Let’s Pirate Everything

Stop giving your money to companies that don’t care about you

Image: Badly edited by author

Tech history is littered with moments when consumers had the opportunity to push back, failed to do so, and were then left burdened with bad products and bad consequences.

Why did we fall for the pretty marketing and find ourselves in a routine of upgrading devices every year or two, throwing millions of perfectly good products into landfills?

Why did we continue to use platforms like Facebook, even when we discovered they were nothing more than data-harvesting machines, with the main purpose of selling ads?

Why did we allow our homes to be infiltrated by “smart products,” stuffed with unnecessary additions and features that made them dumb-as-hell spyware, and we’re now in a situation where your door might fail to unlock because of a software bug?

There are countless more (and I’d love to hear them in the comments!).

In most of these cases, it was the same choice. Had we, the consumers, resisted or chosen to stop using/buying the products, the outcomes could have been different. They don’t want to hear that, but it’s true. They can try to fake it till they make it, or attempt to survive on VC funding until they become “too big to fail,” but at the end of the day, most…