I may wave the flag for higher audio quality, and there is a small cadre of listeners out there who still spin vinyl or high-quality CDs, but of course, we live in Fast Food Nation and this Fast Foodness of our existence bleeds into all realms.
We live in a land where we eat pink slime and say it tastes good. We will pretty much eat anything as long as it comes in a nice, colorful package, and it's easy to swallow, and delivered to us blisteringly fast, and well, yes, of course it's CHEAP!
And we buy from companies that tell us they always deliver goods at the lowest price. Doesn't matter where it's made, or what indignities workers endure to get us those low prices.
And yes, MP3s figure in this story too. Think of MP3s as fast food for the ears. They do the job. They satisfy our hunger for sound. But they are a degraded form. Still you can get nourishment, hell, you can get sonically glutted from all those little MP3s.
We fill our bodies with degraded, empty calories, food that actually clogs our arteries, and poisons us with cancer-causing substances. We buy cheaply made, throw-away products made in sweatshops and "slave camps"and we listen to sound files that are burned and copied countless times over on little tinny earbuds that barely convey the sound.
It is a degraded, false honky paradise. And we tell ourselves that everything is great and we have it all!