True that copyright always existed to protect publishers and not creators. But in pre-digital times there were considerable barriers to publishing and distributing creative works at scale so while publishers in all media have often abused creators they were a necessary evil if you wanted to make a living.

The worst trick greedy capitalists have pulled recently it to bypass copyright and steal the entire digital record of human creative labor to incorporate into proprietary models and services for their own enrichment. I have no idea how society and our political representation has slept through that. The second worse is insanely destroying their own industry by fucking over both consumers and creatives with increasingly unsustainable greedy and dumb bullshit.

Access to education and other equitable causes really should be fair use. If everyone pirated, and the way things are going it will be the only sane way to get content, then new content is going to dry up unless people are happy with AI slop. We will still see indie self-published works but necessarily the creators won’t have access to the same resources we saw when they were part of an exploitative but productive industry. That sucks. A lot of people are happy to pay for convenient and affordable access to content under reasonable conditions and piracy is something they only resort to when that is denied.

The social aspect might be underappreciated. My guess is people are mainly introduced by family and friends and it becomes a big part of their identity. It becomes difficult to separate the individual elements.

I have been wanting to watch this since release but it isn’t showing anywhere near me or streaming or available to purchase and ironically I haven’t pirated because I figured everyone was in the same situation so good quality rips would be scarce. This movie is a spectacular example of all that is wrong with geographical distribution rights. I will probably still wait for a legit stream on this one because I want to send a positive signal if any service grabs the rights but I can’t blame people for making other choices. Copyright is supposed to protect the rights holders so they can profit from their work but in cases like this it just stops them connecting with their audience and they get nothing, neither money or exposure. I don’t think piracy is harming anyone in this situation.

Micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) are extremely successful. You have them in your phone and lots of other devices. It turns out semiconductor manufacturing techniques could be leveraged to make some useful devices but that is about it. There is obviously a lot happening at these scales in biology, semiconductors, materials science etc but the grey goop of nanobots turned out to be a fantasy based on extrapolations that don’t seem to hold up well with physical materials thankfully. One less thing to worry about. Now we only have climate change, pathogens, war etc. Hopefully the machine learning bubble will blow over in a similar fashion, genuinely revolutionary in some areas but increasingly difficult/uneconomical to scale into others.