We Built the Cage and Then Moved In
When you bought a physical book, it was yours. You could annotate it, resell it, tear out a page, give it away to someone who’d never return it. No one could reach into your shelf at three in the morning and delete it. When Amazon remotely removed copies of 1984 from Kindle devices in 2009—the irony of the title was not lost on anyone—the story made headlines for a week and then everyone kept buying Kindles anyway. That’s the whole argument in one anecdote.
Peter Sunde, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, laid it out plainly in an interview with TorrentFreak: streaming platforms aren’t the resolution to the media ownership crisis, they’re just a more comfortable version of the same problem. Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Disney—a handful of companies now hold the keys to almost everything, and we handed them those keys willingly because the monthly fee was reasonable and the interface was clean.
I’m surprised people are so shortsighted,
Sunde said. The solution to file sharing was never to hand control back to a few entities. That’s exactly what we were fighting against. Netflix and Spotify aren’t a solution—they’re a loss. The same companies we fought own these platforms now.
He’s right about the structural problem with artists too. A musician can’t realistically opt out of Spotify anymore because there’s no alternative at comparable scale—the platform has become the infrastructure, so the platform’s terms are simply the terms. And when Spotify itself depends on the major labels that license the content, even Spotify has no leverage. The dependency runs all the way down, and the media industry, as Sunde noted, is quietly delighted that decades of lobbying have finally paid off.
What we surrendered isn’t just ownership—it’s plurality. Physical media was inefficient and expensive and took up space in your apartment, but it was distributed. Dozens of publishers, hundreds of labels, studios all competing under different pressures and incentives. Now a handful of algorithms determine what surfaces and what quietly disappears, and the arrangement feels permanent because we’ve made it so structurally difficult to imagine anything else.
Sunde’s vision of a system that structurally prevents anyone from suppressing or withholding information sounds utopian, and probably is. But the alternative we’ve settled for isn’t comfortable either, even if it feels that way right now. We built the cage, moved in, and are currently arguing about the thread count of the bedding.