I think most importantly, it would give us the leverage to say “no”. To walk away from bad jobs and abusive managers. To refuse to work in unsafe environments. To demand better pay.
To demand better, because the options are no longer “suck it up” or “die”.
The counter-argument: Not having UBI is in the interests of those in power who want to do anything to the people they are in power over in order to remain in power.
If the greed of the few should come before the need of the many.
People against piracy fail to realize that no, I can’t just ‘buy it.’ They stopped making DVDs and Blu-Rays. They’re barely offering digital copies for download. I am not spending money I could use for food or bills to pay for a subscription service just so I can always have access to a beloved piece of media. Especially not when the service will remove media on a whim without concern for how the loss of access to that piece will make its artistic conservation nigh impossible.
For example, I recently learned that Disney+ had an original film called Crater. It’s scifi, family friendly, and seems cool - I would love to buy it as a holiday gift for my little brother! But: it’s exclusive to D+ and THEY REMOVED IT LITERALLY MONTHS AFTER ITS RELEASE.
The ONLY way I can directly access this film is through piracy. The ONLY available ‘copies’ of this film are hosted on piracy websites. Disney will NEVER release it in theaters, or as something to buy, and it may NEVER return to the streaming service. It will be LOST because we aren’t allowed to purchase it for personal viewing. If I can’t pay to own it, I won’t pay for the privilege of losing it when corporate decides to put it in a vault.
So yes, I’m going to pirate and support piracy.
Addendum: This is also a really good reason to support trust-busting. A lot of this obnoxious behavior is only possible because corporations wield monopoly power.
another addendum: most modern (4K UHD) blurays use a form of online DRM that requires the player software to access a server to get title specific decryption keys. you don’t really own a film on one of those disks any more than you do on streaming, the only way to truly preserve it is to rip off the disks or from streaming, not even the physical media you can “buy” can necessarily be preserved anymore.
PIRACY ALWAYS HAS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE MEDIA PRESERVATION
thinking about middle aged gay love is like. we have a future and we have time
my mother divorced my father when i was 7. it wasn’t because she was gay, though she did discover this later (another reminder that it’s okay to find out who you are at 40, at 50, etc, and also for who you are to change) but because she had thought he was the great love of her life and he turned out to be a shitty person.
my mother married my ma when i was 11. i think they do have a great love. i think they love each other the way you can when you’re middle aged – having seen the world, being able to see each other’s flaws, knowing themselves. they see each other in full, and they love each other and the world for it.
they dance on the street to buskers (very embarrassing when you’re twelve; very cute when you look back on it as an adult). i shit you not – they pass me their purses and dance on the sidewalk, laughing. i thought was something that only happened in movies.
my ma makes my mother eggs every morning because my mother can’t cook for shit. my mother presses my ma’s work blazers for her because my ma still can’t figure out how to work the new iron.
when it was warm, high-school me would wake up on the weekends and wander downstairs to find them sitting in the backyard in the sun, drinking coffee together and splitting the newspaper in a surgical, exact process since they’d worked out who wanted which sections years ago.
my mother is happier than she’s ever been. my ma, too. there is a future out there for every gay person who’s always known they’re gay, like my ma, and for everyone who figures it out later, like my mother. there’s time.
they’re growing old together. i cannot express to you how much they are leading happy lives, loving each other, with a huge family surrounding them. i cannot express to you how much they have this beautiful future that they are living and will live.
i want you to know, if you don’t have any older gays in your life: they’re out there. and they’re living these full, happy lives.
sometimes i look to my moms and i think, i want a life like yours. and looking at them makes me believe i will get it.
If you give me any positive reinforcement whatsoever i will go full doggo and hang on to that shit forever and my internal thought process will pretty much boil down to “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”