Gatekeeping Never Stopped

Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime—you log in and it’s all there. Every movie, every song, every book, completely legal, absurdly cheap. Who buys DVDs anymore? Who bothers with piracy? It’s so much easier to just pay eight bucks a month.

The convenience is real. That’s not a lie. But convenience isn’t the problem. The problem is control.

You don’t actually own anything. A title vanishes because the license expired. Amazon can pull books from your Kindle whenever it wants. You think you own your library until the corporation renting it to you changes the rules.

Peter Sunde started The Pirate Bay to fight exactly this—the idea that a few gatekeepers get to decide what culture reaches people. In an interview a while back, he said something that stuck with me: he was shocked how shortsighted everyone was. We spent years fighting to break the gates, and the moment a company came along with an easy button, we lined up to hand them the keys. Different gatekeepers, same prison.

An artist can’t even opt out anymore. Want your music heard? Spotify is the only game in town. Want to reach readers? Amazon owns the bookstore. They control the distribution, they control the audience, they control your worth. You’re dependent on them in ways that feel impossible to undo.

I use these services. I’m part of the problem. But what gets me is how inevitable it all feels. We’ve collapsed everything into five companies that can make any piece of culture disappear on a whim. We did it to ourselves because we valued convenience over freedom, and now the convenience is locked in and the freedom is gone.

Maybe there’s a way back. Some decentralized thing where no single company owns your library or decides what exists. But I don’t think we want it badly enough anymore. The convenience has us.