It is beginning to seem as though it's pretty safe to say that the real "glory days" of Internet piracy are all but gone. I must say that I, personally, type this statement with a heavy heart . I am not really glad, I'll admit, that Internet piracy seems to have taken a serious blow. Not at all. I'm angry. I'm upset. I am grieving. And I think I have been grieving -albeit a bit in denial -for a number of years now. This is because, so far as I see it, Internet piracy has been in a bit of a danger zone for about 3 years or so. It is only now, however, that I am personally coming to complete terms with this. That I am admitting it....
When I was a kid, I can remember thinking that the Internet was altogether too fun, and too easy, to really last. As a dreadfully poor person whose sole possession basically was the Internet, all of the movies, tv shows, books, and songs I would "stea;" (along with friends of course) always seemed too good to be true. Oftentimes, when I would really stop and think about it, it would start to seem like I was living in some sort of surrealist dream, some type of "Big Rock Candy Mountains" style fantasy.
The Candy mountains of course, this is a reference to an old song from the Great Depression era, written from the perspective of a hobo who has finally found the paradise all beaten men dream of: A place where "cigarettes grow on trees", and where "the jails are made of tin, so you can walk right out, as soon as you are in..." The Internet very much seemed precisely like this place, for everything except food and drink, for essentially the entire duration of my childhood, my teenage years, and my very early 20s. The idea was sometimes discussed, around the proverbial text messaging campfire, that it all might one day slow down...but it didn't seem entirely possible. There was no way it could ever end entirely. There was no way!
But then, I don't remember precisely when, things started to get funkier bit by bit. The great pirate sites where everyone got the torrents from, for starters, started to drop like flies, and then you would hear that they were being "monitored". Torrents that you would once download and seed for others to download , all day long, started to seem dangerous, and frightening. "If I download this, will I...perhaps face real consequences?" became a question in the back of your head, that had never existed before.
Alas, in response to this fear of torrenting, many pirates fled to the high seas of "streaming". In my teenage years, streaming was basically impossible , as it would have taken too long . In 2013 or so, it became the thing. For a little while , at least, until then we one day woke up...and even streaming was sort of "finished". Sure, sure, I know...many people still stream, millions of them even, but it is a devilishly annoying way to watch movies, for one simple reason: It is sort of like eating junk food, or smoking. Why? Because all the streaming sites tend to be literally boiling over with viruses, malware, and dangerous diseases that your computer probably won't be able to handle for long. In my opinion, if someone were to regularly stream things off such sites, they can probably look forward to no longer having a functioning computer within a year, maybe two.
If you're poor, this is a problem: You don't have any $$$ to constantly buy new computers. So streaming becomes a pretty fastidious thing, too. Just like torrenting.
Hence it has basically become the case that, since I cannot stand the limited selection of Netflix, Amazon Prime, or any of the other countless packages, I'll confess: I have mostly fallen almost completely out of the television or movie watching game now. Without easy piracy, I'm not afraid to tell my reader, I lost almost immediate interest in all of it. Well, perhaps saying I lost interest is the wrong way to put it, since I'm still definitely interested in watching, but just too cheap and frugal to actually pursue it.
I therefore find that I seem to have automatically moved into a different section of media entirely: Instead of logging onto piracy sites where I fear my precious computer will be swamped by disease and virus (or tracked via torrents), I just use sites like YouTube , which still promise me free and easily accessible entertainment. All the old movies I used to watch, I now just watch clips of them there, from time to time, and as for new television shows, I basically just don't watch them at all. For the most part, my media diet is now limited almost entirely to free music videos, documentaries, and whatever random thing I can find on YouTube. Subscribing to specific channels that follow a similar model to HBO , where you pay monthly, has no allure for me, and I do not think it ever will, unless I were to become a literal multi-millonaire. I really now believe the only reason I ever followed anything at all was because it was "free". I didn't judge it as harshly back then. Now I judge it harshly. So harshly to the poinT I can't really enjoy watching it. So I won't, as I say. I'll instead just continue to watch these free music videos on YouTube, video blogs, etc...
Some people of course might wonder why I'm bothering to write this. What's the sense? Well I think the sense is that I want to help some people understand, perhaps, the "mindset" of a poor person like myself, which is as follows: The quality of the entertainment never seems to have made much of a difference to me. All that ever really mattered was a completely free way to pass my time with my one possession, the Internet, and that was the end. In other words, I have the feeling that the companies believe poor people will be willing to invest more money in higher entertainment, but I don't really believe it myself. I think what we poors instead tend to do is just lower our quality to whatever the cheap thing is. You arrive at the carnival, and you see one ride, that is clearly very good, charging $25 for a single entry, and then you see another ride that clearly isn't very good, but it's only $0.50 cents for unlimited access. Poor people will always, as an absolute rule, choose ride number 2. Always. And if there is a ride number 3 that opens, which is free, and no one even knows what it is, and it's half dilapidated, then poor people will choose that instead, as well. Poor people simply don't care about quality. They simply don't care.
For example, I love rock and roll, but since rap songs are constantly being made and published, each and every day, for nothing, on YouTube, I tend to just automatically gravitate to rap. If you put 10 rock songs in front of me, high quality songs, but they cost a buck, and then you gave me 200 rap songs for free, all low quality and awful, I'll probably just choose the 200 rap songs. I will do this because all that matters to me is being able to pass my time. Ultimately I don't care about quality. I can't afford to care.
In fact, this was even true years ago, when I used to smoke pot all the time: I never bought what we here in the ghetto used to often call "Suburban white boy weed". Suburban white boy weed was pretty high quality, expensive weed, and you often had to shell out $20 for just a single gram. When you're a heavy weedhead, a measly gram is usually gone in just a single heavy smoking session. Sure, you used to get very high, but the next day you'd wake up, and all you'd have left of your white boy weed was a very little bit. Therefore, I used to always spend $40 bucks or so on "Mexican dirt".
As my readre can imagine, the Mexican weed was of a seriously lower quality, but guess what? For $40, you were often able to buy a literal half ounce, or maybe more! I'd be able to smoke for two weeks, instead of one night. I didn't get as high as I would on the white boy weed; but who gives a shit? I was able to pass my time and feel relatively stoned for two weeks instead of a single night, before I had to start worrying about money again. And by the way, oftentimes, when the Mexican dirt connection would disappear (which often happened), I just wouldn't smoke at all. I'd quit and suffer, instead of buying high priced suburban weed, and I'd just wait for the drought to end.My senior year of high school, I actually bought a literal half pound of the Mexican dirt weed, when the school year began. I did this because I wanted to be absolutely positive I wouldn't run out of weed a single night of my senior year. Considering I had a half pound, you can bet I never did. I had weed in my closet baiscally until the Christmas of my college freshman year. This is to say that, even when I did have a lot of money, I would still avoid the high priced shit, to just buy the poor boy shit in serious bulk. Just like I'm saying with the rap songs. Quality made literally no difference to me, so long as I knew something cheaper, that helped me to pass my time, also existed.
Of course, wealthy people cry and cry about this, and say that things like Internet piracy "threaten to destroy" the media , and that we eventually won't have "any media available". My response as a poor person? I guess that's too bad, isn't it? Oh well...nothing will exist. Sad, I guess. No more TV shows or films of quality, no more albums of quality... it all won't exist, because pirates and Internet thieves have stolen and downloaded all of it, so that no one could make money. A real shame, isn't it? For the rich person , yea, I guess it is. For me and other poors? Not really, no. For the truth is that , before this stuff was possible to pirate, it didn't really exist for us anyways. Thats what no one seems to totally understand about this argument -- oftentimes even poor people themselves. For example, you start to discussing Internet music piracy, and many people seriously act like all these people stealing music online would have bought the albums in the first place.
The truth is that they never would have. 95% of them literally never would have participated. The only reason they began to participate was because it was free. If it had not been, they would have just found something else to do. They would literally sit there playin board games with their siblings, drawing on spare sheets of paper, doing anything, before buying it. Because they can't afford to buy it. Get it? I know for a fact that my musical tastes would be radically different, if it had not been for Internet piracy. This is just a simple and "harsh" truth.
As my reader also might be able to imagine, the very reason I am even writing this exact document...is because I am looking for a way to pass some of my time tonight, since I went to pirate something and found I couldn't. So I gave up and got aggravated and thought..let me pass my time another way instead tonight. There's no way I'm buying it. No way at all.
--- A poor
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