The World we Own

I’m reading a book called Technofeudalism, and it has helped me understand why I’ve been frustrated. So let me write a few words on this blog to confirm that I actually learned something from it. Did you notice how major digital platforms have become true digital overlords, and we, mere virtual peasants? It feels as if feudal lords drew inspiration from dystopian cyberpunk to create a world where only a select few benefit.

To illustrate this, I’ll use two companies: Netflix and Disney. When you think of their streaming products (which, truthfully, I could care less about), you’d assume they compete in the same market, but nothing could be further from the truth. I still remember arguments with close friends, insisting that these two aren’t “competitors” in the traditional sense. If you want to watch The Show of Jef, you must be subscribed to Netflix. In theory, since this show is a commodity, you could get it elsewhere. But in our era of digital feudalism, you have no choice. That decision is made for you, and you should be thanking the benevolent CEO for granting you access. Until they don’t. If The Show of Jef isn’t available on your service, you have to venture into another company’s fiefdom and, of course, pay the toll at the gate, usually, a subscription fee.

If that weren’t enough, we pay more while the product deteriorates day by day, fewer features and diminishing usability. For example, I frequently used the watch‑party feature. My friends and I live in different countries, so we’d sync up cartoons and watch together. Amazon Prime once offered this simple feature, and we absolutely loved and appreciated it.

The problem?

This feature was removed, for no apparent reason. You might argue it was an engineering challenge, an infrastructure issue, or a rights complication across countries. The bottom line, however, is that the feature disappeared and the subscription fee increased. When I realized it was gone, that was it for me. I canceled my subscription and stopped thinking about the show. The sour taste of that experience soured the show’s appeal, and I’ll probably never finish watching it.

If this were a real open market, I could find another online media provider with a watch‑party feature and watch together the show with my friends. But because The Show of Jef is exclusive to one platform, this isn’t an open market. One might suggest buying a physical copy, but if you look, it’s nowhere to be found, the tangible version is locked behind Amazon Prime’s fief.

Since no physical copy exists, is it really wrong to download a digital version and burn it to a disc? After all, the physical entity doesn’t exist, so how can that be illegal? Unfortunately, copyright law doesn’t work that way. I won’t delve further here, or I’ll end up writing another post almost as ranty as my last one on copyright.

So my only recourse is simple: stop watching the show, even if I want to. Now do you taste the bitterness?

How much can we discard?

With our digital‑landlords handing us only scraps while we pay for the privilege, we think we’re receiving value. Yet these overlords sell our data behind terms of service and digital contracts that mean little to the average person. If you’re like me, a creature bound by laws and compelled to do what’s right, you start stripping things out of your life.

It began with that small show and a dwindling desire to watch movies in cinemas, an urge to collect physical copies of films and series again. And I’m only talking about movies and TV shows here. I also want to collect music physically. My tastes barely change, so I could, in theory, own CDs of the songs I love. Even in gaming: while my PS5 holds dozens of digital titles that I bought I spend most of my time on cartridge‑based Switch games, not only because no company can yank them from my library, but because they simply feel more like games.

The reality is that I’m on the verge of a shift, not just physically and mentally, but philosophically. As I’ve learned, this change doesn’t come from within alone, the environment around me is pushing me to adapt. Sooner or later, I’ll need to repurchase all my entertainment, almost as if I’ve traveled back to the early 2000s.

A home solution

I have an old Linux machine at home to create a shared directory where I can store the some media files. While setting this up, I also explored streaming from that directory to my phone or laptop, stretching my networking skills, setting up a home server here, another server there, tweaking my rented modem, and experimenting with web servers and static file hosting. Suddenly, I’m grasping more than I ever thought possible. I still want to configure a local network without internet access, so my TV native apps can’t load ads at the hardware level.

Funny, right? The TV is now selling my data. I can’t imagine my work monitor scanning my code to train some AI.

Either way, I quickly learned about Plex and Jellyfin (the free, open‑source alternative), both are quite nice, especially since I’ll run them on my local Linux server. But you might ask:

You’re a software engineer, so this kind of activity is somewhat normal for you.

First, I’m a rEcAT enGInEeR, so I’m far less competent than you might think. Second, the whole process is nearly streamlined, if you have a spare computer, you can set it up as a media server with minimal effort to no effort, depending on how much you want to tinker.

The reality is that the world is changing faster than ever, the crash of 2008, the COVID pandemic, and now the trade war under a bully Trump at the helm with dozens of nuclear weapons, all remind us how quickly things can go wrong. Hopefully, by the time you read this, he’ll be relegated to history, impeached or wathever else.

And with these times the only things that I hope for is the change of the copyright law, and the removal of the digital feifs.

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