Five Dollars at Half Price Books

I recently sat down with my family for a movie night. I was set on “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” after a family discussion about the Odyssey recently and the journey to finding a way to watch it was spectacular. First, it’s not streaming anywhere currently and I refuse to pay $17 for a movie I don’t technically own on Apple TV or another service. So, I stepped out and found a copy of the DVD for $5 at my local Half Price Books. It was their only copy.

The whole experience runs parallel to how I found the movie in the first place: at a Blockbuster with my dad. We were deciding between two movies and truth be told, I don’t even remember what the second movie was. But we chose George Clooney and I don’t remember a movie that my dad and I enjoyed more watching together. We both went into it blind and came out of the experience with a deeper bond. The music really sold it for both of us.

There’s a reason the Coens hung their movie on the Odyssey. It’s the original argument that the detours are the story.

In a lot of ways, I really yearn for those days of discovery. A fork in the path that when you come out of the other end, you have a deeper, shared experience with another person. In the age of automation, AI and the impacts of it on our culture, I hear a lot about Dead Internet Theory.

It’s the concept that the internet is no longer driven by humans; it’s artificial, and automation has taken over all web traffic and content, and for most, hence its name, this represents the death of the Internet as we know it. Without human involvement, the internet becomes a dead space, void of life and the things that made it quirky and wonderful. Every interaction is reduced to an algorithm and catered to your interests only.

When I think about it, it conjures the image of Ouroboros for me. It’s an ancient symbol, depicting a snake eating its own tail. It symbolizes the cycle of life… death and rebirth.

I found the album that defined my teenage years, Ocean Avenue by Yellowcard, by pulling it off a shelf because I liked the cover. I can still sing it verbatim. and I’ll concede the obvious: algorithms are better at putting music in front of you, and it isn’t even close. But volume was never what made that album mine. I bought a lot of bad records that year, and the bad ones are load-bearing.

What I miss isn’t human curation. It’s the friction. The $17 I refused to pay, the one copy on the shelf, the drive to Half Price Books. The payoff is lost without a cost, and an algorithm’s whole job is to cut it out.

So we watched the DVD. I made malts (my wife’s favorite). I sang along badly much to their chagrin. Somewhere it occurred to me that I’m in my dad’s position, creating a new bond with my family.

I don’t know that humans will prevail against a dead internet. What I know is smaller: when the frictionless option asked nothing of me, I got in the car instead. Not because I’m principled. Because I wanted the version that was mine. If there’s a rebirth in there somewhere, I think that’s what it looks like. One person at a time, paying for something they didn’t have to.

Everett doesn’t just want any brand of pomade. He wants his brand, and it costs him the entire movie to hold that line.

I’m a Dapper Dan Man