Correction:

I meant to speak of my refusal to buy downloadable media like tv shows, movies, video games or music.

As penance, I shall force myself to write maven config for old Java projects.

> ‘How do you burn a CD?’ It’s something that was common for us growing up, but that’s knowledge that’s being lost as everything is sort of transitioning to digital.”

This paragraph is using a colloquial but wrong definition of the word "digital" - in this context it seems to mean "online audio/video distribution".

This is wrong because CDs, by definition, hold digital data. Some of us who are old enough to have lived through the transition from unapologetically analog audio media - vinyl records and magnetic cassette tape - to digital, optical compact discs. That was the real transition to digital, not the transition from digital physical media to digital online downloads (both are still digital). Likewise, the transition from analog broadcast TV and analog VHS tapes to digital TV and VCD/DVD/BD was less than 20 years ago. (Side note: LaserDisc stores video analogly but audio digitally.)

Digital is a word that fundamentally contrasts with analog - where analog means infinite variation, no resistance to noise, and imperfect copies. Digital simply means being composed of integers, which further implies finite information and allows perfect copies.

The misuse of the word digital to mean superfluous things is a mockery to the monumental human achievement in inventing and perfecting digital machines and methods of storing/transmitting images and sounds, being much higher quality than previous analog technologies (e.g. photographic film) and allowing information to be delivered reliably across wider space and time.

Digital does not imply electronic, new and high-tech, virtual, or communications-based (as opposed to transporting matter-based recording media). Mechanical LEGO logic is digital. DNA is digital and very old. Alphabets are digital (we agree today there are exactly 26 letters in English). The telegraph network was digital and messages were relayed by humans. A "virtual" meeting involving digital videoconferencing could just as well be held using analog NTSC video channels; the fact that digital technology happened to be used doesn't define the virtual meeting. "Digital marketing" is understood as doing business on the web/Internet through electronic online communications, but I could argue that a paper brochure designed on a digital computer is also "digital marketing".

I know I am just one small example, but their decision to cheat me out of a few dollars has cost them hundreds in subscription fees.