No they are not the average person doesn’t care one bit. Most don’t even know about all this stuff happening which is why companies do it. Online there is a stink but in the real world nobody cares. Look at Netflix and password sharing it did not have the drop.off of subscribers that online would have you believe.
Irony that this is on a paywall website?
I suppose the website owns their article though?
No they aren’t. This is an article written to pander to a specific bubble of people. Unfortunately a dwindling minority
If it’s commercially viable to pander to them, it can’t be that much of a dwindling minority
Its viable to write an article about anything theyre dirt cheap to produce. Its less viable to create products for this audience.
I’m in this audience so I’m always looking out for the products that do try and meet these values. They always seem to fail. They spent ages designing and bringing the product to market and then sell like 100 or less units. When the major players release a version thats slightly less shit it has no difference in sales because their consumer audience doesnt think or care about the issue.
I had to downvote due to the paywall. Sorry.
trust me, people are not pissed enough. noone cares about these topics around me.
This unfortunately
It keeps coming up in my circle once in a while. Usually people complaining about subscriptions. That’s your in.
Yup. Doesn’t feel widely popular yet but I think it will increase especially thanks to Sony discontinuing physical releases. My family luckily is getting there too.
Yeah, it’s the small groups on the edges of these techs that can see it for what it is. Most people are too far removed and refuse to see what world these technologies are creating around us, the prison walls being built.
I think that most people don’t want to tinker. They also hate choice paralysis. Buying the subscription or leasing the car is an easier decision than committing the money to own the thing.
They definitely take the easier paths.
Literally my boomer pensioners all talk about this. But I don’t live in United sofa states
Seriously, I tried talking to a friend about Sony going digital only and how that means you can’t own a game anymore. He just said technically you’ve only ever licensed a game via physical media.
Which is so far from the point
That’s a terrible take, he will eat his words when he sees that some of the games he played is no longer available for purchase and download
Exactly. Most people don’t understand the concept of “ownership” in this way. When you try to explain it you may as well be talking about UBI or other mythical crack pot ideas.
The relevance of these objections is diminishing if anything
Fuck whoever downvoted you. You’re doing great bro. Keep it up.
While I haven’t seen the DDOS attack in their code for a while now, once you have done something like this (tampering with captures) the trust is just gone.
Assuming the commenter created the archive (probably not) they should’ve used a better service. Maybe Ghostarchive.
Didn’t know about this! Thanks for the info. I didn’t create the archive, just went there and saw that someone else already had. But I’ll check out Ghostarchive for future links.
Fucking corporate bootlickers I tell ya hwut.
the boy ain’t right
Thank you.
“Our continued existence as a publication relies on people being able to freely access information, and there’s a burgeoning movement to actually make people aware of something they’ve been too arsed to bother with for decades. Wrote an artic-”
“Paywall it.”
“On it, boss.”
It’s not perfect, no, but what are they supposed to do to keep the lights on? Double down on ads giving everyone malware, that everyone should be blocking anyway?
…That being said, we have every right to try and bypass the paywall too, heh.
They should be a little bit discerning about what they paywall. It won’t kill them make public interest stories of serious value free as a public service.
This is true.
Some sites do this already. Wired may do it; not sure, though you are right in that advocacy posts should make the cut.
maybe they should take a class from the 14 yr old influencers keeping the lights on with socials, follows and clicks.
…Those “14 year olds” make money with ads, if not by being straight-up product shills. And social media takes most of the cut.
Also, that’s quite different than sustaining a whole journalism business. There is of course social media centric journalism, and Wired does plenty of that too.
Via sponsor spots and ad revenue?
Social media isn’t a sustainable model. Yes, there are people that have success in that model, but those people have to sacrifice a lot, especially in the content quality, to acheive that success. Many media companies have already tried it, but the content they produce ends up dissolving into mostly clickbait, because they would fail otherwise.
I’m literally one of those consumers that goes to great lengths to pick devices and appliances so that I really own them. I can tell you that right now it is harder than ever.
These movements really have to put some weight, otherwise nothing will change.
who could have seen this coming? oh right me
This is literally capitalism, if you do something people don’t like they are free to choose a product where they get what they want
In a democracy outside of voting money is your biggest weapon to change
Nice! I’ll just stop buying this enshittified product/service and switch to—
…oh, wait. They’re all enshittified.
My seedbox is not enshittified. heh
I hear you but honestly when I have time to game I just want to sit down and game. I used to have time to do that. Go find the pirated versions, or the cracks, fiddle with it for hours and then finally play. Not to mention the time and money to buy, build, and configure a decent gaming system. I don’t really care for the massively online versions because in my opinion online gaming is just so competitive and toxic so that’s not really an issue for me. All of this combined is why I typically had veered toward consoles. It was just easier. But since I gave up on Xbox and now Sony is pulling this shit, I’m seriously concerned about what options are even available at all, let alone unenshittified versions.
I’m too lazy to pirate games, but also, I rarely get a new game. I have my stuff on Steam, or like in the case of Simutrans, I just download it directly (although we’re on Steam these days lol - for free). For me, it’s about the media I watch. Which… is still not all that much. heh.
When I have downloaded a cracked game, most of the time these days it’s pretty easy. At worst, install, run crack, bam. But it might depend on the game.
your first statement still applied… stop buying.
That’s great in theory, but there are tons of essentials that people have to buy to remain employed and/or alive.
I think the main problem is that the amount of people who couldn’t care less overweight, always.
if you do something people don’t like they are free to choose a product where they get what they want
That’s ideal capitalism. I find ideal capitalism to be about as real as the concept of “fair” is in adult life.
no, that’s a competitive market.
Capitalism historically has usually sought to undermine them - because the only metric of capitalism is return to current holders of capital.
I do feel the more and more pervasive all of these subscription models become the more compelling data hoarding becomes. The main problem being as it gets worse, storage prices keep climbing. Physical media is cool and all but collecting DVD, Blu-ray, books and CDs or any combination of the 4 quickly becomes a physical space issue. Collecting all of this media digitally and keep it all on HDD space is a much more attractive solution. Give you ‘physical’ forever access and doesn’t take up so much space.
storage prices keep climbing
This is just another oscillation cycle in the generally declining cost per bit of storage. We recently went through an oversupply price crash: 2023 prices of $40 per TB and less were an aberration due to supply creating a glut beyond what market demand would consume at any price.
Now we’re hitting a double spike both from production ramp-down after the 2023 over-supply, coupled with an unanticipated demand spike with LLMs in 2025 and beyond…
How long before we’re back down below $40/TB ? If you could predict that, you could make so much money on Wall Street that you woudn’t care about the cost of storage anymore.
Give you ‘physical’ forever access and doesn’t take up so much space.
Some of us figured this out 20 years ago and never turned back. (I figured it out about the time that I realized I had more music in my mp3 collection than the college radio station I volunteered at in 2000.)
My Cinemageddon account turned 18 earlier this year.
I’m evolving a “music player” system which basically consists of a fleet of individual players, each with a full copy of the music library because, even at today’s storage prices, why not? Storage for 10,000 songs at higher fidelity than a brand new LP vinyl album costs less (adjusted for inflation) than an album of 8 songs did back in the 1980s, and only 2 of those 8 songs were usually any good…
So, have a music player in every bedroom, living room, family room, kitchen, car, patio - turn them on when you want, synchronize them when you want - split off and listen to your own playlist when you want - and every player contains a synchronized backup of all the music so you can just drive off with one, go completely off-grid and never interrupt the playlist. The only network traffic is from your phone interface to choose your playlist or synchronize with players nearby - or across the planet.
This does sound very attractive. I’ve been trying to get a few family members of of Amazon Alexa’s and this is one of the biggest arguments they give me against it. I’d be curious to hear how far your evolution has come with this. I do have a rather large collection of music mostly from the olden days of piracy but would be interested in some doing some ‘updating’ to the library and the possibility of getting some family further away from Amazon.
How “techy” are you? Do you have a couple of Raspberry Pis or similar laying around basically unused? Can you clone a git repo, open an LLM coding agent and get reasonable results out of the chat interface?
The ultimate goal is to get this 100% AI/LLM free, but for now the LLMs are still doing a lot of the heavy lifting of configuring the target devices to install the player.
The ultimate goal is to get this 100% AI/LLM free, but for now the LLMs are still doing a lot of the heavy lifting of configuring the target devices to install the player.
why don’t you use ansible for that, or even just some bash script? you could generate it even if you want
So far, every target is different - like the one with the 3.5" touch display built in, that has its own display driver module. Then there’s Windoze vs Ubuntu vs Raspbian OS, and the Pi Zero 2W has a few different considerations than, say, a Pi 4 or 5, and basically every place I have deployed this so far has had something unique that needed custom attention. Once that’s all worked out, sure, ansible or whatever, but customizing for each target isn’t something “last year’s tools” did as easily as the new agents.
Techy enough. I self host a bunch of stuff, have a few servers and am more or less comfortable cloning a git repo. I actually currently have 2 rasp pi’s begging for a job.
I’m just about to run my first test of the “echo mode” where each player plays its own local files, synchronized to one player’s play list (a few issues of delay/clock rate synchronization to deal with in that approach). After that, I discovered I need to do a project rename (I’ve duplicated another project name from 2021, so… time for a different name - on 100K lines of stuff…) then remind me and I’ll give you a pointer to the (new, renamed) repo.
100k lines? are you sure you couldn’t outsource more tasks to existing tools?
Finally, a way to properly listen to The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka without needing to own four fucking cd players and stereos.
I lived this. It was a great way for me and several of my closest friends to learn about the variable latency among devices between pushing the play/unpause button and when a cd track actually starts to play.
In University, I drilled a hole in my dorm closet wall to my neighbor’s room so we could run a wire between our stereo systems and I could play whatever he was playing through my speakers. This is like that, for the digital-networked age.
I just started my physical media collection but it’ll take a while
Does it count as physical if I pirate it then put it on my hard drive? I see no difference to owning DVDs or BluRay disks.
There is a difference, and not just a legal one. For DVDs and BluRays, the disc’s first purchase partly funds the people who worked on the disc’s contents. With pirating, nobody gets paid (unless the pirate(s) that is/are distributing the content accept donations).
Although that does make me wonder how different is buying a second-hand disc from pirating… other than the legal part, that is.
Second hand markets help to keep the primary market propped up higher than it otherwise would be. If you can buy something and it retains resale value, then the initial purchase price is more worth it. Whether that balances out with supply/demand and price/sales numbers if there were no resalability is another question.
I never thoght about it! Thanks!
Second hand is different from pirating because the royalties have been paid. When it’s sold to the second owner the status of having paid the royalties passes with it. With physical media the disk, tape, or reel and the license to use it privately are the same thing. Otherwise we’d need a system to keep track of who owns every disk, tape, or reel, and who owns the license to each and that’s a sure fire way to get everyone to begin pirating.
Basically if a thing has a reliable second hand market, people will be more inclined to buy them.
DVDs for the longest time had no market, you couldn’t give them away. Now it’s picking up again. Blurays even more so.
That’s a great point.
A hard drive is physical media, yes.
Technically, but that’s not usually what people mean when they say “physical media”.
Too bad, it’s physical media, and people acting like “that’s not what I mean” contributes to this whole idea that data is ephemeral and like it lives in the air or something. No, it all lives on physical media, on drives, somewhere. Just because Netflix streamed it to you doesn’t mean that the movies files don’t live somewhere on physical media. Yeah, you don’t own it, it’s just streaming, but the physical media it exists on still exists, you just don’t have physical access to it (well, technically you do, it’s just little chunks instead of the full film that live on your PC just long enough for the film to play).
Sorry, this grinds my gears because I think not being clear about physical media including things like hard drives and USB thumbsticks is what contributes to a general lack of understanding of how any of this fucking works and why corporations were able to get away with how they abused “licensing” for so long.
Started this year with CDs, games, vinyl, books and DVDs. Buying second-hand is great too; sure, streaming looks “cheaper” at first glance but I can do with my property what I want and don’t lose it if I can’t afford a subscription, the service goes down or they lose licenses. It’s preservation, too, and if need be can be lent out to others.
Plus, I’m just discovering the joys of making my own mixtapes and burning CDs. Spotify playlists are… good, of course, but it feels like an actual thing now.
I never stopped collecting physical media luckily 🤭 They will never own my shit
Sealed media is like the new collectible. Prices are crazy.
Oh, Louis Rossmann. Sounds good.
Shit means electronic devices here.
He has a non-profit now and I can hear him speak through the text of the site.
No paywall for me btw. Here’s a screenshot of the article.
It’s a righteous screed that feels infectious in the crowd. People cheer and call out their own ownership issues. Rossmann is a preacher at the pulpit of people pissed off by subscription services, the steady decline of physical media, and the inability to fix their stuff.
Louis Rossman? You mean the guy with an active account on Kiwi Farms?
What’s with all these otherwise reasonable seeming people being right wing asshats deep down? It really twists up what their underlying reasoning for supporting these things are.
What’s a Kiwi Farms?
What does active mean here? You linked to a profile that only someone with an account can open and quantify.
That said, the furthest left his politics have ever been has been center-right (this is pretty clear if you’ve watched his videos) but his overall soapbox has always been about consumer rights.
damn, I knew there was going to be something
Ok, but what does fulu mean?
According to the wiki page for Rossman himself it’s: Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users
I couldn’t find anywhere they say what FULU stands for
It stands for ‘shoot donald trump in the fucking face and while you’re at it, all of those CEOs and major shareholders that are hellbent on destroying the world and making slaves of everyone’ i think
deleted by creator
The About Us page doesn’t say. Wikipedia says:
This article is about the Taoist talismans. For the star in Cassiopeia, see Zeta Cassiopeiae.
🤷
It’s the battlecry you yell as you charge down the greedy ceos with your sword made of worthless PlayStation Blu-rays
FULULULULULU
“WE CALL THIS A DIFFICULTY TWEAK!” I scream while dressed in full black tactical gear and nightvision googles after dropkicking a CEO in the face and start beating his ass with a nightstick
that Framework laptop is on my shopping list… WHEN ram prices go down
or when LPCAMM2 RAM is easy to find.
Suggestion: you can buy it now with less ram than you need and add a stick later when prices are more reasonable.
The hard truth is that ram prices are not going to go down, but inflation will eventually make the price of all other components catch up.
yeh good idea. With this AI shit going on, maybe next year we’ll have 1 ram stick = 3 laptops…
I hope Louis is being careful. There’s not as much protection in being public as there used to be. The billionaires know they’re essentially immune. I don’t think it’s too much to imagine anymore that he might end up deported, or disappeared in some other way.
Maybe he’s braver than you are.
The billionaires know they’re essentially immune.
Immune from what exactly? Their biology isn’t unique. They live in information bubbles surrounded by sycophants.
Billionaires with their estates and servants (cooks, nannies, security, lawyers, brokers, PR staff, butlers, etc.) represent a huge attack surface and a very soft belly of capitalism.
Billionaires are not like Trump who can lean on the USA’s first-tier state actor security, the US Secret Service (which isn’t even all that great as we have seen for ourselves, only human).
Why are the billionaires building themselves doomsday bunkers? Because they feel scared or because they feel secure?
This is not nearly as important as you think it is. If you ask 300 million Americans who this guy is, you would have some random kids knowing about him from YouTube. And that’s it.
It just seems important because it’s in your fringe interest.
[REDACTED] Pissed [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] Shit
To take the title literally: people have stopped wanting to own their shit since the advent of the flush toilet. In the days of the privee, you’d own your shit, you’d muck it out and maybe do something of value with it. But with the flush toilet, your shit belongs to someone else, they deal with it.
In the digital services economy ‘your shit’ could be considered to include your profile information, what do you use, where do you go, when do you do it, how often, how much do you pay? That ‘digital shit’ has about as much value as what you flush down the toilet, individually, but combined into representative market statistics it’s digital gold - predictive information about what will sell, how much of it will sell at what prices, where and when.
Personally, I’d trade my ‘digital shit’ for advertising. Yes, you can track me, if I don’t have to listen to, see, read or receive ANY marketing materials that I do not specifically actively seek for myself. Unfortunately, that’s not the way the current models work and there’s about zero incentive for the advertising world to change.
As for “streaming” vs “owning” digital content, streaming is the ultimate form of tracking - besides the hook of making you pay per view or listen or read - a huge value (to the sellers) in streaming is that tracking is built-in 100% effective.
Then we can devolve into the world of “durable consumer goods” being led by fast-fashion straight down the toilet. Own a car? Actually maintain it and keep it running for 30, 50 or 100 years? Inconceivable in the world of corporate profit maximization. That’s as backwards as clothing that you buy once and wear for decades, mending and tailoring as needed.
That ‘digital shit’ has about as much value as what you flush down the toilet, individually, but combined into representative market statistics it’s digital gold - predictive information about what will sell, how much of it will sell at what prices, where and when.
the advertising industry has left that behind many years ago. the question now is not what will sell, but how will they sell literally any garbage, how do they get you to buy that any garbage, and how do they make you actually want that any garbage above anything else. its mass manipulation from start to end, with the knowledge about everyone how to press their buttons.
how will they sell literally any garbage, how do they get you to buy that any garbage, and how do they make you actually want that any garbage above anything else. its mass manipulation from start to end,
“We could sell horse piss if we put it in an aerosol can!”
Johnathan Lute played by Orson Welles in the 1967 feature film: I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname
