Tonight, as I have often before in my life, I got into a stupid, pointless, wearying argument about digital piracy. I read this post by Darren Orf of Gizmodo, and I criticized it. I did so knowing full well that the typical throng of piracy apologist tech-head commenters would descend on me with the typical worn-out cliches. And lo, it  came to pass.

Why do I let something like that depress me so much? I’m not 100% sure. I guess it’s just the litany of excuses that the commenters always have for why, in fact, there is no moral consequences to their behavior at all. It’s the typical laundry list of bad faith and evasion. “We only pirate because it’s so inconvenient to get these legally!” You could literally download thousands of movies, books, games, and albums from a moving plane. “It’s so expensive legally!” There’s thousands of movies to rent, albums to buy, and games to play for $5 or less, all delivered, in seconds, to objects you hold in your hands, in your own home, or anywhere else you prefer to be. “People only pirate things that aren’t available to pay for!” Torrents for movies and albums you can instantly download for less than $10 get downloaded by the millions. “It’s only taking money from millionaires!” In fact many of the people hurt most by piracy are independent and experimental artists who have are already just scraping by, or the creative middle classes that perform essential services for artists. “VHS and the 8-track went away too!” Those are mediums, not art forms. VHS giving way to DVD didn’t mean there were no more movies being sold. People refusing to pay for movies and music makes it less likely that some movies and albums will get made. “Piracy is a triumph for the little guy!” Literally the opposite. Giant tech firms make billions. Artists who can trade on their celebrity and sell Vitamin Water make millions. Independent artists and the middle class that works in the arts get hamstrung. “It’s not really hurting their bottom line!” That is entirely untrue, no matter how many times you insist it isn’t. “These companies have to evolve!” How? In what way? Saying that industries have to change is not an argument. You have to say in what way they have to change. Because they’ve changed in precisely the same way piracy advocates have always said they should, and yet people keep pirating anyway. “Music is bad these days!” Not true and totally irrelevant. “Some people in other countries can’t legally download things!” I’m talking about the people who can. I’m not talking about the guy who just wants to see an obscure silent film that he can’t get anywhere else and I’m not talking about the guy living under an oppressive regime who can’t get access to Amazon. I’m talking about the millions of people who every day could pay a pittance to get digital media and instead choose to pirate it so that no money at all goes to the people who created it. (But money still goes to Comcast, and Apple, and Google….)

So that bums me out, the impregnable nature of the little philosophical fortress they build for themselves, the way they’ve simply precluded the question: am I hurting others in this behavior, and if I am, do I have any obligation to stop?

But look at Orf’s piece. He may not offer all of these excuses. It’s what’s missing, instead, that depresses me. His post is totally lacking not only any kind of moral consideration of the behavior that he’s talking about, but any suggestion that it’s occurred to him that there is such a thing as a moral obligation to others on this issue. The notion that content creators are, like him, trapped in capitalism and should thus receive money for their work either doesn’t occur to him or he doesn’t see fit to reflect on that fact. If anything it’s defiant in not even acknowledging that there’s any moral concern here. It’s pure Borg Complex: this thing is inevitable because it comes from technology, and because it is inevitable I have no moral relationship to it. I’m in the clear. I don’t even have to ask.

And that, ultimately, is what just depresses the hell out of me. I mean Gizmodo specializes in a kind of aggressive moral childishness, but the tech culture is full of this stuff: I’m going to take what I want whenever I want it because I want it and I won’t ask or care what the costs of that behavior are.  It’s not the issue of piracy in and of itself, although I think a lot of people simply have no idea how massively threatened so many of the arts are, how truly beleaguered music and movies are as professional enterprises, or how much declining profit margins for blockbuster properties make it harder on the smaller projects and producers…. But it’s really just my sense that so many people allow these digital divides to blind them to the consequences of their own actions.

I try always to distrust my own feelings that things are getting worse, because we have such a powerful bias that way as human beings. Certainly I’m not making some lame generational complaint, “argle bargle Millenials” whatever. And I guess I lack data to say that people are getting more myopic in their sense of responsibility to others. I just worry. So many new technologies and services seem to operate from the premise that interacting with people who aren’t already your friends or family members is just the worst. And as we put more and more digital intermediaries between us and other people, I don’t know how the responsibility to think of the ways in which your own action impacts others survives.

Adulthood gets a really bad rap. To me the basic insight of adulthood is pretty simple: my actions affect others, and sometimes hurt others, and it’s my responsibility to be hard on myself when it comes to figuring out if I’m doing harm. But advertising tells you that you’re the only human being that has ever mattered, and technology makes it easier and easier for you to avoid human beings that you don’t already have some extrinsic interest in, and we have this whole bankrupt philosophy that tells us that resistance is futile because technology supposedly “wants” things to happen. I’m a pretty emo guy, granted. But it wears me out.