My entertainment experience is so much better than my friends’ because of piracy. I use torrents, and store my media and it’s made my life so great since I got into this a little over a year ago. I’ve seen shows that none of my friends have seen. Lately I’ve been into police dramas and there’s an incredible series from France called Le Bureau des Légendes, which is phenomenal. There’s one from the UK that I just finished called Line of Duty that was also great. I saw an Estonian period film that is entertaining called Apteeker Melchior – it was freeleech for a short while, so I grabbed it.
My friends who pay for Netflix, Disney+ and all the the other streaming channels watch the all same garbage TV. I can see that too, but I get access to these other amazing films and shows. I’ve not even mentioned the books, audiobooks and music.
The pirate’s life is a great life and it’s the life for me. Arrrr.
It’s been an interesting full loop. The first rise of P2P file sharing was obviously much more convenient than the combination of broadcast TV and slow-to-release and expensive physical media and the legal fight against it proved pretty useless, beyond shutting down the most obvious for-profit services. Then streaming tipped the scale of convenience, where it was simpler and easier to have an affordable Netflix account than it was to dig through sketchy sites to seek out torrents and only find out later that half of them were actually gay porn.
The history is well known, the question, I guess, is what the next loop around the enshittification path will look like. Are we always doomed to run in circles seeking the optimal experience or can we agree on what it is and deliver it in a somewhat stable fashion at some point?
I get the feeling it’s going to be constantly running around in circles. The corporations are constantly looking for ways to enshittify things to improve profits, but too much and people don’t want to deal with it. They’re constantly looking for that balance in a landscape that’s constantly changing, and so constantly experimenting with what they can get away with.