This is a long discussion now, and answering everything point by point will be a lengthy exercise.

I’ll say this: I believe in a world run by corporate interests, piracy is similar to civil disobedience. If we collectively decide to create friction to the functioning of the system, it can in combination with other ways of resistance influence the situation in our favour.

Not everyone has the option to turn off from certain technologies. My employment requires me to use social media websites (but I can choose to block ads on them)

Piracy of MS office doesn’t impact Microsoft much because Microsoft is primarily a cloud and enterprise IT company. For Netflix, Spotify and Disney, piracy would have a meaningful impact. That’s why Netflix cracked down on password sharing.

Piracy isn’t mutually exclusive with supporting your favourite artists. You can still go to concerts, buy merch, donate or buy physical media. I pirated three of Supergiant’s first three video games, and then when I was earning, I bought the games again and played them because of how good they are. Now I buy their games on early access every time.

https://materials.proxyvote.com/Approved/958102/20240923/AR_587276/INDEX.HTML?page=71

This is the financial report 2024 _for Western Digital. Check page 69 (naice)

Cloud revenue 5bn

Client revenue 4bn

Consumer revenues 3bn

I don’t see numbers on gross margins but from what I understand about business, B2B divisions usually are higher margins than consumer divisions.

It’s like tipping. It’s a shitty system and nobody likes ads and tips and it needs to go away.

And your favourite content creator will sell his integrity to any corporation that will put a value on their content. Look at what Linus has become, it’s just entertainment and clickbait. No PC builder is learning to make PCs from Linus anymore, he’s busy getting clicks on 40,000$ PC that can barely play cyberpunk or potato PC that can play CS Go. Look at the honey scam, even tech expert youtubers promoted scams. I am sure this is just a few examples. Youtubers are just media companies selling ads. You can choose to bypass ads and pay a creator if you like it. But ad & sponsor blocking by default is a morally and ethically valid position and needs to be normalised.

I recently saw Technology Connections guy on Bluesky mention how people have forgotten to curate their online experiences, and in many cases prefer to get media delivered to them in a pre curated form.

Not only does this take away agency, it makes it a less interesting part of the media and consumer journey. Gone are the days of discovering artists on /mu/ or soulseek or mix tapes borrowed from your older sibling. You get what spotify thinks you will like.

Piracy is a great exercise in curation. You have limited space, you only download what you need and like. You most often get better quality. You get to be a part of community.

These are ‘soft benefits’ that don’t necessarily have a monetary upside but can still be a positive experience.

You missed the point. Consumers buying 20-30TB of capacity (even if millions of consumers do so) won’t add much to their margins.

The high margin solutions are managed services where they provide end to end solutions to businesses like data centers and IT companies.

Absolutely. Support small game devs, musicians and film makers. Go to the cinema & concerts more often, buy or donate to artists whenever you can.

But there is little reason to keep your Netflix, Disney and Spotify subscription. Pirate things and pay your favourite artists directly. Tech companies are rent seekers who add no value and give very little back to the creators.

Consumer HDDs are a small part of the revenue of HDD manufactures who make money from businesses and data centers. The money you spent on HDDs is much lower than what you pay for subscriptions over a period of 10 years. So you also contribute less to their bottomlines.

In addition to this, remember that Internet companies took away your privacy. The upcoming AI revolution is being pushed to take away your agency. AI will do the research and buy things for you while you have little choice in the decision. This is why the push for AI, not because of worker productivity gains.

Few years ago, regulations around privacy forced Google into a corner and they had to start phasing out third party cookies. Tech companies came up with ways to continue harvesting user data either from the metaverse or through some other walled gardens online.

AI will make user tracking obsolete. Marketing on reddit doesn’t need cookies, we can already tell what consumers like based on what communities they are part of. This will get worse with AI tools. This is why reddit stock moon’d.

I was hoping we are about to enter Chinese imperialism once Trump runs the western hegemony to the ground.

The unravelling of US imperialism is an amazing outcome of the Trump presidency.