Whatever the fuck HBO is called now started this thing where all the streaming companies are destroying media to cheat on taxes, a couple of really good shows and already finished movies are just flat GONE unless someone managed to pirate them or in the case of batgirl literally steal some drives.
Folks back in the day used to go on and on and on and on about samizdat and how folks in the USSR had to carefully hand type copies of verbotten works and then pass them around, presumably under threat of being immediately sent to the GULAG forever (despite the GULAG system closing decades earlier but pay no mind to that)
Well, now, instead of censorship, we've got media companies just fucking deleting shit from history. But that's capitalism, and culture is property that a corporation can own and destroy as they please, and this is all good because adam smith invisible hand innovation blah blah blah whatever the fuck.
Either way, the long and the short of it is steal everything, be gay do crimes, keep circulating the tapes.
Is that an MST3K reference?
Yeah. I didn't even realize it was from MST3K until I looked it up to make sure I had the wording right. I thought it was from prior to that, relating to old audio tapes and records.
Rather appropriate as the reason “circulating the tapes” was so important to the MST3K fandom was that there were so many classic episodes Comedy Central couldn’t air anymore because whomever acquired the rights to the original movies refused to let them. So fans making VHS copies of those episodes was the only way to preserve them.