Growing up poor without access to creative media has given me a very different perspective on piracy than I commonly see in twitter discourse.

Suffice to say that morality under capitalism is not black and white, and those trying their best are often the poorest.

I am well aware that the majority of piracy is undertaken by those who can afford to purchase creative media.

But I am equally aware that for those struggling to survive on a pittance, a life without creative media is a horrific ideal to be upheld.

As a very young child I had one VHS tape with cartoons on it. It was copied, by my mum, from a rented video that we couldn't keep renting out.

It was a Chip and Dale chipmunks collection with Donald Duck.

I don't think that case of piracy was wrong.

The Disney movies that I had, save for one then later two exceptions, were taped from the television. This is also piracy, and illegal to keep for more than 6 weeks, but nobody ever took that seriously.

Today I have the DVDs of those films. But now they're all streamed.

When I entered the field of comics journalism, I had access to nearly every weekly and monthly comic written in English, across multiple publishers and countries.

Hundreds upon hundreds of titles every week.

This is not piracy, even though I read far more than I could review.

In my time in and around the comics industry I have seen many people exit from the path of making comics, and every single one of them was working class.

At cons, I have heard and seen classism constantly, always directed at working class creators for struggling.

But that classism also applies to those working class readers, and even more so to the vast number of potential readers who can't afford to be there.

For novels there are libraries. For comics, they are often missing.

And books *are* more affordable than comics.

When I was a kid, the opposite was true. The highlight of my year was taking birthday book tokens given by my huge extended family and buying a selection of books.

But I got The Beano and The Dandy every week from my grandma. They cost 24p each.

The older I got, the more kids media became unaffordable.

And the older I got, the more all media became unaffordable.

As a kid I was fortunate to be taken to museums (free) and art galleries (free) because we couldn't afford the theme parks and cinema.

And it's notable to me that what society deems to be culture that should be accessible to all - the high arts of painting, literature, sculpture etc -

don't line up with the arts created by working class people, that fellow working class people cannot afford to access.

My criticisms of piracy, the related struggle of the working class creator, and the often erased experience of the working class non-consumer

is not therefore rooted in black and white morality and condemnation of the individual.

But of a society that doesn't value art.

There is little support for the artist from society, in many countries there is no health care or welfare net whatsoever, and there is no drive to increase access for the poor and vulnerable who are instead told to live a life devoid of art.

Capitalism values profit, only.

And under capitalism, the profit is never for the worker, or for the consumer.

It is only for the rich at the top of society, free to purchase, waste, and pirate art as they so please.

Piracy doesn't fix this. But nor does it cause it.

It's a symptom.

I don't want to live a life without art. But I'm too ill to work. And thus society says I must live without it.

I am glad that growing up poor, I did not grow up without art. MANY of my classmates did. Today perhaps those kids have the option of piracy.

And as a former kids bookseller, I might add that a great deal of stolen stock is from the children's department of a book shop.

Books for toddlers, books for learning to read, books for studying school exams.

This is seen as natural expected "wastage" in the book industry

So there I suppose is my true unpopular opinion.

Focusing on the working class creator is important. But forgetting or dismissing the working class non-consumer is all too frequent and deeply troubling.

That's capitalism for you. The poor helping the poor, never quite enough.

PS - one actual solution to this is governments adopting the universal basic income, which allow everyone to live above the poverty line and mean that both art creation and purchase was at least basically funded.

Psst, if your takeaway from this is "you said piracy is fine!" I suggest reflecting on the fact that I did not in fact say that

and thank you for the reminder that twitter is indeed dogshit for any discourse more complex than "lol"