From the Editors: Sept. 2026
To have and to hold
What does it mean to own something these days?
Increasingly, products that used to have a place in our homes, on our shelves, or in our collections are becoming subscribable, rentable, intangible, and therefore truly unowned. How many services do you currently subscribe to that give you nothing concrete in return? How many more internet-based products are going to go this way? How many artists, writers, and musicians are being raked over the coals? How many more data centers do we have to build to support all of it? Does anyone actually want this?
And how do you get your information these days?
How do you learn about local events, businesses, products, artists? On community corkboards in local businesses? By picking up a paper copy of the Erie Reader at your local stop? Through flyers handed out at shows or pasted up on telephone poles? Or is it more likely on social media? Where artists, musicians, and business owners have to become content creators in order to get their posts noticed? Where so much clickbait turns into ragebait turns into people turning on each other in an imaginary world? Where every application comes with a little AI devil on its shoulder asking you if you want to make this easier, faster, more productive? Aren't we all just so damn sick of it?
You might notice something a little bit different about this September issue of the Erie Reader. What has historically been known as our Back to School issue has undergone a little bit of a throwback. We're instead calling it the Back to (Old) School issue, and taking the opportunity to celebrate the feeling that comes from a job well done, done with our hands. Our cover this month, compiled and photographed by our very own award-winning graphic designer Nick Warren, is a physical, actual, real-life corkboard with physical, actual, real-life flyers, stickers, posters, and ads pinned to it and then photographed. It is the first Erie Reader cover EVER without any superimposed digital graphics or copy.
You'll see this theme throughout the issue – in a feature by Larry Wheaton in which he gets to know a handful of physical media collectors and why they think it's important to preserve the notion of ownership, to hold their owned objects in their hands. A feature by the aforementioned Nick Warren about a band in Erie who has recorded their music onto all the different forms of physical media. Edwina tries a day of unplugging from the internet and finds herself a little more plugged in to real life. And yours truly took a step back in time to the mid-'90s, reading through 15 issues of a local zine called R.T.R., produced as a labor of love for the local music scene, wanting to make something, put it out into the world, and to help the Erie community become a little more connected in a time before the internet convinced us it could do it better.
In the introduction of that zine feature (that you can find on page 27), I paint a picture of what life was like as a teenager in the '90s. And to avoid falling into the "kids these days" trap (because I often find myself right there with the kids), I will say that the way I interacted with the world, with physical media, with other people, and really the way my brain worked was just different back then (how many people these days can relate to thinking about the post they're going to make about something while they're actively experiencing it? That doesn't feel quite normal).
The only way that we can combat the increasingly digitized, dehumanized, intangible world of all-things-internet-all-the-time – is to stop. Back up. Ask yourself if there isn't a slightly more difficult way to do something, but a way that will ultimately feel so much better. Rather than the knee-jerk of instantly sharing what we experience on social media, what if we didn't? What if we got off the hamster wheel that gets us nowhere, exhausts us, and offers us nothing in return?
The Erie Reader has been singing this song for 15 years now – we are stubbornly free (our subscription model is completely good-faith, donor-based) and stubbornly committed to remaining a tangible piece of print media. As the world speeds up faster and faster, the Erie Reader invites you to slow down for a moment – pick up a paper and read words written by humans, look at art made by humans, and feel a little more human in that moment.
The way that physical media succeeds in an increasingly digital world is when people support it – buy that CD or record from the band that you love and give money directly to them (I promise you they will just use it to make more music that you'll love), buy that piece of art from the maker selling it, print out flyers and hand them out to kids at the mall to advertise your band's show, and, if there ever was an issue to do it, PICK UP AN ERIE READER IN PRINT. Especially if you're used to reading our stories online, give flipping through an Erie Reader over a cup of coffee at your Sunday breakfast table a try. Talk to your loved ones about something you learned or remembered or admired within it. Slow down a minute and hold that paper in your hands – it belongs to you now.
