WaDI Newsletter: "Vonnegut punch for your Atlas shrug"
It’s been quite a break. During I was not around world has changed a lot, things changed for all of us. There’s a lot changed over here too, starting with the one thing you all probably noticed by now.
Yes, I moved the newsletter out of Substack to Buttondown. It’s not that I had a problem with Substack but it felt like their tools and platform is not really for me or what I plan with this newsletter. Being on the Substack makes me think about I should go for a more professional newsletter, one with paid subscription and stuff. Aside from the fact that it’s technically impossible for me (because of the country I’m writing this to you) I really don’t want to do that, at least not with a newsletter. I already have Patreon for that purpose and focusing that seems like the best path forward right now.
Also there were some personal differences about design taste with Substack. I want to keep my newsletter simple and easier for me to edit and write. This is why I went with Buttondown. Because I write most of the things first on a Markdown editor (Ulysses) and then move it to wherever I want to publish. On Buttondown, I can do that with a simple copy-paste. And keep the style as simple as I wish.
One other thing that made me choose Buttondown was the level I could turn down email tracking. Right now, I really don’t know whether you opened this or clicked any links I put because I really don’t want to think about those numbers and stats when I publish this newsletter. I want this to be something more private and personal. Buttondown will only see whether this email has arrived to your inbox or not because they need to see that to make things running smoothly and I left the UTM sources open for the time being because I want people I’ve linked know I’m the reason of that small visitor bump (we’re only 138 people here). But other than that, this newsletter don’t have any type of tracking stuff.
One last note before closing this introduction section. If you ever think that you have so many newsletters piling up in your inbox and you need some space, you can always grab the RSS feed for this newsletter from here and plug it into your favorite RSS reader.
OK, let’s talk about something else now.
Once again, authors over US Twitter is talking about piracy and how they’re going to become homeless because a website didn’t limit the number of people who can borrow a digital file which is locked by DRM and will be gone when it’s due. When I put it this way, it sounds silly but that’s pretty much the base of the horror story they’re telling.
I’m not going to talk about how this special example is not illegal or why trying to fight piracy is meaningless. I'm also not going to talk about why they should've learned their lessons from Napster because Bruce Sterling already told that story really well. Instead, I want to talk about the personal reasons behind my “support for piracy”.
Let’s go back to my high school years. I was a teenager who lives in a city called Adana in Turkey, low-income family with a single mom and a little brother. I was reading like crazy and with high school I was getting more curious and wanted more to read, craving for different things and ideas. But if you’re in a country like Turkey, your options are limited and —unless it’s popular— translations usually drives you crazy. So I was trying to find the good stuff with your limited budget. Around those times we also got our first really mediocre desktop computer. With that, internet arrived.
The more I spent time online, the more resources I found. So many new ideas, authors, styles, genres… That’s what I’ve been waiting for all this time. But I had to improve my English because the English taught in high school was much less than helpful. So I forced myself to learn how to read all these new things and how to write meaningful stuff because I was also hanging around forums and blog comment sections. If I’m writing this newsletter —and everything else you’ve read from me— you can thank piracy for it.
I also thank piracy because that’s how I educated myself, found what I want to do for the rest of my life and discovered so many amazing authors, musicians and thinkers. If I never pirated anything, there’s a good chance you won’t be reading any of these. And I won’t be able to pay all the authors I’ve discovered back then with the money I’m earning thanks to their influence. Thanks to all the piracy, I’m now able to support authors and artist I want and I can even pre-order their books and stuff. This was something not even imaginable to my younger self.
(Just remembered that years ago, a British sci-fi author who I totally forgot his name, blocked me on Twitter because I said similar things I said here as a rebuttal to his “piracy scare”.)
Piracy also helped me find my activist side. With all the Internet freedom and censorship things going on here, I also discovered Aaron Swartz and his work. Most importantly Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. He was, and still is, a major inspiration to me and how I approached many things about the technology. He also motivated me to become an activist. If that was not the case, I couldn't do many things I’m making a living out of it right now. (Also Aaron is the main reason why I’ll always pirate everything published by the major academic publishers and help others to pirate too.)
Long story short, I’ll always stand with the pirates. Because I hate all that American “muh copyright” mentality destroying the culture for profit, thinking all of the world living on their standards and people like younger me who are broke but want to read does not exist. There's piracy because all over the world there are people like younger me, who just wants to access more culture. If they think otherwise and try to make sure people like younger me can’t read anything, they will enter my list.
Title of the newsletter came from the RTJ4, from the song JU$T. Whole album is on repeat for me for a while but this one is so far my favorite.
On the more personal updates side, I've redesigned my personal website and trying to turn blogging my main online presence again. I’m still not where I wanted to be but pushing myself to do more. Thankfully there are really good examples like Warren Ellis, Ganzeer, Jay Springett, Paul Graham Raven and more to motivate me with their regular blogging.
I’m also going through most of my media diet to clean and add new things. Maybe I should share the blogs/newsletters/podcasts with you (after the clean up) so you can also send me more recommendations?
I still don't know what type of format I want to follow here or whether I should write weekly or bi-weekly. But this week turned out like this. And I just had to send this because I’ve been avoiding it for three weeks now.
Hope you enjoyed reading it. If you do, spread the word! Like I said, not many people around here. I need more people to corrupt with my ideas about piracy.
Take care of yourselves in these weird times! See you next time.