The right surroundings used to be the bachelor pad in all its swingy-dingy splendor. In the premiere editorial for Playboy, founding editor Hugh Hefner announced that the Playboy reader, unlike the Esquire gent, wasn’t a hunting-and-fishing Hemingway he-man avid to camp out under the stars and cast the perfect fly. “We don’t mind telling you in advance—we plan on spending most of our time inside,” proclaimed Hefner. “We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” Yes, nothing goes with a nightcap quite like a little Nietzsche deftly massaged into the frontal lobes. According to Gabbard, the trouble arose from fetishizing one’s musical tastes, marching them front and center and parading them like a set of encyclopedias. “A serious devotion to collecting may … hinder a man from acquiring the regular company of a sympathetic woman, and not just because so many record collectors end up with the unkempt look of the nerd,” he cautioned. An overgrown man-child and his precious collection can become a closed-loop co-dependency that functions as a moat. Gabbard cites the scene in Barry Levinson’s Diner in which Daniel Stern’s Shrevie freaks out at his wife (Ellen Barkin, before she got scary) for misfiling a James Brown album, which for him violates the building code of his very being. You wouldn’t put Charlie Parker in with rock ’n roll? he asks his wife, to which she responds with innocent blasphemy, Who’s Charlie Parker? “Jazz! Jazz!,” Shrevie explodes as the ceiling of his universe comes crashing down. “He was the greatest jazz-saxophone player that ever lived.” Today such a couple would have to find something else to quarrel about, probably finances, because iPod software can organize a music library any way one wishes with no risk of an outsider’s slotting an artist onto the wrong shelf. Some bloggers even post regular shuffle lists of their iPod listening to advertise the eclecticism of their tastes. Any shuffle list that doesn’t include the Ting Tings appears underdressed. (According to Emily Gordon, the editor in chief of Print magazine and a trusted informant, the real bragging rights in popcult superiority now belong to those who snag and collect “set lists” from hipster-accredited bands and have them framed. If they’re autographed, so much the cooler.)

The video library has undergone a similar purge diet as iTunes and Netflix downloads have made the trip to the video store staffed by the scroungy cast of Kevin Smith’s Clerks a schlep of the past. The video library, unlike the vinyl collection, involves too recent a technology to acquire the nostalgic aura of paradise lost and regained. As with a neatly stacked CD collection, even the most adventuresome DVD collection appears paltry because a guest has to squint and/or twist his head at an acute angle to read the tiny print on the sides of the plastic cases; it has all the wonderment of checking the ingredients on soup-can labels. An ancillary victim of the film-library thin-down is the framed movie poster that used to grin from so many walls when I first came to New York. Duck into someone’s apartment and you might have been met with the poster for the Radio City Music Hall spectacular for Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Robert De Niro skulking through Times Square with his full-bodied scowl in Taxi Driver, or some French New Wave classic exhaling its grainy romanticism. But as more and more films are fetched from the ether, the movie poster loses its memento value, its Pop vintage. What will survive in the entertainment bunker are the definitive boxed sets jammed with extras (mini-posters, booklets, director’s cuts, bonus discs) that preserve film and TV classics in Proustian density: the “Ford at Fox” collection (corralling half of director John Ford’s output for the Fox studio spread across 21 discs—auteurist’s heaven), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Sopranos, and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Chosen Collection” (40 discs suitable for any crypt). They attest to the foundational tastes of the owner without having to be viewed in their stupefying entirety.

As all this space opens up—as the tokens of our cultural snobbery or keen connoisseurship (take your pick, depending on the degree of pretentious wankery you attribute to others) recede into the hideaway shelves and flash drives—what will refill it? “After two decades of defining ourselves in terms of our possessions,” Holly Brubach wrote recently in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, “we now need to figure out who we would be without them.” I suspect that once this downturn plateaus and shrinks in the rearview mirror, we’ll just stock up on other possessions, which will be arrayed and arranged to show off not our personal aesthetics or expensive whims but our ethics—our progressive virtues. A place where we could play host to Barack and Michelle and feel assured they’d find nothing amiss.

James Wolcott is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.