We should stop pretending piracy is some fringe problem instead of a pressure valve. When artists and creators use the internet primarily to sell and self-promote, they’re still participating in the same system even if they’re not Facebook or Spotify. Scale doesn’t change the outcome.

We can’t have the internet we claim to want and treat it like a digital busking space. Those two ideas don’t coexist. Once monetization enters, everything starts bending toward the same endgame, tracking, ads, artificial walls, data collection, subscriptions. It always converges there.

Content creators are part of the enshittification problem. Piracy is a stopgap response to it. A way people push back against a system that turns sharing into commerce. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the result of trying to force a market model onto a space that was built for sharing ideas and collaboration, not sales.