Burning ROM and Subscribing Autopay

Information is of prime importance for making decisions and for making right decisions, right information is important. I spent my childhood on a research station on the outskirts of the city I lived in so for a major chunk of my life I didn't have access to cable television as it had not reached there and so thankfully whatever TV I watched for a considerable time in my childhood consisted of government propaganda and "school chale hum" bullshit. VHS tapes were disappearing during that time and CDs were appearing, and for the middle class watching new movies meant rented CDs which were pirated in and smuggled from Pakistan. A middle class kid with computer couldn't really buy original computer games, and not only because of cost but also because of availability and so all he had was either playing "demos" of video games or getting pirated games from the mythical place called Nehru Place in Delhi. I have always liked owning my media, and books. I used to burn the movies I loved on CDs and keep them, like The Matrix and Harry Potter. I used to collect books and comics and I still do, though my huge childhood collection of comics went to the raddiwala because my mother was unaware of its value. The 90s kids grew up on pirated media, and not like we had any options. There was no Spotify back then, but songs.pk was there. I always made the point to buy my books though, except once during my college time when I read public domain classics from Feedbooks. I mean the books are public domain so anyone can read it, right? Wrong. Just like lower castes were prevented from reading scripture in olden times, people are prevented from reading literature and learning (about) technology now. Technology is the scriptures of today. The fun part in all of this, this is done by individuals who have a freehold of your extremely personal private and even secret data. I have torrented movies (and sometimes books) during my college time, though in case of books I always try to buy them, but well, if you are getting something which is rare in the market and readily available, why won't you try to have it. The funniest part of the bit was when I suffered consequences for reading public domain books which I would have read anyway, as I have been devouring books since the age of three, and it is here I realised how knowledge is rationed and kept from people. Movies, as far as I'm considered, have outlived their purpose for me at least. I have subscription of every OTT in the country and yet I do not watch movies, except superhero movies, because I have affinity to comic books. I collect physical copies of books and have their Kindle subscription, and I have a pretty decent collection of computer games in my Steam library which I seldom play. Is piracy bad? I thought it was bad, but I'm not really sure about it anymore, especially when I realised that in this country, only the descendants of exploiters and extortionists had access to authentic media, including western media and literature while it was gatekept from everyone and only way for common people to access it was contributing to illegal economy (remember the pirated bollywood movies from Pakistan?). Media was democratised only when it lost all its relevance, and of course for profit. I end up paying more to the OTT platforms than I watch every month. On Kindle and Steam, I (and anyone else) only have the "license" to read the books and play the games and I don't really own them despite paying the price in full. You could buy and own software earlier, now it's an unending "subscription". Windows is a necessary operating system due to Microsoft Office, and so I have Windows on my work computer, but I have Linux on my main computer, because it is open source and community based and I support the idea. Windows anyway had lost its charm for me after Windows XP. Having Linux as my main OS does me no harm since Steam supports Linux now and I can play most of my Steam games, if not all, on my Linux machine. Feedbooks is gone, and it has been acquired by a private entity and now it's not as freely available as it was before. I donate. I donate to websites which provide public domain books like Project Gutenberg and others. I donate to Wikipedia, it is not a place to gather political knowledge, but scientific knowledge is still accurate there, and even historical knowledge from Wikipedia is fine as history anyway is a scam. I donate to Linux projects such as Debian, Linux Mint and Ubuntu. My advice, buy all the knowledge and media you consume unless you don't have options or resources, but never get bullied for not doing that. Know that those who have (had) access to authentic media and literature in this country, in most cases, have that due to their daddies extorting and exploiting the populace. Knowledge should be free, and if it is not, first consume the knowledge that is free, instead of going after pirated paywalled content, in most cases public domain knowledge would be enough for you to achieve enlightenment and for making a right worldview if you ignore the social media propaganda of today.