necessarily physical

A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.

Digital in this context is merely shorthand for "digitally distributed", as opposed to "physically distributed"