Episode 978: The Paper Trail – Technology's Path to Freedom

Air Date: August 19, 2026  |  Host: Bob Metz
Just Right — broadcasting on WBCQ and Channel 292 shortwave

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this program are those of the participants.

Clip (Castle S03E03):

Dion Carver, bail bondsman. This is his office. He walked into a B&E last night, and before he had a chance to use his registered firearm, our killer knocked him over the head with that. Which means our perp had about an hour to ransack the place.

Looking for what?

Money? I mean, bail bondsmen often get paid in cash, and 10% of a million would be enough reason to tear up a place.

Oh, and Laney called. She said she found something weird.

I found this hidden in Carver's sock while I was stripping the body.

What the hell is it?

I don't know, you're the detective.

Maybe it's what our clown is looking for in Carver's office.

Seriously. Did your husband keep cash in his office?

No, he insisted on money orders and cashier's checks. He had a good heart, but he wasn't stupid.

So you like this guy for murder.

Yeah, for his bail bondsman, Dion Carver.

God, I know Dion. I just did a skip trace for him last year.

You know, we found a weird piece of paper in his sock. I'm thinking it's some kind of code.

Only paper I've seen people killed for had dead presidents on it.

Bob Metz:
Welcome everyone. It is Wednesday, August 19, 2026. I'm Bob Metz, and this is Just Right. Broadcasting around the world and online. Join us for an hour of discussion that's not right wing. It's just right.

If someone's willing to die for pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents on them, what happens when that paper is no longer worth, as they say, the paper it's printed on? That's just one of the riddles we'll be attempting to resolve as we head down the paper trail, that trail of history and evidence upon which all of humanity's comprehension of its own nature and existence depends. Yes, we're going to be literally talking about paper on the show today. You know, those pieces of scrap on which you can quickly jot notes or sign contracts, type letters, write constitutions, record history, or from which you can simply read books and periodicals in every paper format and shape you can imagine.

But beyond paper itself, as a physical medium, there are other physical forms of media that can be considered to be kind of a metaphor for paper, insofar as they offer a physical recorded form of anything from art to history to entertainment to personal recordings, from film to video tape to audio tape to digital formats, you name it. And all of these formats, paper included, represent incredibly sophisticated technologies. Many seem to be getting more advanced as time progresses, but nevertheless, all have a very concerning Achilles heel, with the exception of paper.

And because of paper's superiority on this count, apparently there are some very sinister efforts being made to replace and destroy paper forms of media with digital only versions. And worse, it's a strategy now being employed to make sure that physical copies of other forms of media are replaced, amounting to an outright attack on personal and private ownership. And that is why we're framing today's theme as the paper trail, technology's path to freedom.

A path that we shall embark upon right after our reminder that you can write us at . Hear us on WBCQ and on Channel 292 Shortwave. Follow and like us on your favorite podcast platform, and visit us at justrightmedia.org where you can access all of our social media links, archived broadcasts, and the support button that makes it easy for you to support the show. Because as always, your financial support is appreciated and is what makes this show possible.

Now I've often quipped that if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen. Which of course was not meant to express a metaphysical reality, but an epistemological fact that pertains to human knowledge. It's rather self evident that if something in the past was never written about or recorded, we couldn't possibly know about it. And that presents us with a paradox. Because it seems to me only logical that an infinite number of events have transpired in humanity's past about which we have zero knowledge. Problem is, that's not something you can objectively prove in a scientific way. I mean, the fact that I can't even cite a single example of any such past unknown event because it was never written about is the paradox. It's not a contradiction.

And for thousands of years, what is known about historic events is known only because it was written on some form of paper, without which writing would never have been possible in the first place. So, to set the stage for today's various discussions, allow me to first demonstrate how the incredible power of paper manifested itself in the advancement of human knowledge and civilized culture.

Now I imagine most of you are familiar with the phrase, it is written. I looked into the etymology of that phrase and discovered that, quote, the phrase it is written originates from the Latin scriptum est, which translates to, it has been written. In a biblical context, it is used to introduce quotations from scripture, emphasizing the authority and permanence of the written word of God, end quote.

Now the two significant terms in that description refer to, quote unquote, authority and permanence, and quote unquote, the written word of God. Now, recall that in the Bible, John 1:1, there is the oft quoted definition of the word word. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. And because words represent concepts, I have always interpreted this to refer to the beginning of humanity's ability to conceptualize, and therefore to be able to reason. And we have discussed this in some detail on past broadcasts. And in terms of authority and permanence, the true power of the written word was that it was written and did not change its message with the passage of time. And this is a point of great concern, as we'll be hearing soon in some of our upcoming audio bites.

Cultures that never develop paper or writing only had verbal accounts of histories passed down from one generation to the next, and with no way to verify the origin of the story or account. Now, if you stop to think about it, there's really no difference between saying it is written versus it has been written, since both mean the same thing. Looking at each phrase literally, if something is written, then obviously it has been written or it wouldn't be written. And if something has been written, then it only naturally follows that it is written because, again, it has been written. But to be fair, one phrase does convey an authority within the present, while the other does so from the past. But the fundamental meaning and authority of each is identical.

So, with this narrative as our backdrop for today's discussion, up next are two voices who both, on their individual July 31st, 2026 podcasts, brought to my attention the sinister efforts I mentioned earlier to replace and destroy paper forms of media, leaving only digital versions in existence. On this side of the bumper, Dan Dicks passes on a warning about where this might lead, while on the return side of the bumper, Glenn Beck applies the principles we just established in our narrative to the danger of paper forms of media disappearing from our civilizational landscape.

Clip (Press for Truth, July 31 2026):

Dan Dicks: This is a warning to everyone who still values the printed word, the physical page, and human knowledge that you can hold in your hands. AI companies are coming for your books, and they will stop at nothing until they turn them into digital pulp for their machines.

These AI companies out there are buying up millions of old books, rare ones, out-of-print ones, specialized titles from used bookstores. And then they're straight up destroying them. Cutting the spines off, shredding the papers. After going through industrial scanners and tossing the originals in the trash, or destroying them. Also they can feed the pure human written text into their large language models. Yes, you heard that correctly. In a world drowning in AI-generated slop, these companies are hunting for the last clean sources of real human knowledge. They're going after the physical books. Because the internet is now polluted with chatbot garbage and training that leads to something researchers call model collapse. Where the AI just starts reinforcing its own mistakes and loses the variety of actual human thought. Court records confirm it. One digital copy for their internal library and the originals gone forever.

And this didn't come out of nowhere. Remember back in 2012 when Encyclopedia Britannica, after 244 years and over 7 million sets sold, announced that they were halting print publication forever. The last paper edition was 2010. They called it moving online. They said it was progressive, convenient, the future. What they really did was began the transfer of the sum of human knowledge into servers controlled by a handful of corporations.

And now the next phase is underway. Destroy the remaining physical evidence so nothing pure is left outside of their machines. The thick volumes that kids once flipped through by chance, wandering from ancient pyramids straight into particle physics, replaced by searchable databases, controlled by whoever owns the servers.

Now they're taking it further, not just stopping the printing, but actively destroying the remaining physical copies so that the machines can learn. Remember George Orwell's 1984? The main character, Winston Smith, works as a clerk in the records department of the Ministry of Truth. His primary job is to rewrite historical documents and news articles so that they align with the party's current political directives.

The past is not fixed. It's continuously edited, altered, and erased to serve the present. Facts are fluid, evidence disappears down the memory hole. And what remains is whatever the ruling power needs it to be today. Sound familiar?

Clip (Glenn Beck, July 31 2026):

Glenn Beck: Right now, there is a machine sitting in a warehouse where a worker is placing a book into it. And the blade comes down. The spine is cut away. The pages race through a scanner. And then the book is not discarded. It's shredded. Not recycled, not damaged in a flood, not lost in a fire. It's destroyed on purpose because now the digital copy is now considered enough.

Now imagine this is happening again and again and again, not a hundred times, not a thousand times, millions of times. They want every book on planet Earth to be ingested into the machine.

Now that in and of itself is fine. That's a fine goal. Okay. Not shredded. Anthropic is one of the largest artificial intelligence companies in the world. And they have launched a project called Project Panama. And its goal is simple and ruthless. Acquire every book in the world that you can, scan it, and destroy the original.

They had already been raked over the coals and fined for training on pirated books. So this time they say we'll buy them legally by the pallet from the wholesalers all over the world. Then the books went into industrial scanners and they were shredded.

Now here's the problem. If you want to do this to new books, fine. You know, there's millions of copies of this book, fine. But Anthropic knew exactly how you would feel about this. So they issued a private confidential internal memo and told the employees to keep this whole operation secret. Quote, we don't want it to be known what we're working on right now. Okay.

So these rare bookstores started getting phone calls. And these are bookstores where the owner might, you know, sell a book a day, maybe. All of a sudden they're getting calls. Do you have these titles? Yeah. You have these 300 titles? Yeah, we'll buy all of them. Bulk orders were arriving. Pallets of books, rare books. Questions asked, nothing answered.

When this was found out, this went to court. You're destroying rare books. Court ruled buying one copy and turning it into a digital copy is fine as long as you destroy the paper one. Keep both, and you have two copies, but you shred the original and you still only have one. So you can do that. Really?

The destruction of the original became the legal argument that made this okay. So when the truth finally came out, men and women who have dedicated their lives to protecting books through protecting history, these rare books, they were obviously outraged.

When I read the story, I was outraged. In some cases, the books that have been destroyed were the single remaining copy left known in the world. And it's gone. I don't know. It bothers me. Does that bother anybody else?

Let me tell you why. First of all, I want America to win the AI race. I want American companies building the smartest systems on earth. Books should help them train these systems. Books are some of the finest thinking humanity has ever done. Compared to the endless flood of machine generated garbage and slop filling the internet, books are civilizations' memories. Scan them, learn from them, preserve them, but never confuse scanning with shredding. Those are two very different acts.

This is something that I have been warning about for a long time. I don't know if you will remember, but I have said it over and over again. Buy paper copies of books. Buy the paper copies of books. A book is more than ink and paper. A book is a witness. Once it's printed, it can't quietly change overnight. Nobody can sneak into your library at night and rewrite page 247. Nobody can update chapter five while you're asleep. The printed book stays exactly the way, and what it said the day it left the press will always be that way. Forever.

A digital file is different. Now I'm not claiming Anthropic is secretly changing books. I'm saying something more simple and much more dangerous. Without the original, there is nothing left to check against the file. The original is the referee. You destroy the referee, and eventually somebody else decides what the score was. Okay? That's not paranoia. This is history.

You cannot destroy the original because any digital copy can be changed, and you have nothing to check it against. History is filled with stories like this. The Nazis burn books in the streets, and everybody cheered. Communists go in, they shred the archives, they rewrote the past so the party could never be wrong. It happened in Russia, it happened in China. Authoritarians, ideologues, it happens in Iran. Every regime that feared free thought has always done the same thing. They understood the simple truth. If you control the record of yesterday, you control what people believe about tomorrow.

And I've been urging you, please buy a hard copy of books. Please, don't just buy them online. If it's an important book, buy a hard copy of it and online if you want. But somebody has to preserve this stuff. We're building a museum in a library in Dallas, Texas. I have now with David Barton and the American Journey Experience. We have the third largest library of the American founding in the world. I want copies in the Library of Congress and the National Archives, but it must be also in the hands of private individuals.

I'm preserving these books and documents because they have to remain in private hands, as well as the public ones. No single government, no single corporation, no algorithm should ever hold the key to the past. Protect the printed page so no one can kill the last witness. Civilizations survive because knowledge is scattered. Thousands of libraries, millions of homes, countless private collections. They have to be there. No king, no corporation, no government, no algorithm, no single point of failure, no library of Alexandria. When that thing burned down, we lost all of man's knowledge and we went into darkness for a very long time.

Never shred rare books, never destroy the originals. Because once the last physical copy disappears, history no longer has a referee. And once that happens, the question is no longer what is true. The question becomes who gets to decide what's true.

Bob Metz:
Well, we already know the answer to that question, as provided by both history and current events. And he said that history is filled with stories like this. Hitler, communists, Russia, China, Iran, every regime that fears free thought has known that if you can control the record of yesterday, you can control what people believe about tomorrow.

And among some of his stories, Beck elaborated on one in particular with a narrative that was way too long to keep in our own edit today. But basically it went like this. In 1526, an English scholar named William Tyndale translated the New Testament from its original text into English, believing that ordinary people should be able to read the scriptures for themselves in their own homes. The king, however, found this to be unacceptable, since he demanded control of how the Bible would be interpreted. And the bishop of London, in order to rid the community of the English versions, came up with a plan, not to raid the printers or to outlaw the books, which really surprised me. But you know what he did? He bought every copy as it went on sale, through a middleman named Augustine Packington, and then they burned them. Beck said only 3,000 copies of the English translations were printed, and today only three survive, thanks to private collectors who hid them from authorities.

So today, when I take a look at my Knox version of the Holy Bible, it takes on a slightly different significance, wherein the first page reads, a translation from the Latin Vulgate in the light of the Hebrew and Greek originals, and then get this, authorized by the Hierarchy of England and Wales and the Hierarchy of Scotland. School edition, 1966, London.

Now how this version might differ from, say, the King James Version of the Bible and others is perhaps something worth exploring, but that's well outside the theme of our discussion for today. The point to be made here is that you don't want state or corporate agendas to monopolize knowledge, narratives, or very significantly, definitions. Because definitions are concepts, and as we've warned many times in the past, concepts are the software of the human mind, upon which all human thought and activity originates. So the last book we might want to see monopolized by corporate and state interests is the dictionary.

For example, you might wake up one day to discover that the definition of, say, experimental gene therapy has been changed to vaccine, or that the definition of woman now includes men who self-identify as such, despite the fact they have penises, which is what distinguishes them as men from women who have vaginas and are capable of bearing children.

And while there are various forms of dictionaries in print, for the most part, and for most definitions, they concur with one another. But what's important here is that you won't wake up tomorrow to find the printed definitions changed to suit someone else's agenda.

Now I have numerous print versions of dictionaries, the most comprehensive being the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is two oversized volumes printed on Bible thin pages with over 2,000 pages in each volume. And on each of those pages are printed four more pages, all shrunken from their original textbook sizes to the point where they are only readable by using the magnifying glass that comes with the casing in which the volumes are stored. And they call that the compact edition.

And then there's my copy of Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary, Unabridged, which is a single volume, again printed on Bible thin paper and exceeding 2,000 pages, but which doesn't require a magnifying glass to read.

And may I say that each of these print editions of these dictionaries, aside from being oversized, weigh a proverbial ton. You can't be leafing through them by holding the book in one hand and turning the pages with the other. And that in turn is why most often, but not always, you'll hear me citing definitions on this show from my handy and holdable copy of Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary, a mere 900 pages thick in a more standard hardcover book size.

And then, of course, there are a handful of political dictionaries and legal dictionaries on my shelf as well. But further to our greater theme, Robert Vaughan passed on his observation that, as a sort of corollary to the notion that if it wasn't recorded, it may as well not have happened, we can understand why records of nefarious deeds are destroyed. Call it the if the records are destroyed, what happens fades from memory principle.

And to illustrate this principle, Robert sent me quite a number of historical examples as compiled by Grok, such as the following few. Qin Shi Huang's book burning 213 BC in China. The first emperor ordered the burning of historical records from rival states and philosophical works of the hundred schools of thought, especially Confucian text, on the advice of Li Si. The explicit goal was to erase competing political philosophies and historical narratives that challenge legalist ideology and Qin supremacy. Practical texts on medicine, agriculture, and divination were spared. Scholars were also persecuted.

And there was the burnings of the Talmud and Jewish text in Paris, 1242 and later, following the disputation of Paris and Papal Orders, Gregory 9th and successors, Royal and Church authorities burned thousands of copies of the Talmud and other Jewish works across Europe. The goal was to suppress Jewish religious and intellectual traditions deemed heretical or dangerous.

And then there was the Spanish Reconquista and Inquisition actions. Widespread burning of Islamic and Jewish books and manuscripts in conquered territories to eliminate non-Christian religious and intellectual traditions.

And there was the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, 1975 to ‘79. Deliberate destruction of records, libraries, and the educated class to erase the prior social order and impose a radical agrarian ideology.

And of course, there were the Nazi book burnings beginning May 1933 in Germany, student-led public burning supported by the regime, targeted works by Jewish authors, Marxists, pacifists, and others labeled un-German. This included political philosophic scientific, including Einstein, and literary texts. The explicit purpose was cultural purification, erasing ideas and knowledge incompatible with Nazi ideology.

And that's just to cite but a few. Grok concludes that these cases share a common pattern. Regimes or religious authorities deliberately targeted written knowledge because it preserved alternative political systems, religious doctrines, scientific methods, or philosophical frameworks they sought to eliminate.

So thus the effort to replace paper books and records with exclusively digital versions becomes quite understandable in the context of history.

And if anyone thinks that once everything is converted to some kind of digital form, that this process of intellectually disarming the individual would at least slow down or cease, think again. In the you will own nothing and be surveilled department, for any of you currently using Windows 10 or Windows 11 on your computers or devices, and I'm one of them, this next audio bite may be the most alarming and disturbing piece of news you'll be hearing today. Posted on the very significant date of October 14, 2025, computer tech Rob Braxman paints an ominous picture about Microsoft and its plans regarding Windows 10 and 11. Talk about closing the windows to technological freedom.

Clip (Rob Braxman Tech, October 14 2025):

Rob Braxman: Many of you who are users of Windows 10 are likely in panic since Windows 10 is about to be classified as end of life by Microsoft. End of life is today, October 14, 2025, a day that will live in tech infamy.

Currently, still 40% of Windows users are still on Windows 10. Likely the main reason you have not updated to Windows 11 is because you cannot. Your old computer is considered junk now, because it doesn't have this thing called a TPM chip. You're being pushed to get a Copilot PC, one that is equipped to handle the AI companion, even though likely you have not come up with a reason to want to use some spying AI in your daily computer life. So you don't want this.

But it's worse. Microsoft has basically been systematically exerting dominance over its users to the point that you question now if your machine is yours or if it is Microsoft’s and you're just paying for it. But in recent years, with the advent of Windows 11, I have to say that Microsoft has truly gone crazy. And the current direction of Windows 11 tells me that it is time for all of you to go.

You are not a Microsoft slave. You own your device. Take your freedom back, dump Windows, otherwise it will own you. Microsoft has plans for you, and you will not like those plans.

One needs to ask why there's so much resistance. I've never encountered so much resistance to moving to a newer version, and much of it likely is because the users cannot upgrade to Windows 11. Microsoft itself is blocking them. In order for many users to move to Windows 11, they have to buy newer computers. And the justification for this on the Microsoft side is twofold. First is to push for this security chip called a TPM chip, which is lacking on old computers, and which I will tell you now is a huge risk to privacy. And the second justification for Microsoft is to encourage more people to use Windows Copilot, which creates AI capable computers. Again, a massive risk to privacy.

But there's more. New computers using Windows 11 now turn on BitLocker, which is disk encryption by default. You might think this is a good thing, but not really. Windows has been forcing us to use cloud services constantly with features like OneDrive to ensure that you keep your files on Microsoft servers, and now they're pushing the new Windows backup. Or how Microsoft keeps forcing updates that you cannot turn off. All these approaches by Microsoft, you don't want them. It's my machine. I paid for it. Microsoft didn't pay for it.

So as I will explain in many details here, Microsoft is definitely not interested in respecting your rights to have other things on your computer, even in separate partitions. I have had multiple instances of Windows wiping out entire Linux partitions and even a data only partition just because it didn't recognize the format.

This is extremely aggravating. I have lost so much data from unexpected events like doing a Windows update and having it wipe the dual boot files and then continuing on to overriding partition data to wipe Linux completely. But generally, this lack of certainty to what Windows will do is a dangerous roll of the dice for people who make a living off computers.

One of the biggest changes that Microsoft made is to not allow updates to Windows 11 from Windows 10 if your computer doesn't have this security chip called a TPM, which is an acronym for trusted platform module. You don't need to worry about what it means. It's a security chip. The basic functionality of the TPM, as with all other security chips, is that cryptographic keys used for encryption are not kept in the open in accessible memory or hard drive where third parties can potentially have access to them.

What would have been a better option is to be able to insert your own security chip in your computer, similar to a YubiKey, where you can plug it or remove it at will depending on what you're doing. Then at least you're given a choice. Now there's no choice. Windows 11 requires a TPM, and Windows 11 will track your Microsoft ID together with your device ID based on the TPM. New software utilizes this now.

Just to make sure that they have full control over your machine, Microsoft, of course, forces updates on you. All these are under the guise of cybersecurity, of course, and I'm sure all these cybersecurity experts will all chime in and say that I need all this. And these forced updates have caused me massive problems. One of the well-known incidents was when Microsoft overwrote the boot instructions, which in my case is set up to be dual boot. I can choose to boot Linux or Windows. I'm primarily a Linux user. Then it completely overwrites the boot instruction, so now I can't boot to Linux.

So usually I have to always put a delay on Windows updates, which you can only delay up to two weeks. This gives me an allowance to prepare for a catastrophe. But that's the limit, two weeks. So I have to find some time within a two-week window to do an update. I don't want to be in the middle of an important project and be shut down just because I booted to zucking Windows. For my specific use, I rarely want a Windows update. If some specific major security thing is announced, I would like to be given the choice. Tell me the risk and I'll decide. But I guess it is no longer your computer when you run Windows 11.

The real objective is AI. So let me show you this again in case you forgot.

Microsoft Spokesman: Well, I mean, I guess the first thing to say is that we are on a mission to create a true AI companion. And to me, an AI companion is one that can hear what you hear and see what you see. And live life essentially alongside you. You know, your AI companion will be able to remember everything that you've talked about session to session, understand the content of the web pages that you browse, and be able to talk to you just like I'm talking to you now. So it's going to have this seamless fluid, very, very smooth conversational interaction.

Rob Braxman: Yes, the purpose of this is to immerse yourself in the see what you see technology. For the computer to get to know you intimately. For the computer to be a copy of your brain. So the way this is intended to work, the vast majority of you have to be running on a Windows Copilot PC with Windows 11. And if you have this set up, then Windows Recall starts recording all your activity by screenshots every few seconds. Then the AI analyzes what's happening on screen and notates it and stores that information on the hard drive. In which case Windows 11 will have a complete history of your life.

Now of course philosophically speaking putting your entire life on a computer changes the way you use a computer. Suddenly you have to be super interested in cybersecurity because you need to protect your device in ways you didn't have to do before. Makes sense. This information used to be private in your brain now it is on your computer and now you have to lock it up with all this security BS. Did you need this? The answer of course is just to say no. Thank you. We're not given a choice so make the choice and not use Windows 11 unless you believe in this AI companion BS.

All the cybersecurity protections put in by Microsoft are here to take away all your privacy. So install Linux and tell Microsoft to go zuck themselves.

Clip (Castle S03E01):

What the hell were they into? It's like a bad joke a sculptor, a vending machine salesman and a chemistry teacher walk into a burlesque bar.

Yeah only we don't have a punchline.

Other than they made a bunch of money and got themselves killed.

Made a bunch of money.

What?

A sculptor who works with metal, a chemist and a vending machine operator I think I know what our victims were up to.

What are you looking for?

Take a look at the serial numbers of those bills.

They're the same.

These bills are all pre-1998.

That's before they redesigned the currency.

That's our punchline. That's how these people are connected in counterfeiting the hardest thing to make is the paper. But they had all the paper they needed they had an unlimited supply of $1 bills.

From the vending machines.

And those chemicals we found on our victims' bodies?

Were used to whitewash the singles in order to make blank banknotes.

A procedure requiring the expertise of a chemist. And what do counterfeiters do with blank banknotes?

Print larger denominations for which they need a metal press plate.

And who better to provide that than a sculptor.

Bob Metz:
And all to simply create a paper product counterfeit though it may be.

You're listening to Just Right broadcasting around the world and online.

And just as a piece of trivia the image accompanying this week's show as posted online was a screen grab of the very counterfeit bills that our characters were looking at. Now in addressing the technology behind producing paper, here's a very brief summary from the history of paper.net and I quote Paper is a thin material produced from natural or very rarely artificial fibers pressed together into solid structure after they were loosened in a hot water. This recipe was established more than 2,000 years ago in ancient China and from that time it changed very little enhanced by occasional advances of chemistry which caused the creation of countless variations of paper types.

Today we are using paper all around us and not only to write or paint on it but also as a widely versatile material that can be used almost anywhere. Asian cultures use it as food ingredient. We interact with it anytime when we buy something in stores, building materials for houses and various installations, cleaning products and much more end quote.

By the way do you remember how at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns and panic about shortages people seem to fear a shortage of paper towels and toilet paper more than running out of food.

But the site offers quite a detailed history of how paper was originally produced and distributed and concludes with the ominous statement that many governments try desperately to regulate its production, recycling, reduce effects of pollution, deforestation and other environmental hazards that accompany industrial paper production.

Well knowing full well that paper production does not contribute to deforestation and other environmental hazards as we have detailed many times in the past the real key villain being attacked by governments here is not just paper but industrial production. Remember we're dealing with the left.

And now turning our attention to the whole Windows crisis I have to say most emphatically that what Windows is doing with this companion technology is repulsive to me. “We are on a mission to create a true AI companion that can hear and see what you do and live life beside you and be able to talk to you.” Are you kidding?

Computer programs are not companions, nor are they intelligent or able to appreciate anything human, to which I can only say, danger, danger, Will Robinson.

The idea of the operating system, taking a screen grab of your device every few seconds would mean that Microsoft can see your wallpaper, any photos or videos you may watch or produce, see your open written documents and banking transactions, and just about anything that can possibly be displayed on your screen. This is anything but the security they keep lying to us about.

And to demonstrate how digital products and services keep getting worse, while consumer control and ownership of those products becomes increasingly elusive, on this side of our upcoming bumper, Paul Chato expands on this intentional agenda, citing a concept he discovered called encrapification, although crap wasn't the exact word he used. And on the return side of the bumper, King Trout takes the discussion to its ultimate conclusion that all of these trends away from paper and from things physical are all about destroying property and our ability to own things.

Clip (Call Me Chato, March 6 2026):

Paul Chato: Hello, denizens of the internet. I just found this hilarious video by the Norwegian Consumers Council called EnShitification.

Speaker: My job is to make things shit. I take things that are perfectly fine. And I make them worse. Yes. Yes!

Paul Chato: By way of Louis Rossmann, one of the heroes of the right to repair movement. Right to repair has been a battle for at least two decades, as more and more companies lock you out of the things you've bought, like smartphones and and believe it or not, farm equipment.

In our realm, our entertainment realm of people who enjoy collecting movies and things, haven't we purchased or tried to purchase movies and videos online thinking that we own them? Or naively thought that we would have at least access to them in perpetuity. Ha ha ha. Then poof gone with some weak apology from the service. Wait, you'll just get the DVD versions, but that they're suddenly gone too. Can't buy them.

Digital products and services keep getting worse in their new report, breaking free pathways to a fair technological future. The Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into Enshitification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide. Those are the words of the council, but I'm not so sure. I only see things getting worse.

What's missing from it is how streaming has changed the movie and TV landscape. People are worried about Paramount buying out Warner Brothers. Disney is pretty much killed off 20th Century Fox. How is this good?

The fact remains the movie and TV business is not the robust experience it once was. Yes, it's true. The decline has been precipitous and consolidation was inevitable between the billions spent on trying to find that mythical modern audience, and of course, the aforementioned streaming services that destroyed the aftermarket business, which sustained the studio for decades. And it was so smart of them to get rid of that. I can't tell you. I'm sure they're thrilled too.

Switching between the streaming apps with your remote, the lag between switching, the different interfaces of each streaming service. How? How is this better than the cable experience? Except they didn't provide video on demand.

Maybe consolidation will at the very least cut down on the number of streaming services. We are looking at a future with fewer theaters. That's inevitable.

The Norwegian video touches on automobiles, but perhaps there's no better example of Enshitification than cars. My son is a mechanic, and he'll tell you the entire experience has gotten way worse, much of it because of government rules and regulations. The electronic nannies, the safety features, the cost of repairs. Try buying a simple cheap new small car. They don't exist. At least not in North America.

Of course, the worst thing to happen to cars is that large LCD infotainment system, especially the ones with no physical buttons. Most people can't even set the clock on their microwave, and you're now asking them to futz around with a computer while they're driving? Who reads the owner's manual for their cars? Hell, they don't even supply an owner's manual anymore. You have to download that.

Many cars now demand that your mechanic has to pay to connect your car to the internet to fix it, which is passed on to you, of course. This, of course, is meant to force you to take your car to your horrible dealer to fix it. And they don't even fix cars anymore, really. They diagnose a problem that could be traced to any, you know, one of five different things in the car, and instead of spending time finding the one thing that needs fixing, they just change all five and charge you. That's called parts cannon. The boy has many stories where the initial diagnosis was wrong, the five things didn't need replacing, and he found that that was a $100 part that needed to be replaced.

Appliances that need a smartphone to fully operate it, like refrigerators and washer dryers.

TVs no longer come with manual controls under the bezel anymore, right? Nope. Only the remote control that you've misplaced, and now you can't watch TV.

What happens when you die to all the pictures you've put into the cloud that you're paying monthly for the expanded storage memory for? Did you put your password in your will? Wait, oh no, it's got two-factor identification. It's going to text you your security code to your phone while you're dead, that no one can access, that no one even knows where your phone is, or even if it's charged anymore, and maybe it was buried with you.

Be seeing you.

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Clip (King Trout, July 31 2026):

Have you noticed that we're quietly losing the ability to own things? Not houses. The market has been screwed for years at this point. Not cars, either. Those are quickly becoming subscription services. No, I mean something a little more subtle. Movies, music, books, video games, TV shows. Things that for most of modern history you could buy once and own forever. Now, everything lives in the cloud. Everything requires a subscription. Everything depends on an internet connection. And perhaps most importantly, all of it could disappear.

We've been told this is progress. Streaming is more convenient. Digital is cleaner. Why do you need to physically own something? But here's the question no one seems to ask. Who benefits when we don't physically own anything anymore? Because this wasn't just a technological shift, this was a business decision. And it was a business decision that has quietly changed our relationship with entertainment forever.

I'm King Trout. Join me on today's episode of the Quickly Disappearing Format of Physical Media. Why it's happening, why some of the biggest companies in the world want it to happen, why it's probably not a very good thing, and why preserving physical media could help to preserve human culture.

Let's start with the obvious question. Why are DVDs and Blu-rays disappearing from shelves? Is it because people stop buying them? Honestly, kinda. That's only part of the story though. The bigger reason is that physical media existing isn't part of the business strategy that companies want anymore. Think about it. You buy a Blu-ray for $25, and they only get your money once. That's it. If instead you wanted to watch that same movie and you paid like, I don't know, $15 a month for a subscription service where it's streaming, they get your money $15 at a time indefinitely.

Unknown Speaker: Apple TV Plus. Oh boy, yeah. ESPN Plus? Yeah. CNN Plus? Yep. Keanu Reeves Plus? Yep. Fisher Price Plus? Yep.

King Trout: Everybody wanted their own little kingdom. And instead of selling you the movie, they'd just sell you access to the movie. Once access became the product in question, those physical copies became competition. Even Sony, one of the few companies that physically manufactures Blu-ray players has drastically reduced their production of physical Blu-rays, moving towards a more digital market. This isn't because nobody wants physical media. The demand still exists. It's just not the demand that generates the most predictable profits.

And some of you are probably thinking, so what? Streaming is incredibly convenient. Then I agree with you. Like obviously I stream things. Everybody and their grandma does. Convenience isn't the problem though. Ownership is. When you purchase a Blu-ray, you own it forever. Nobody can remotely delete it, nobody can alter it after the point at which you purchased it, and nobody can remove it from your possession just because the licensing agreement changed.

Streaming, on the other hand, does not work that way. We've already seen countless examples of purchased digital copies of movies that disappeared overnight because the distribution rights changed. Imagine if libraries worked this way. Like, oh sorry, that book you're looking for wasn't profitable. Gone from existence. That's essentially what these streaming platforms are doing. And because these streaming services constantly rotate content depending on these licensing agreements, you'd never truly know what's permanent. Because in effect, nothing is.

A few years ago, Amazon actually did this to a book on their Kindle services when they realized that their licensing rights had expired, so they removed it from people's digital libraries so that they couldn't read it anymore, a book that they thought they had purchased. No, no, no, they were just renting the rights to read it. That book? 1984. Good god we're reaching levels of irony I didn't know were possible.

Even worse in some ways, in my opinion, than having a product you believed you purchased taken away without your permission, is that these companies can change what you've already purchased. Films have been edited, music has been taken away, scenes have been changed, dialogue has been changed. If you own a physical copy, guess what? You still got the original, baby. If you're streaming, they can do whatever the hell they want with it.

Here's where I think some people are kind of underestimating what's happening. Physical media isn't just plastic discs, it's kind of an archive of human history in a way. Think of all the movies that we have access to today that only exist because someone kept a physical copy. Historians estimate that roughly 75% of American films from the silent era are gone. Forever. Nobody intentionally erased this very important part of American cinema history. They just didn't think it was worth preserving.

Entire generations and edits of certain films have only existed because collectors and archives have preserved physical copies. Digital only media is incredibly fragile. It feels permanent because it's everywhere right now, but we're literally the flip of a switch away from entire catalogs of films being potentially lost forever.

Physical media also protects artistic intent. A Blu-ray purchased in 2008 still contains the same film from 2008. Streaming platforms can and do replace those versions of films at any given point in time.

Fortunately, the situation isn't hopeless. Physical media isn't gone, it's just shrinking. Those are two very different things, and the simplest thing people can do to prevent this from happening is to simply purchase physical media.

The same thing happens with music too. I love music. I love music, all genres of music. A perfect example of that is like physically own a CD copy of the Grammy award-winning soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou, because if you look it up on streaming services, the rights are split between like eight different platforms. You can't listen to the entire album online in one go. You own the CD, no problem. Nothing's changed in 30 years. Or 20 years. I don't know when the movie came out.

If you have a collection and you don't want to keep it around anymore, or maybe you know, your hoarder uncle passes away, donate those films. Maybe that's the last copy that's in existence. You never know.

Support film preservation organizations.

If you have children, introduce them to physical ownership. The value in owning something and taking care of it versus trusting a megacorporation to have it available for you as you pay them your monthly fee.

And maybe most importantly, stop treating convenience like it's the most important thing in the world. Convenience is wonderful until it becomes dependence.

And most importantly, we're trusting a handful of mega corporations to preserve a large part of our cultural history. History suggests that's probably not a great idea.

Physical media doesn't care about quarterly earnings. Doesn't care what company merged with what company this week. You pull the disc out 20 years after you purchased it, put it in the DVD player, and bing bang boom, same movie as it was 20 years ago.

Sometimes old technology isn't obsolete. Sometimes it's a little piece of freedom.

Bob Metz:
It seems to me that the biggest takeaway from all of this is that digital only media is incredibly fragile. And I'm beginning to experience some anxiety around that reality myself on a personal level. Because right now I've got some external hard drives on which all of our family printed photos, films, and videos and slides have been digitized into their various formats. And while they are on a physical hard drive, the files on that drive are still, nevertheless, digital. I recall digitizing all of our videos into MPEG-2 formats, which was the standard for burning your own physical DVDs. But already, both that format and physical DVD players are falling out of use. And fortunately, I still have all of the original print photos I scanned, but the same cannot be said for the original 8 and 16mm films taken very early in my life, or for the subsequent video files, all of which were created by and dependent on the technology of their day. Which may be why King Trout said that sometimes old technology isn't obsolete, sometimes it's a little piece of freedom. Well, at least as long as that technology is still functional and not in disrepair or obsolete.

Just as a personal example illustrating the benefit of having something physical in terms of ensuring online security, you'll recall earlier on that Rob Braxman warned of the threat to cyber security where Windows 11 does a screen capture every few seconds and stores each of those images. Each month in my administrative role regarding the Freedom Party of Ontario, I have to go online to Freedom Party's bank in order to debit the various accounts of individuals who give monthly financial contributions to the party. And when I do so, in addition to the usual passwords necessary to access the account, I also have to type in a six-digit code generated by a separate physical device, which the bank provided me with. And each time I push the button on that device, a six-digit number appears, but never the same one twice. That way, even if someone should have a screen grab showing that number, they still wouldn't be able to use it to hack the site.

So that's just one small example of how something physical, not directly connected to the internet can play a critical role, ironically, in protecting internet security.

So you can see the challenge that lies before us. How to benefit from convenience and influence that's open to us through the digital world while preserving individual independence and personal private ownership of things both physical and digital. Which brings us back to the paper principle, a technology that requires no other technology to access it. And while no one is suggesting that the use of paper will resolve the problem of preserving audios and videos or the like, it is clear that paper is a superior technology in this respect, which is why it will always have a use and value irreplaceable by any other technology.

Clip (Castle S03E14):

It's a winning ticket. Hard to believe a little slip of paper's worth over 100 mil.

Bob Metz:
Well, it might not be worth over 100 million dollars, but you can write your own winning ticket by joining us again next week when we will continue our journey in the right direction. And until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right, think right, and be right back here. We'll see you then.

Clip (Hogan’s Heroes S01E01):

This is fantastic.

It's a little bare, but it's comfortable.

Ha! Welcome to the mint.

You make German money.

By the bale.

Is it good enough to pass?

Confidentially we're having a little trouble in the real stuff, the ink has a tendency to run.