I’ve been a computer geek since I was 8 years old when I got my first C64. Back then, digitizing media didn’t make sense. The resolutions of old monitors were too low, the sound quality was mediocre at best, and the equipment to do the conversion from physical media to digital was expensive and rare.

But times change, and as soon as technology to rip CD’s to MP3’s was commodity, I was building my personal library. The idea of not having to change discs all the time and be able to create large playlists of my music was incredibly compelling. Yes, the Napster revolution was also around this era as well, but we’ll keep this conversation to media that you actually own.

When it came to photos I was an early adopter of color scanning and spent a lot of time scanning in our photographs so that we had digital libraries of our memories. Soon digital cameras became the norm and despite having been a film photographer since I was 13 years old, I happily left behind the world of chemicals and printing off of negatives.

Fast forward a few more years (or maybe a couple decades) and we’re fully enmeshed in the digital world. We carry media devices in our pockets that can capture the world with amazing clarity despite their diminutive size. Our phones and TVs are filled with apps that give us access to every possible song, movie, or TV show that we could ever want. Yet, in reality, we own none of it.

The sad truth of much of our digital media landscape is that we are forever the feudal peasant to our noble lord who lets us enjoy the media landscape that they own, but at the cost of perpetual enslavement to not just their financial whims, but their belief that they know best what it is we want to consume. Despite having a veritable infinite library of media at our fingertips… none of it is truly ours. The reality of our modern media ecosystem is that we’re just renters. We pay our monthly subscription fees and in exchange we get access to vast libraries of content that is curated to what will keep us engaged as long as it can, and keep us paying those monthly subscription fees.

But behind the curtain, our overlords can change the rules at any time. Shows disappear from streaming services with regularity, and there’s little recourse for the end user. You may have subscribed to a specific media platform because of one piece of content you wanted to watch. But then that content disappears. Perhaps it appears on a different streaming service, so then you sign up for that one. Then it disappears again. Over and over we play this dance just so that we can watch something that in years past we would have paid one time for the DVD (or VHS!) and could have enjoyed as many times as we wanted.

Therefore, it’s no wonder that people are starting to push back. Perhaps the most visible is the rise of vinyl records. What perhaps started as an audiophile niche interest has started becoming another symbol of the desire of people to once again own their media. New albums are released and people clamor for something they can touch and feel, even if it’s not nearly as convenient as just pressing play in Apple Music.

But even beyond the physicality of owning a record or a CD or a DVD, there is a resurgence in the home lab movement to create personal digital systems that contain media that no one can take away from you. A home lab is simply a server and storage solution that usually sits within your physical house and serves up media content to your devices inside that dwelling. It’s your own personal, and highly local, streaming service.

Again, I’m not going to go into the question of how to obtain digital copies of media that you own, but once you have a collection going, there are lots of new ways to serve that content up to your personal network. Tools such as Plex and Jellyfin are great options for movies and TV shows. Some NAS servers like Synology even come with built in media tools such as Audio Station for music. And there are the whole series of “-arr” apps that can help discover new media across the interwebs.

What the rise in interest of these platforms tells me is that people are finally starting to get tired of signing away a significant portion of their monthly budget to things that just don’t last. That’s not to say that streaming services are bad, or that the content they serve isn’t good. It just means that people are looking for more options. In our case it’s meant trimming down the number of media services we use and being more thoughtful about which ones we want to invest monthly income in to. It also means setting up a home lab solution to re-awaken my old mp3 collection and start building up a library of local media that we own and can control.

I know that in the future we’re never going to get rid of streaming services completely, but perhaps with more options, and more knowledge, people will opt to ownership more instead of just renting. There’s a sense of freedom that comes with knowing that no one can take something away that is much more freeing than endless scrolling through a catalog of media that might only exist to try and convince you to spend just one… more… month on a platform.