Mainstreaming: Piracy is a symptom, not a crime

From a #mainstreaming point of view, what people call “piracy” is not a simple moral failure, it’s rather a signal of systemic #dotcons failure. Again and again, across decades, people have shown a simple truth: When access is fair, affordable, and humane, people pay. When systems become extractive, people route around them.

This is not new, not edgy, it’s basic social behaviour. Before the Internet: we had Informal commons, cassette copying, vinyl bootlegs, tape trading networks, these were not experienced as “theft” by the people who did this – they were social distribution systems, low-scale, trust-based, culturally embedded, limited by friction. They existed alongside markets, artists still toured, labels still made money, culture still flowed.

This was a pre-digital common, tolerated because it couldn’t scale enough to threaten capital. Then came the first native digital implementation. Napster originally wasn’t thought of as a crime, but was turned into a real fork in the road when Napster didn’t invent piracy, it simply removed friction and exposed the contradiction.

Napster was an early, messy, accidental example of what open distribution could have become if shaped by public-interest values rather than VC mess. What panicked the industry wasn’t copying – it was loss of control. Two paths were possible:

Adapt to abundance, treat sharing as promotion, build fair access + fair reward, except that copying is native to digital culture.

Reassert artificial scarcity, lawfare, DRM, surveillance, platform capture.

They chose the second, before they shift to the working subscription “solution” This turned into a temporary truce in the that #dotcons streaming worked, briefly, because it aligned with human behaviour: convenience, simplicity, predictable cost, “good enough” access. This reduced piracy, not because people became more ethical, but because the service stopped being so hostile. This is crucial, piracy goes down when #mainstreaming systems respect users.

Though this did not last, the pushing of the #dotcons (#enshittification) broke the social contract, now we’re seeing a piracy resurgence – due to legitimacy collapse. Platforms: fragmented access, raised prices, removed ownership, revoked sharing, erased archives and locked culture behind licences. The normal mess that you don’t own culture any more, you rent permission until it’s revoked.

People don’t won’t this enclosure of culture and memory “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing” isn’t only edgy internet logic, it’s a commons’ logic. It says: ownership has been broken, legitimacy has been lost, people are reclaiming agency informally. This is exactly how commons historically re-emerge, outside broken institutions, not through them. So from any seasonable mainstreaming view, Piracy Isn’t Anti-Artist – It’s Anti-Bullshit, a service problem, it’s what happens when distribution is controlled instead of shared.

Where #OMN fits, the Open Media Network is not about simply justifying piracy. It’s about removing the need for it by rebuilding: public-first distribution, shared infrastructure, local publishing, federated archives, cultural memory that can’t be revoked, trust instead of DRM, access without enclosure, communing.

Culture needs to be: easy to access, hard to erase, socially rooted, economically plural, governed in the open. When those conditions exist, piracy fades into the background, not because people are policed, but because the system stops being abusive.

Piracy Is the smoke – enclosure Is the fire – the historical arc looks like this:

informal sharing → tolerated

digital abundance → panic

platform compromise → temporary calm

enclosure + extraction → rebellion

From this view, people aren’t becoming criminals, they’re disobedient consumers because consumption has become hostile. What people need to see in this mess is that Piracy isn’t the future, it’s a warning flare. The future is rebuilding open, shared, accountable media infrastructure so that: artists are supported, culture persists, access is normal, and people don’t have to choose between legality and dignity. That’s not nostalgia, it’s the unfinished business from the original #openweb.

And yes, it needs to happen #OMN

The History of visionOntv: What We Built, What We Lost, and Why It Matters Again

Looking back at the old TubeMogul stats – the archived page from 2011 – I had a jolt:
18 million verified views, and when you added the torrent distribution, RSS syndication, video CDROM redistribution, and all the edge-case channels we seeded into, the total was closer to 34 million views. These were big numbers back then.

All grassroots, all #KISS, all built on the early #openweb ethos, that number matters, not for vanity, rather, it showed proof-of-work for what a truly decentralized media network could do before the #dotcons consolidated their grip.

People forget this now, but #visionOntv was one of the earliest real-world demonstrations of the idea behind what we have now with the #Fediverse, years before the word existed:

distributed hosting

open content flows

creative commons

no algorithmic manipulation

human curation

peer-to-peer distribution

training and empowerment as core paths

This wasn’t theory, it was practice, in the era just before the enclosure of the Web took hold. The original vision – visionOntv’s mission statement from back then – looking at it now through the Web Archive – still works:

“Are you feeling dejected and bored? Does mainstream media make you feel ill? Then get off your ass…” This wasn’t branding, it was the cultural tone of a time when people still believed the internet could change things, and it genuinely did. visionOntv was a platform, seed for a network, built around a simple idea: video for social change, delivered in formats normal people could actually use.

We were deliberately designing for the “lean-in / lean-out” model before UX people had the words for it. You could sit back and watch it as TV. Or you could click deeper, link up to the grassroots campaigns behind the stories, jump straight into action.

The point was always outreach, always getting beyond the activist bubble, aways trying to plant seeds of agency in ordinary people, that “compost” metaphor we still use today. Quality, not chaos, visionOntv was not open-publishing, we had a quality threshold, we mentored people into producing work that worked, visually, politically, narratively, not gatekeeping, but gardening.

This is something the #openweb forgot: freedom isn’t the same as noise. We were trying to hold onto a craft tradition inside a political one. Tools, Training, and #4opens. We pushed #FOSS open source production tools as far as they could go, but we weren’t dogmatic. If a corporate tool was necessary for outreach, we used it. The guiding star was always:

Does this help media democracy grow?
Does this empower real people?
Does this keep the compost fertile?

And because we distributed everything in Creative Commons non-commercial, people everywhere could download, remix, project in their communities, hand out self copied video CDs to run their own screenings. One broadband connection could feed a whole neighbourhood. That was media democracy. Again: this was proto-Fediverse thinking before the word existed, this was a people’s broadcasting network built on the #4opens.

What happened, the #dotcons consolidated – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – and sucked the air out of open distribution. We were publishing into a storm of #enshittification before the word was coined. And of course we tried to ride the wave, keep the doors open, keep the channels alive. But the gravity of centralized platforms crushed the ecology, distribution dried up.

The “lean-in/lean-out” mechanism was rendered obsolete by the algorithmic feed. The early #P2P ecosystems were squeezed by copyright paranoia and corporate capture. It wasn’t that visionOntv failed, the Web changed around it, in the same way soil ecology collapses when a monoculture plantation takes over.

The #Peertube Era That… Almost Happened. When the #Fediverse bloomed, we did the obvious thing: we pushed all the video archives, feeds, and channels onto PeerTube. It was the correct move, and we were there early. But PeerTube was young, fragile, underfunded, underhyped. And unlike the massive #dotcons, decentralized tech requires community support to stay alive.

We didn’t get that support, so the server went dark. And now the whole archive – all that history, all that outreach, all the proof-of-work – sits offline. This isn’t a guilt trip, it’s a call-out to the people who care about the #openweb: Come on, folks, let’s bring visionOntv back https://opencollective.com/open-media-network/projects/visionontv

Review: Who Broke the Internet? – Podcast with Cory Doctorow

🎧 Listen on CBC

The #mainstreaming narrative around power tends to centre on institutions – on policy boards, corporate elitists, and those privileged enough to claw their way up the slippery sides of crumbling hierarchies. But that’s not where most of us live, and more importantly, it’s not where real change and challenge takes root.

Too often, we miss this balance, we “forget” that we have direct power and influence over the grassroots, because we are the grassroots. We are embedded in networks, collectives, and everyday moments of solidarity and resistance. It’s here, in our own spaces, that we can compost the mess into something fertile, resilient alternatives born of shared struggle. By contrast, our power over “them” – the #nastyfew, the policy-makers who ignore us, the corporate class – is minimal unless we shift the frame from the bottom up to acturly included them against their will.

To see a clear and useful example of top-down critique done right – or at least with an honest attempt to redirect power – look to the new #CBC podcast series Who Broke the Internet? Where Doctorow lays out a thesis many of us have known intuitively, the internet, and the #dotcons that grew like weeds across it, were not victims of some inevitable collapse or unstoppable tide of “network effects.” No, it was broken by design. Through deliberate choices, made in plain sight and often against clear warnings. It was policy. It was enclosure. It was centralization. And the ones who did it? Some were the #nastyfew, sure. But many more were #fashernistas chasing the next hype wave, while the #geekproblem stumbled behind them, building systems that locked us in. Now we live under a kind of techno-feudalism – run by the #broocracy, the #geekproblem made “good”, the unwitting nobles of a new authoritarian shift.

Doctorow’s work isn’t just about assigning blame. It’s about dismantling the myth of inevitability. The so-called #enshittification of the internet wasn’t fate, it was a process we can understand, interrupt, and reverse. That clarity offers the possibility of agency. And more than nostalgia, Doctorow attempts and likely sadly likely mostly fails to articulate a future-facing vision of an internet rebuilt to meet the radical demands of our time: from #climatechaos to oligarchy, fascism, and digital colonialism.

Where his work meets more “us” focus is in this core tension – top-down insight and bottom-up action. Doctorow maps the wreckage and names the architects. But it’s up to us to compost what’s left and grow something new. We rebuild with our hands and hearts, in our local contexts, among people who still care. That’s where resilience grows. That’s where the #openweb is rebooted.

More thoughts on grassroots change and challenge paths: http://hamishcampbell.com

Why #Enshittification Misses the Point and Why #Dotcons is the Better Frame

The term #enshittification, coined by Cory Doctorow, is a catchy way to describe the decline of digital platforms as they become exploitative and unusable. While it’s an effective pop term, it ultimately obscures the root causes of the problem.

For the past 20 years, I’ve used #dotcons to describe the same issue, but with a clearer critique of the systemic forces behind it. Unlike #enshittification, which frames the issue as an inevitable decline, #dotcons directly points to deliberate deception and enclosure of the #openweb by corporate interests.

Tech as a confidence trick, for over 30 years, the tech industry has been a confidence trick (see scam) dressed up as progress. The early internet was open, decentralized, and full of promise. But over time, corporate enclosures captured these open paths and turned them into walled gardens.

The dot-com boom (#dotcons) wasn’t about building a better web—it was about monetizing control. Liberal elitists and the public bought into this process, handing over control to Silicon Valley under the illusion that private corporations could be trusted with public digital infrastructure. The result? The death of the #openweb as #dotcons turned the internet into a system of surveillance, advertising, and data extraction.

Now, the same liberals who helped build this mess are using #enshittification to describe it, as if the problem is just an unfortunate trend rather than the predictable outcome of capitalism’s extractive logic. This is why #Enshittification misses the bigger picture, the problem, it shifts focus away from responsibility. It frames tech decline as an inevitable process, rather than a deliberate, profit-driven strategy.

🔹 Profit Motive and Diverging Interests, the core issue isn’t just “enshittification”—it’s the profit motive that drives platforms to exploit people. The interests of people and corporations are fundamentally opposed. People want stable, functional platforms; corporations want maximum profits, which means stripping away user benefits over time.

🔹 Lack of Accountability, by using a vague, abstract term, the real actors behind this decline—tech CEOs, venture capitalists, and #neoliberal policymakers—are let off the hook. The problem isn’t that platforms just get worse on their own; it’s that corporations actively degrade them to extract more profit.

🔹 The Liberal Blindspot. Liberals love talking about how things are bad, but they rarely examine how their own ideologies enabled these failures. It was liberal policies that deregulated Big Tech, liberal tech elitists who built the enclosures, and liberal “innovators” who sold out the #openweb. Now, they lament the decline without addressing why it happened in the first place.

🔹 A Call to Action – #Dotcons as a clearer critique as #dotcons isn’t just a description—it’s a call to action. It’s a critique of the corporate hijacking of the internet and a demand for accountability. Unlike #enshittification, which tells us “things got worse,” #dotcons reminds us who is responsible and why we need radical alternatives.

It’s time for critical thinking, using terms without deeper critique allows liberals to continue avoiding responsibility. If we want a better web, we need to stop pretending that this decline is just some natural cycle.

📌 The real issue is corporate control, profit extraction, and the enclosure of digital commons.
📌 The solution isn’t lamenting decline—it’s fighting back against #dotcons and rebuilding the #openweb.

So, let’s ditch vague buzzwords and focus on the real struggle, taking control from #dotcons tech monopolies and thus breaking the cycle of enclosure. And seriously, liberals, try thinking critically about this for once—without being prats about it.

More on this: 🔗 Enshittification – Wikipedia