Y'all remember when we could buy things with our money? And then we OWNED them? After that, we could do whatever we wanted: take good care of them, crush them in the street in protest, have them repaired or repair them ourselves...
I still have some of the things I got in childhood, like my Super Nintendo and all my games (still works perfectly!), a few books from early childhood and a lot of my clothes. Things were made to last, not to fall apart after a few trips through the washing machine. That's because most of them were made in the U.S.A. or other Western countries with high quality materials. My parents still have a clock radio from the 1970s they use to wake up every morning. That thing will outlive us all....
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| Stompin' CDs in protest of gangsta rap (1990s) |
Planned obsolescence changed all that. Tech products like the iPhone are literally made to stop working after a certain point, or to slow so significantly you're forced to upgrade to the next $1,500 version. On the other end of the spectrum are items made so poorly and cheaply they fall apart after a couple of uses, like our Chinese-made clothes. "Fast fashion," they call it. Our landfills are full of it and we've got stores like Temu, Shein, Zara and H&M to thank. China makes most of our consumer products now including important things like generic medications. This has caused some life-threatening problems with both medication shortages and quality issues. This is not a "Chinese conspiracy" but a result of U.S. politicians selling this country out from under us by allowing U.S. corporations to outsource their labor to the lowest bidder. "Lowest" means lowest; it doesn't matter if they're incarcerated, undocumented, trafficked against their will or underage sweatshop or slaughterhouse workers. Aside from the obvious slavery and criminal nature of this practice, it puts consumers at risk.
There's another kind of consumer issue happening that absolutely shouldn't be, and I'm not even sure it has a name. The subscription issue. Instead of buying tapes or CDs that we own after purchase, we rent our music from streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music, which charge monthly fees that cost as much as a cassette tape and nearly as much as a CD. EVERY FUCKING MONTH. They can remove songs or entire artists' catalogs at any time with no warning, make it difficult to log in or do other shady shit such as charging less than half the price for a Premium subscription in countries like Romania compared to the U.S. for the exact same service, or occasionally force unwanted & unrelated add-ons like Hulu to justify the ever-rising price.

Comparison of Romanian & American Spotify Premium prices.
It's the same with TV and movies: subscribe to 50 separate networks and pay 50 separate fees every single month, then you STILL have to pay to "rent" certain movies or shows on networks like Amazon Prime. You can watch any episode of SNL once you pay for a Peacock subscription, but not the whole episodes as they were originally broadcast. They've cut out over half the broadcast on most episodes, including most of the musical guests because they don't wanna pay for the rights (but they don't mind taking YOUR money for a subscription!). Some episodes are as short as 20 minutes, making them essentially "clips" or highlight reels. At the same time, these corporate giants use DMCA takedown threats to rid the Internet Archive of alternative ways to access this content, rendering the cut footage essentially Lost Media.
Muzzling the Internet
[nostalgia intensifies]
That's the other side of this coin: If you weren't around for Internet 1.0, you missed out on something truly special. Actual freedom of speech existed for a brief glorious time, as well as a sense of community in whatever weird niche area you were interested in, be it a favorite TV show, True Crime, politics, music, drug chat, local current events or what have you. Sites like Topix & Zoklet were a Wild West of chaos where bad things indeed did happen, but it was your choice to involve yourself in them or not. I was a mere spectator shaking my head at the drama...
Craigslist and Backpage.com were the backalley of the clearnet where prostitution was rife and hopeful romantics shot their "missed connections" shot with pathetically hilarious Want Ads about briefly locking eyes with a stranger in the meat aisle. There was Experience Project, which hosted every kind of written content you could imagine, as well as grey-market substance discussion boards like The Altered States and the short-lived Yellow Brick Road (YBR).
Internet 1.0 was not really appealing to kids because there was no social media, no Youtube... you had to know how to code to an extent to access anything worthwhile. It was all chat rooms, discussion forums and other dry "boring" formats. Instead of Instagram, Facebook & TikTok, we had Angelfire, Tripod and Geocities, where making your own page was both an art and a science and you had to have some degree of OCD to make it look halfway decent. But your finished page could say or contain basically anything you wanted. ANYTHING. And oh, how great was the beauty of Napster, Kazaa, Limewire and mp3 Rocket, where you could download (for free!) music shared by peers and it was yours to own forever. I would gladly pay for a service like that again; instead I pay $12.99/month to "stream" music that may go poof at any time and will be riddled with intrusive ads if I stop paying.
"You Will Own Nothing And You Will Like It"
The dream is dead.
What happened to the promise of human advancement via the information superhighway? Being able to share things you love with people on the other side of the world with the click of a button? Corporate greed is what. If sharing said thing causes them to lose even one penny, it must be stopped. The Napster ruling was the first big shoe to drop followed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). There are still some great pirate sites available on the clearnet (shout out to Cineby, Bflix & Scribd) but even those are under constant threat of being wiped out. (R.I.P. ev01.to & Z-Library).
When I think of all the forums and websites that have been dropped by their webhost, sued out of existence, DDoS'ed into extinction, taken down directly by the Nanny State or even de-indexed by the Internet Archive, I get sad. Then angry. None of this was about "protecting children," saving people from drug OD, preventing bullying or stopping sex trafficking. Not one iota. Peer-to-peer sharing of music and movies cuts into corporate profits, as does the selling of drugs like research chemicals (bath salts, Spice, kratom, Salvia and others that weren't explicitly illegal at the time but didn't require you to pay three times for: once at the doctor, once at the private insurer and again at the pharmacy).
Sex trafficking didn't stop when they shut down Backpage, it just moved back to the streets where it's more dangerous for the victims and harder for law enforcement to monitor, not that they really care that much anyway. The vast majority of pedophile busts are conducted by citizen journalists like Chris Hansen and the hundred other vigilante predator hunter groups out there doing the Lord's work (also, the cops' work). It's ALL about money, 100% of the things our government does. They now exist solely to protect the profits of billionaire CEOs regardless of how it affects us. And we allowed it to get to this point every time we didn't get in the street and protest loudly and, if need be, violently like the French.
The recent "age verification" porn laws are the latest egregious example. Imagine having your real name, address, the photo on your driver's license, entire watch history, all the comments/messages you've sent and any uploads leaked to the dark net in a data breach, which happens daily with big corporations like Sony & Walmart, who should have airtight data security. The potential for blackmail and threats to one's life are huge. Teens are dying due to "sextortion" all the time in the U.S. after sending a single nude photo to scammers... imagine what they could do with your entire porn history!
And our leaders don't give a one damn. These are the same leaders who haven't brought a single Epstein client to trial despite literal video footage of them raping children, hours of flight logs, financial receipts and much more. That's not a coincidence, btw. It's our punishment for demanding they be brought to justice for THEIR crimes. π΄π»π
Final Thoughts
Not a rhetorical question
What happens if the internet goes down for an extended period for some reason, be it war, telecommunications/satellite failure or anything else? What products and services would you still be able to access? Could you do your job? Pay your bills? Purchase basic necessities?
This might seem like "Old woman shaking fist at sky" now, but if you were to add up all the money you've spent over the years on subscriptions and realize you own nothing in return for it, maybe then you'd see the impact. Or maybe the internet would truly have to go dark for an extended period for you to realize what they've taken from us. Either way, I need you to start giving a damn because none of this is normal.
Contact the FCC about Spotify, Amazon, your local cable company & other online and communications-based companies that are blatantly ripping you off. I wrote the FCC about my local scammy ass cable company a couple years back & had surprisingly positive results. Just saying. There's strength in numbers as you can see with the kratom community's effect on the quality of kratom-related journalism, so speak up! π£π£
After that mega-rant here I am, begging for fake virtual money again! π Seriously, please consider dropping something in my Bitcoin account. No amount too small. If you don't, this blog may be run by an AI bot some day... π€
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