Kids my age were born too late to make mixtapes, so instead we burned CDs—a subversive act of Promethean proportion that put the power of creation in our hands.

(At least for the 74 minutes a single CD-R could hold.)

Then came the important work of naming: Some scrawled haphazard liner notes in Sharpie across the CD's face; others slid, with a painstaking, surgical precision, the tip of an X-Acto knife along its reflective surface. Either way, we made our mark.

The CD carried our fingerprints, its data our DNA.