Orcocracy [comrade/them]

AI, algorithms, and the statistics that power them are not that smart. They have no way of knowing for sure what is in your head when you hit the delete button.

Is having lots more green energy not a result?

Perhaps. Or perhaps what uses more over a lifetime is an ebook that is bounced around from device to device which all turn to toxic e-waste after a few years, constantly communicating with always-on servers for account data and DRM authentication hosted in a data centre based in a region powered by fossil fuels. All while a paper book just sits on a shelf causing no further environmental impact - potentially for hundreds of years.

To be fair, nobody’s preference for paper books or ebooks will change the environment in any meaningful way - the problems are much more systemic and require radical action from an unwilling corporate and political elite that has been ignoring the problem for decades.

Data centres and “the cloud” are not great for the environment either. DRM forcing people to have their files constantly deleted and redownloaded makes it even worse.

Also, “support” doesn’t have to mean a direct financial transaction. Libraries operate a bit differently from a McDonalds. Even just going in and sitting in a library reading a book without ever taking it out can help to support your local public library.

A train that has a stop somewhere in my neighbourhood.

Yeah, and telling people to just pay for a VPN isn’t a great answer either - that’s just another fucking pay-forever subscription with the price rises of Netflix plus the added jank and nonsense that comes with being a copyright infringement hobbyist.

Maybe I’ll just cancel everything and do totally offline ripping of borrowed physical media from the public library, like some kind of pirate hermit.

Hold on to that leverage over your employer with a union

Yes it absolutely does.

Copyright infringement is absolutely the moral thing to do in quite a lot of cases. For example, for the preservation of cultural works. Corporations aren’t exactly spending their money on proper archives and the people to curate them. Quite the opposite! For example, if some or all of the lawsuits against sites like archive.org are successful then the result could be a mass erasure of cultural works on the scale of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.