There's apparently already an entire generation who hasn't ever used a computer-like device that isn't locked down. I mean all those kids with iPads. They are simply unaware that there could be something better, something more empowering.

Back when oink.me.uk was a thing, I had amassed a (what I considered to be) massive collection of music. Tens of thousands of songs, 500gb hard drive entirely filled with music. It had everything and I downloaded every new thing that looked remotely interesting.

It was wonderful until that hard drive failed. I didn't have a backup (because of course I didn't, that hard drive was expensive and the cloud didn't exist). After that, I never did amass another massive collection of music like that.

So in a sense, yes, I kind of do now treat most media as ephemeral and don't place too much value on maintaining copies of them. There's always interesting music to listen to and books to read and video games to play. Having a physical or digital copy of it hoarded away in a hard disk locally simply isn't that important to me.

If something that matters to me disappears from whatever service I use, I'll just download it after the fact. If I don't care enough to do that, it wasn't that important.