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News Post: A Primer on Torrenting · Never Post

0:11
Georgia Hampton: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
0:15
podcast for and about the Internet. I am producer Georgia.
0:20
This intro was written on 03/31/2026 at 03:50PM central
0:26
time, and we have a litigious show for you this week. In this
0:33
episode, we're bringing back our series Terms and Conditions,
0:38
where we spend some time with Internet related concepts,
0:40
practices, and ideas to better understand how they work and the
0:45
context in which they exist. Today, I am chatting with
0:49
author, professor, and digital piracy expert, Aram Synreich,
0:54
about torrenting.
0:56
Peer to peer file sharing isn't new, nor are the ongoing legal
1:00
controversies surrounding it. But what is torrenting? Why does
1:07
it have such a marred reputation, and what is its role
1:11
in our online lives? But first, we're gonna take a quick break.
1:16
You'll listen to some ads, unless you're on the member
1:19
feed.
1:19
And when we return, we'll talk about a few of the things that
1:22
have happened since the last time you heard from us. I have
1:28
got six news items for you this week. Firstly, in show news,
1:33
we've been nominated for a Webby award. Eagle eared listeners
1:37
will remember that we won the Webby for best podcast live
1:41
recording last year for our xoxo fest live show in 2024. This
1:46
year, we're up for best individual episode in the news
1:50
and politics category for Mike's incredible episode titled AI and
1:56
New American Fascism.
1:58
If you'd like to vote for us, we will include the link to do so
2:01
in the show notes. Huzzah. The Federal Communications
2:06
Commission has banned all new consumer based Internet routers
2:11
made outside of The United States. Importantly, the ban
2:16
does not affect any foreign made routers that are already being
2:19
sold in The United States, nor ones that already exist in
2:23
American homes. But any new foreign made models are banned,
2:29
unless they can be approved by the FCC and the Department of
2:34
Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.
2:37
This comes as a result of alleged national security
2:41
concerns around these newer models. With the FCC writing in
2:45
a statement that, quote, malicious actors have exploited
2:49
security gaps in foreign made routers to attack American
2:53
households, disrupt networks, enable espionage, and facilitate
2:57
intellectual property theft. But how real that threat actually is
3:04
remains unclear. Virtually all Internet routers sold in The
3:09
United States are manufactured at least in part overseas. And
3:14
it is also unclear what elements of manufacturing process fall
3:18
under this ban.
3:20
But as a spokesman from TP Link told Wired, quote, it appears
3:25
that the entire router industry will be impacted, unquote. And
3:30
that, invariably, includes us as consumers. Hachette Book Group
3:41
has pulled one of its latest releases from shelves after
3:45
suspecting that the novel was written by AI. The book in
3:50
question is Shy Girl, the debut novel written, allegedly, by Mia
3:55
Ballard. The book was first self published in February 2025, and
4:01
later picked up by Hachette in the fall.
4:04
The novel revolves around a young woman who is forced to
4:06
live as the pet of an abusive, controlling man. And in some
4:11
corners of the internet, this shocking, brutal story was first
4:16
celebrated as a kind of extreme feminist horror. But over time,
4:21
more and more readers started to post online with theories that
4:25
the story wasn't just badly written, but the product of AI
4:29
slop. Flash forward to March 19 when the New York Times broke
4:35
the story that Hachette was both canceling Shy Girls debut in The
4:39
United States and removing it from shelves in The UK because
4:44
of widespread allegations of AI use. Mia Ballard, for her part,
4:49
has completely denied these claims, telling the New York
4:53
Times that it was actually her editor who had used AI when
4:56
working on the text.
4:58
But Ballard did not elaborate on how exactly this AI editing took
5:05
place. A New Mexico jury found Meta guilty guilty of misleading
5:13
its consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabling
5:17
child endangerment. Now, Meta owes $375,000,000 in civil
5:25
penalties. That would be a story worthy in and of itself, except
5:30
that one day later, Meta was back in court again, losing big
5:36
time. In the second trial, Meta and YouTube were found liable in
5:42
creating addictive social media platforms that endanger the
5:45
emotional well-being of its users.
5:48
A young woman using the pseudonym Kaylee sued both tech
5:52
giants, blaming them for her childhood social media
5:55
addiction. Kaylee has now been awarded $6,000,000 in damages.
6:01
In response, Meta released a statement saying that, quote,
6:06
teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to
6:10
a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously
6:14
as every case is different, and we remain confident in our
6:18
record of protecting teens online. Sure.
6:22
Totally for sure. Where have all the doge bros gone? Turns out,
6:30
they've gone viral. Earlier this month, video footage from the
6:34
deposition of former Department of Government efficiency
6:38
employees, Justin Fox and Nate Kavanaugh, spread like wildfire
6:44
across the social Internet. The videos showed the two men
6:48
admitting to using ChatGPT to filter out grants based on words
6:53
like black or homosexual, but not terms like white or
6:59
Caucasian.
7:00
They also struggled to answer simple questions about what
7:03
exactly DEI even was. The videos from these depositions were
7:08
originally posted on YouTube and shared across social platforms
7:13
before a judge ruled that they needed to be taken down out of
7:18
concern for the safety of Fox, Kavanaugh, and their families.
7:21
This ruling was reversed a little over two weeks later,
7:25
citing the first amendment. But what's most interesting was what
7:29
happened in those two weeks. Because, yes, the videos were
7:34
taken down from YouTube.
7:35
But it turned out that doing that didn't really make a
7:38
difference because they had already been backed up online.
7:44
Four zero four media reported that only a single day after the
7:48
videos were taken down, the Internet Archive had already
7:51
reuploaded a saved version of the videos. Plus, both
7:56
depositions had already been saved another way. They had been
8:00
torrented. Arrr.
8:02
And speaking of torrenting, oh, how far we have strayed from the
8:07
days of Limewire. In a surprising unanimous supreme
8:12
court ruling, the internet service provider Cox
8:15
Communications was found not liable for the illegal
8:19
downloading and sharing of copyrighted music done through
8:22
its services. The case was brought to court by dozens of
8:27
major music companies who claimed that Cox Communications
8:30
hadn't done enough to sufficiently stop its users from
8:33
engaging in piracy. But as it turns out, that wasn't enough to
8:38
convince the court to put the responsibility of this behavior
8:41
on any given Internet provider. Justice Clarence Thomas read
8:45
aloud his opinion that, quote, under our precedence, a company
8:50
is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a
8:55
service to the general public with knowledge that it will be
8:58
used by some to infringe copyrights.
9:01
Hahar, medicate. This is exactly why the conversation you're
9:06
about to hear felt so important to share right now. Torrenting
9:11
is one of those countless Internet y things that gets
9:14
talked about a lot, but at least for me, was something that was
9:17
never explained clearly enough for me to feel like I really
9:21
understood it. So for this installment of terms and
9:24
conditions, that is exactly what we are going to try to do. So
9:29
after the break, we'll talk Torrenting.
9:49
There's something you should know up top. Out of the entire
9:53
Never Post staff, I undeniably know the least about Torrenting.
9:59
Going into the research for this episode, this is basically
10:02
everything I knew. One, Torrenting is a kind of
10:06
decentralized file sharing done through peer to peer networks.
10:10
So stuff like the now defunct platforms of Napster and
10:15
Limewire.
10:16
Two, it's how a lot of people I know downloaded and watched
10:20
movies. And three, once, my friend got a cease and desist
10:25
letter from DreamWorks because she did not realize that the
10:28
Torrent file for she's the man that she was trying to download
10:32
never stopped downloading for, I kid you not, multiple years. But
10:38
that's basically it. So this episode of terms and conditions
10:42
is partially for my own benefit. Because as a kind of Internet
10:46
journalist, it is ridiculous for me not to know more about
10:49
torrenting.
10:50
And also, frankly, considering the ongoing news about the
10:53
topics of file sharing and piracy, I don't really think I
10:58
can afford to not know about this. So to better understand
11:02
torrenting as a practice and as a concept within a broader
11:06
cultural context, I brought in Erem Sinreich. Erem is a media
11:12
professor at American University in the School of Communication.
11:16
He's a musician and he's an author. But the reason I knew he
11:20
would be the best person to talk about Torrenting is that he has
11:24
spent decades covering Torrenting and file sharing and
11:28
piracy.
11:30
Aram has written multiple books about those topics, including
11:33
The Secret Life of Data and The Piracy Crusade. You'll hear the
11:37
two of us talk more specifically about The Piracy Crusade in a
11:40
little bit. Suffice it to say, I knew he would be the perfect
11:44
person to help me understand the basics of torrenting and to
11:49
contextualize it in a culture that has I mean, for my entire
11:54
life, demonized peer to peer file sharing as something as
11:59
unforgivably illegal as stealing a car. So I started out our
12:06
conversation with a very simple question. In the simplest
12:14
technological terms, how does torrenting work?
12:18
Aram Sinnreich: So in order to torrent, you have to first
12:22
download a file that's like a little pointer file. You don't
12:25
you don't go onto the internet and download an m p three. You
12:29
download like a little like 100 k file that says, here's what
12:33
the m p three looks like in a bit torrenting network and some
12:36
of the places you could go to ask if anyone has one. And then
12:40
you load that little file into a BitTorrent client and then the
12:43
BitTorrent client asks everyone in the network, do you have this
12:46
file? And then you get to download it.
12:49
So those websites where you download the little Torrent file
12:52
became social websites. And they actually developed their this
12:57
whole very well articulated system of social credit where
13:01
people would have like credit scores, and those credit scores
13:04
would then be interpreted through the technology to say
13:08
how much permission people had to download how many files and
13:11
how quickly. And people developed reputations for being
13:15
seeders rather than leechers, That is people who are willing
13:18
to upload as well as download. And and all this kind of social
13:22
language and these social protocols emerged around this
13:27
practice. But again, because it wasn't built into the tech,
13:30
people had to kind of build it themselves.
13:32
Georgia Hampton: I like that there's this community component
13:35
here. But I also have to imagine that this process isn't one
13:40
that's smooth every single time. Right? Like, I have virtually no
13:46
experience with torrenting, but I do know that it comes with a
13:50
certain set of risks. Obviously, you have the possibility that
13:54
the file you download is actually a virus.
13:57
There's also, like, legal threats in the sense of
14:01
downloading a movie might get you unwanted attention from a
14:05
giant movie studio or something. So in that case, what are the
14:12
best practices for torrenting? What tools do you need?
14:16
Aram Sinnreich: The number one thing you need is to use a VPN
14:20
because all of the litigation is based on IP addresses. So you
14:27
need to effectively mask your IP address and you need a VPN that
14:30
doesn't log your own online traffic, make sure you have good
14:35
antivirus. Scan everything that you download. And then there are
14:40
some BitTorrent trackers that are laden down with malware and
14:47
scammy porn ads and and sports betting ads and stuff like that.
14:51
And you want to kind of figure out which ones those are and go
14:54
to more altruistically oriented BitTorrent trackers to download,
14:59
you know, the little 100 k file.
15:01
So so I would say like, look at a blog like Torrent Freak, which
15:08
has been out for a long time, and get their advice about the
15:12
best software to use, the best websites to visit, the best VPNs
15:16
to employ, and and practice data hygiene.
15:20
Georgia Hampton: I wanna shift us to a more cultural context
15:25
with Torrenting because it has, I mean, it has a reputation, you
15:30
know? Like, I synonymize torrenting with piracy. So does
15:38
torrenting always mean piracy?
15:41
Aram Sinnreich: No. No. Of course, it doesn't. In fact, the
15:44
vast majority of torrenting has nothing to do with so called
15:47
piracy. These days, most if you took a look at Internet traffic
15:51
and you analyzed it, most of what is classified as torrenting
15:55
is really kind of back end content management for big media
15:59
companies.
16:00
Georgia Hampton: Say more about that. What does that mean?
16:03
Aram Sinnreich: So the thing that torrenting is really good
16:05
at is taking big files and breaking them up into super tiny
16:08
pieces, and then spreading them through the network and
16:11
reassembling them. And as it turns out, companies like
16:14
Spotify and Netflix need that kind of back end infrastructure
16:19
in order to manage their huge content libraries and move them
16:22
seamlessly all around the world. So in addition to kind of edge
16:25
of network service, servers, and peering arrangements, torrenting
16:30
and similar technologies have for the last fifteen years been
16:33
an important part of that back end.
16:35
Georgia Hampton: I had no idea that a place like Spotify uses
16:40
torrenting.
16:41
Aram Sinnreich: I think they replaced it with a torrent like
16:44
protocol a couple years back.
16:47
Georgia Hampton: Okay.
16:47
Aram Sinnreich: But they did use torrenting for many years as so
16:51
did Netflix, so did I think YouTube, if I remember
16:53
correctly.
16:54
Georgia Hampton: How ironic.
16:56
Aram Sinnreich: Yeah. It is. It is. Even as they're all the
16:59
Hollywood studios were were demonizing it. It's funny, you
17:02
know, one of the things I've done over the years is I've been
17:05
an expert witness on a bunch of court cases about file sharing.
17:08
Woah. Actually, first one was Grokster, which went to the US
17:12
Supreme Court back in 2003.
17:14
Georgia Hampton: Oh my god.
17:15
Aram Sinnreich: I know. Yeah. Had I didn't know it was gonna
17:17
go to the Supreme Court, you know. Otherwise, I would have
17:19
done a better job. But you know, I still do I still do a fair
17:23
amount of expert witnessing and and Torrenting still comes up.
17:26
And what you see, I can't reveal the details of any of these
17:30
cases because a lot of it is under seal. But generally
17:33
speaking, the arguments that you see the plaintiffs make in these
17:37
cases is, we looked at this traffic analysis and it said 7%
17:42
of all internet traffic is BitTorrent. Therefore, it's a
17:45
massive piracy problem. And then my job is to say, actually, out
17:50
of that 7%, you know, 6.85% is like back end systems for the
17:55
Spotify's of the world. And that remaining point one five
17:59
consists of all kinds of other stuff of which music is only
18:02
this teensy little piece.
18:04
So like, you know, don't get like too exercised about it.
18:07
This is actually a tiny tiny problem, not a huge huge
18:10
problem.
18:11
Georgia Hampton: That's that seems so different than my,
18:15
like, layperson understanding of what that means, what that
18:18
practice is. And I'm curious kind of why that is. Like, if if
18:24
torrenting isn't always piracy, and if anything, like you just
18:27
said, it kind of often really isn't at all, and is used by
18:30
these massive companies that would otherwise, you know, take
18:34
legal action against something like torrenting as piracy. How
18:39
did torrenting come to be defined by its use circumventing
18:45
access and copyright restrictions? Like, how did it
18:48
become synonymous, at least from my perspective, with a kind of
18:52
piracy?
18:53
Aram Sinnreich: There was a sustained public relations
18:56
campaign undertaken mostly by the music industry from 2003 to
19:00
2008, which resulted in a massive change of the framing of
19:04
this technology in mainstream media. And that framing has
19:07
stuck with us ever since.
19:09
Georgia Hampton: So this dovetails very nicely into
19:12
something I know you've written about, which is this notion of
19:17
this legal affront on piracy and on, I guess, torrenting in in
19:22
some capacity as part of that as a kind of crusade. Why why is
19:27
the term crusade so apt?
19:29
Aram Sinnreich: So so the fight against torrenting by media
19:32
industries, it kind of puts this moralistic screen on what's
19:37
really a form of economic self interest and and short term
19:40
economic self interest that doesn't really pay attention to
19:43
the kind of knock on consequences of waging the war
19:47
itself. And in my book, The Piracy Crusade, I squander a lot
19:51
of ink talking about all of those knock on consequences and
19:54
the way that they in in unexpected ways come back to
19:57
bite the industry in the butt.
19:59
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. I'm curious to hear a little bit
20:01
more about that because I was very interested to see in the
20:04
introduction of your book, how you specifically say that this
20:08
is a short term solution and that it doesn't actually protect
20:11
the long term interests of these so called crusaders or the
20:17
government that serves as their allies. So so why is that?
20:21
Aram Sinnreich: I mean, you have to remember the context in which
20:24
peer to peer file sharing first emerged in The US and elsewhere.
20:28
You know, flash all the way back pre BitTorrent to 1999 when this
20:33
thing called Napster comes out. Some kid in his college dorm
20:37
named Sean Fanning invented this little piece of software that
20:40
allowed anybody who had access to it to freely share all of
20:44
their m p threes with anybody else on the internet and to
20:47
download all of the m p threes from everyone else. Prior to
20:51
that time, in like May 1999, the music industry estimated that
20:56
there were half a million m p threes on the entire Internet.
21:00
And and then June, Napster comes out and by like August, there
21:05
are billions of m p threes being transacted every day among tens
21:09
of millions of active users of this platform.
21:12
Georgia Hampton: Wow.
21:12
Aram Sinnreich: Modernity was born that day. Like the world
21:15
that we now live in was was born in June 1999. Now, at the time,
21:21
I was a music industry and Internet industry analyst. And
21:25
along with a bunch of other of my contemporaries, we were
21:28
arguing that because of the Internet and because of digital
21:32
technology and the kind of low cost of storage, the future of
21:38
media wasn't going to be the kind of like pay for access to a
21:41
single thing model that we've seen during the twentieth
21:43
century where you walked up to a store and you gave them $20 and
21:47
they gave you a CD with 12 songs on it, And then you went back
21:50
the next time your allowance was topped up. But that now, the
21:54
problem was that there was so much abundance of information
21:57
that the business model had to be prioritizing this song or
22:01
this movie over all of the other millions of ones that someone
22:04
could have access to.
22:05
And that meant you were switching to a model that we now
22:08
think of as the streaming model. And I was an early and, you
22:12
know, loud advocate for that model. So I did some research,
22:17
big survey at the time, and I found out that by the 2000,
22:24
people who'd been using Napster were actually buying more music
22:27
than the people who weren't using Napster. Even if you
22:30
controlled for like how much money they made, how much music
22:33
they bought in the past, Like every other factor, people who
22:36
are demographically identical to each other, if they were using
22:40
Napster, they were like half again as likely to have
22:42
increased the amount of money they spent on music in the last
22:45
year. So people were like actually discovering and
22:48
learning about it.
22:49
And I I went running to my record label clients and I was
22:53
like, you guys, the best thing in the world just happened.
22:56
Like, I know that you've got record revenues now, but you're
22:59
about to grow your revenues by 50% just by licensing to this
23:04
cool new platform. And they literally, not only stopped
23:08
being my clients more or less overnight, but issued a press
23:12
release about how I was full of shit and and I was I was not to
23:17
be listened to.
23:18
Georgia Hampton: Oh. Oh, yeah. Oh my god.
23:20
Aram Sinnreich: Yeah. Like a smear a genuine smear campaign.
23:22
The first of several that I've experienced at the hands of the
23:26
music industry over the years. Yeah. And then this interesting
23:30
thing happens where all of these people at the record labels
23:34
would call me up or or meet me for lunch or whatever and be
23:37
like, you know what?
23:38
You're a 100% right. I wish you'd come in and tell like the
23:41
higher ups in my organization what's going on because they
23:44
don't understand it.
23:45
Georgia Hampton: So let me get this straight. The short term
23:49
reaction by these like bigwigs in, I mean, the music industry,
23:54
but also it sounds like in Hollywood and all these
23:56
entertainment industries, is basically just a financial one
23:59
of being like, we can make so much money by suing these
24:04
people. Like, we don't care about this model.
24:07
Aram Sinnreich: Right. And damn the future. Like, what what why
24:09
license and make a little when you can sue and make a lot?
24:11
There was so much pressure on companies to show massive
24:15
quarterly growth that they were strategically compelled almost
24:19
by through fiduciary duty in the case of the public companies to
24:23
do whatever it took to just boost those numbers. And like,
24:28
we'll worry about the future when the future comes.
24:30
Georgia Hampton: Well, mean, then the future came, especially
24:32
with streaming. Because I mean, now that's the standard.
24:37
Aram Sinnreich: It took a decade. Right? A decade during
24:39
which the the music industry as we were talking about before,
24:42
spent its resources demonizing technology rather than embracing
24:47
it. But the real change didn't happen until Spotify came to The
24:50
US and integrated with Facebook in 2011. So reintegrating that
24:56
social function back into the tech, which had been missing
24:59
since Napster had been sued and shut down.
25:01
Because the the tech that replaced it, which was mostly
25:04
Torrenting, was decentralized and didn't have a social
25:08
component in it. It was much more utilitarian.
25:10
Georgia Hampton: I mean, it again, as an as a outside
25:14
observer, it certainly seemed like torrenting was sort of,
25:18
yeah, the work of an individual person for individual needs or
25:22
desires.
25:23
Aram Sinnreich: Well, when it's used for that function, yes, to
25:27
a certain extent. There is a social para network surrounding
25:31
torrenting that was not imminent to the technology itself, but
25:36
that people built around it because people like to be
25:39
social.
25:40
Georgia Hampton: Right. Like sort of what you mentioned
25:41
earlier. This self created system that also has this very
25:47
communal component. Like, it's a a practice that is, I mean, very
25:53
trusting, like one based on trust.
25:56
Aram Sinnreich: Yeah. That's a good way to put it. Right?
25:58
Mutuality, reciprocity, and trust in so far as you don't
26:02
think you're downloading a spoof file or a piece of malware are
26:05
integral to it. And and also all of those, like like all human
26:10
systems of trust, and interdependence, it it got
26:13
exploited by all kinds of bad actors.
26:15
Right? So BitTorrent has been used to seed malware, which
26:19
create botnets and are used for denial distributed denial of
26:23
service attacks, you know, basically since day one.
26:26
Georgia Hampton: I mean, it it seems like such a to use, I feel
26:30
like, the often used way of codifying things, like a true
26:35
neutral tool. And that you can use it for these sort of
26:40
beautiful free access egalitarian desires, and then
26:46
also can be used kind of quite literally as, like, a almost
26:50
like state sanctioned, like, cultural Terrorism? Assault.
26:57
Yeah. Terrorism.
26:58
Aram Sinnreich: Yeah. Yeah. Both of those things are true.
27:01
There's so many reasons why people, you know hold a knife or
27:05
drive a car. Right?
27:07
It's a piece of technology that has many uses. We haven't even
27:11
begun to plumb the depths of the kind of altruistic functions of
27:14
it. You know there are all these people and institutions that
27:18
began using BitTorrent as a kind of, distributed archival system.
27:24
So that, you know, if if, Amazon Web Services went down or
27:29
somebody's hard drive crashed, all of their valuable content
27:32
wouldn't be lost. It would be distributed throughout the cloud
27:34
using BitTorrent.
27:36
So there's a ton of public domain stuff. Know, the bible is
27:39
on BitTorrent and, you know, silent films are on BitTorrent
27:43
and, you know, all all this, you know, government websites and
27:46
and government archives are on BitTorrent just to keep them
27:50
because some altruistically oriented person decided that
27:55
that would be a safer place to store it than in one in one
27:57
spot.
27:58
Georgia Hampton: I mean, and then you kind of also touch on
28:01
the now contemporary troubles with streaming and very much
28:07
platforms owning and distributing this content, which
28:10
is, you know, the movie that you love Netflix right now, they can
28:15
decide to just take it down and now it doesn't exist.
28:17
Aram Sinnreich: Well, it doesn't exist on Netflix. It's still on
28:20
BitTorrent. And, you know, I'm not gonna lie. There are times
28:23
where, you know, I lost access to streaming media that I had
28:28
paid for access to, and I resorted to BitTorrent to find
28:32
it because it wasn't available anywhere else. But morally, I
28:35
feel absolutely fine about it.
28:38
Georgia Hampton: Why do you feel that way? Like, why why not feel
28:41
dissuaded by the technical illegality of of torrenting?
28:46
Aram Sinnreich: Well, am dissuaded by the technical
28:48
illegality because if somebody identified my IP address with
28:52
that Torrent, I could be sued. And I'd probably have to settle
28:56
for a couple thousand dollars, which is what usually happens
28:59
when the hundreds of thousands of people who have been caught
29:01
like that get sued. But also, this is a movie that to your
29:04
point had been removed from streaming and download services
29:09
perfuncturally without my knowledge, without without
29:14
taking the interest of consumers or the interest of the our
29:18
cultural legacy to heart. And I felt that whoever is
29:23
distributing this film via BitTorrent is doing a mitzvah
29:27
because they're keeping the film in the public eye.
29:30
Georgia Hampton: I know you've written in the Piracy Crusade
29:32
about kind of the extremely high stakes of this. I mean, you
29:36
you've written about how it affects, like, democratic
29:40
institutions. So how does something like piracy or
29:44
torrenting affect something as enormous as literally democracy?
29:53
Aram Sinnreich: I think the the most important way to answer it
29:56
is to think about what is the collateral damage in these
30:00
battles. Sharing information is part of how we exert power,
30:05
especially in a democratic society. Right? That's why The
30:08
US has a first amendment. So that battle always becomes
30:14
especially pitched at moments of technological, ecological
30:18
change.
30:20
When it's possible for people and institutions that have been
30:25
constrained to exert to have newfound powers, and it's
30:31
possible for institutions that have been powerful to become
30:35
even more powerful. If you look at the technologies that have
30:40
been put into place to limit consumer access to information,
30:45
And if you look at the policies that have been put in place to
30:48
reify those technologies and support them, they tend to be
30:53
very censorious and surveillance. And censorship and
30:57
surveillance are anathema to a healthy democracy. In a free
31:01
society, torrenting and similar technologies are tolerated
31:04
because the cost of policing them is not worth the benefits.
31:09
Georgia Hampton: And the benefits are cultural, societal?
31:13
Aram Sinnreich: Well, I I guess what I'm saying is the cost to
31:15
society of policing them is not worth the benefits to society of
31:19
policing them. I'm not pretending that torrenting is
31:21
like an unalloyed benefit to the world. Right? It has upsides. It
31:26
has downsides.
31:27
It helps the industry. It hurts the industry. It's complex. But
31:31
the question is, what are we willing to At what price are we
31:36
willing to stop this technology and this behavior? And if the
31:40
price is surveilling the whole internet and creating these
31:43
systems of electronic gates that prevent different people from
31:48
spreading and accessing different kinds of information,
31:51
right, to me, the cost of putting that in place is so
31:55
great that it's not worth whatever benefits accrue from
31:58
putting it in place.
31:59
Georgia Hampton: But it does feel like piracy is is part of I
32:03
mean, is a political conversation. And I'm curious
32:10
what your thoughts are for, like, the near future of piracy
32:16
and torrenting, especially at a time when a lot of corporate
32:21
media is being consolidated and turned into these just like
32:25
enormous monopolies.
32:29
Aram Sinnreich: I think most politics are small p politics,
32:31
not big p politics. And most people who are engaging in
32:35
political activities don't conceptualize it as such. Right?
32:40
I think most of people torrenting and and most of
32:44
people, you know, secure online platforms are not really
32:50
thinking about the kind of larger picture so much as
32:55
they're just trying to live their lives and be free. And
32:58
they want they want to watch what they want to watch.
33:01
They want to listen to what they want to listen to. They want to
33:03
associate with people though, you know, freely and to
33:07
participate and to feel like meaningful participants in the
33:10
public conversation. And all of that is political, but it's not
33:13
framed politically. And it doesn't need to be framed
33:16
politically for people to to feel that reflexively. So I I
33:21
think that that we are at a moment as you point out of such
33:25
extreme media consolidation and monochromatic overdetermination
33:31
of the public sphere that there will be increasing popular
33:34
resistance to that, and that decentralized systems like
33:39
BitTorrent will play a role in that.
33:41
I also think that The US is busy squandering every last shred of
33:48
goodwill it's ever had around the world. And because of that,
33:52
there is going to be an increasing interest, big big p
33:56
politically, from foreign governments and corporations,
34:00
not to mention general citizenry in how do we get big tech out of
34:05
our lives and especially American big tech out of our
34:08
lives. And platforms like BitTorrent are gonna be part of
34:12
that as well.
34:13
Georgia Hampton: I was gonna say it. In a world of big tech, it
34:15
feels at least to me like something like BitTorrent is
34:19
like little tech or like accessible for everybody tech?
34:25
Aram Sinnreich: Very much. At some point soon, I think we're
34:27
gonna see a real breakout kind of popularly embraced unlicensed
34:33
streaming service that that has BitTorrent on the back end. And
34:37
then history will repeat itself. There'll be a moral panic about
34:40
it, and there'll be lawsuits, and maybe I'll have to testify
34:45
before the supreme court again. And, you know, the cycle
34:51
continues.
34:52
Georgia Hampton: Well, in that case, as someone who has watched
34:56
this cycle already happen, if someone was just going to start
35:01
getting into torrenting right now, what advice would you give
35:05
them?
35:05
Aram Sinnreich: I would say, first of all, you need a good
35:07
reason. Streaming, especially music streaming, has now become
35:10
like a commoditized kind of add on for other kinds of online
35:14
service relationships. So so if you have free streaming, you you
35:19
know, unless you want that, like, documentary that you can't
35:22
find anywhere else, there's not a really good reason to use
35:25
BitTorrent at this point for those kinds of functions. And
35:28
you have to balance your tolerance like, what's my
35:31
tolerance for advertising? What's my tolerance for
35:34
Melania's face versus my tolerance for like malware?
35:37
Right now in this current environment, adding BitTorrent
35:42
to your life increases your threat surface meaningfully. So
35:46
if you're concerned about the integrity of your laptop, your
35:49
phone, and if you're keeping sensitive files on it, you might
35:54
not want to open that window. And and even if you do, be aware
35:59
that you are undertaking a level of risk that you might not be
36:03
tolerant for. There is not a safe version of BitTorrent.
36:08
There are only safer ways of approaching it.
36:27
Georgia Hampton: That is the news we have for you this week.
36:31
We'll be back here in the main feed next week on or around
36:35
April 9. I want to say a huge, huge thank you to Erem Syndreich
36:41
for talking with me about the ins and outs of Torrenting along
36:45
with its history within culture. If you wanna learn more about
36:49
him and find more of his work, head on over to his website,
36:53
synreich.com. And thank you for listening.
36:58
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