Chap 01.
The Grift
July 2005, I head into a Toys R Us with my mum, she tells me she'll meet me back at the video games area. I run to the PlayStation 2 area, and look at the covers of rows and rows of games. I then run to the gamecube side and do the same. I get to choose one cheap game. I walk out happy with a copy of Cel Damage.
It breaks my heart to watch the optical disc become a luxury antique for rich collectors. Today, you buy a PlayStation 5 disc and it is nothing more than a plastic key that starts a 150-gigabyte download from some server farm.
Sony has intentionally gutted the purpose of physical media over the last decade so they could point at declining physical sales figures and claim that consumers simply prefer the convenience of digital storefronts. They have engineered this decline from the ground up by making physical ownership as cumbersome and expensive as legally possible. They ripped the disc drive out of the base model PlayStation consoles, turned it into an eighty-dollar external peripheral, and then manufactured an industry consensus about the death of physical media to justify cutting the distributors out of their profit margins.
We have essentially already lost the battle for film and television, considering everyone saw exactly what happened a couple of years ago when Sony unilaterally decided to nuke hundreds of purchased Discovery television shows and movies from people's PlayStation Network libraries. They repeated the same process with Funimation content shortly after, proving it was a concerted strategy rather than a licensing fluke. You paid real money for it, but you only ever bought a temporary license to view them at the pleasure of a corporate landlord. We have transitioned into techno-feudalism, where the fundamental concept of owning the art you consume has been systematically eradicated. Sony deleting your media is a deliberate conditioning tactic meant to create a state of perpetual precarity in their user base. They want you to internalize the feeling of loss so you eventually stop fighting for ownership altogether and just passively accept the monthly subscription fee to retain temporary access to your own memories.
All of this relates to the impending cataclysm of Grand Theft Auto VI, the single largest, most capital-intensive product ever generated by human beings. The fact that Take-Two and Rockstar pushing for a digital-only or heavily digital-focused release is insane. The online flippers, the deleted PlayStation movies, and the impending GTA VI digital monopoly operate as a team of capitalist primitive accumulation. The resellers online represent an emergent, parasitic immune response to Sony's artificial scarcity. Those hustlers realize the corporate layer is salting the earth of physical ownership, so they are buying up the remaining artifacts to sell our own cultural history back to us at a five-hundred percent markup.
Meanwhile, Sony removes your movies to psychologically break your attachment to permanent ownership, clearing the mental roadblock for entirely rent-based consumption. When GTA 6 launches without a physical edition, it will serve as the final, unassailable justification for the completely closed ecosystem. The thrift store grifters are essentially building private museums out of the last remnants of consumer sovereignty, while the megacorporations happily lock the iron gates of the company town behind us forever.
Chap 02.
Ownership
We have exited the capitalist dynamic of buying and selling commodities, and are now operating as digital serfs toiling on the private fiefdoms of mega-corporations, paying a monthly tithe just for the privilege of experiencing human culture.
You can pour eighty hours of your finite time on this earth into a RPG, build memories, form emotional attachments to the characters, and then log in on a Tuesday to find a padlock icon hovering over the application on your dashboard because the publisher’s temporary licensing agreement expired.
The "Leaving Soon" tab on the PlayStation Plus menu is a psychological tool designed to reinforce your status as a permanent tenant. Every time that catalog updates and cycles games out of your reach, the corporation is reminding you that your memories and your lived experiences are entirely contingent on your willingness to keep paying rent. You do not own your save files, you do not own your childhood nostalgia, and you certainly do not own the art that shapes your worldview. You are just leasing temporary access to a server rack.
But to really understand the total depravity of this model, you have to look at how these executives are weaponizing AI to gut the human production side of the industry. In a normal studio environment, a human concept artist would spends weeks researching historical architecture, fashion, and anatomy to sketch out a character. They pass those orthographics down to a 3D modeler working in ZBrush and Maya, who sculpts the high-poly mesh. Then someone has to do the retopology to create a low-poly version the engine can actually render without melting the console, unwrap the UVs, and hand it off to a rigger who paints the skin weights to the skeleton so the character can bend their elbow without their forearm clipping through their chest. It is a specialized, collaborative, and human supply chain of labour.
Right now, the sociopaths running these holding companies are drooling over AI slop to bypass that entire system. They are firing the very artists who built their billion-dollar franchises, feeding the stolen portfolios of those terminated workers into machine learning models, and using that slop to generate derivative assets on the cheap. The AI smokescreen is a union-busting tactic masquerading as a technological revolution.
Eradicating the disc drive and eradicating the art department are the exact same mechanism of corporate enclosure applied to different ends of the supply chain. When you kill physical media, you sever the physical supply chain; you eliminate the factory workers pressing the discs, the truck drivers hauling the palettes, and the retail workers stocking the shelves. When you force AI into the development pipeline, you sever the human mental supply chain. The executives want a reality where there is no physical footprint and no human labor overhead to cut into their profit margins.
When you mix the rotating, ephemeral nature of the PlayStation Plus catalog with the incoming flood of AI-generated content, you realize the ultimate goal of rentier capitalism is a permanent, inescapable loop of algorithmic tenancy. The feeling of your subscription catalog updating every month is going to mutate into something truly terrifying in the next few years.
You are not just going to be renting older games that cycle in and out of a library. The corporations are building a system where AI procedurally generates endless, mediocre, highly addictive content specifically tailored to your personal engagement metrics, fed directly to your rented console via a cloud stream you do not control. You will pay a perpetual monthly tax to a machine that feeds you soulless, automated slop, and because the physical artifact has been abolished, you will not even have a plastic box on a shelf to prove any of this ever happened. You will just be floating in a digital void, paying rent for eternity to experience nothing at all.
Chap 03.
Facades
You watch Phil Spencer get up on stage in his vintage gamer t-shirts and pretend to be everyone’s cool uncle, talking enthusiastically about the magic of the interactive medium, while his company operates as a textbook apex predator structurally designed to annihilate human creativity and human life. We all saw them spend eighty billion dollars consolidating the entire industry by swallowing publishers like Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax whole.
And the second the ink dried on those contracts, they started offing the most brilliant, weird, independent studios in their new portfolio.
You get a team of a hundred people who spend years building a game, they pour their literal souls, and their lives into creating a piece of art, then some fucking suit who has never written a single line of code in his life, decides that the studio's profit margins fail to align with the unattainable projected growth of the Xbox ecosystem for the third quarter. They fire everyone, scatter decades of irreplaceable institutional knowledge to the wind, and lock the IP in a vault where it will rot for eternity.
Microsoft acquires these studios exclusively to eliminate market competition, hoard the patents, and strip-mine the talent pool.
Microsoft supplies the Israeli Defense Forces and various global military operations with Azure cloud and artificial intelligence data processing capabilities. They provide the underlying tech that fascist regimes use to kill innocent people. This is necropolitics, where late-stage capitalist sovereignty is defined entirely by the power to dictate who is allowed to live and who is marked for death.
Mega-corporations function as the foundational architects of this modern death machinery, operating the digital infrastructure that makes industrialized slaughter efficient.
The executives signing off on these AI targeting systems and cloud military contracts are ordinary men wearing Patagonia fleece vests who talk about synergy and shareholder value while casually facilitating the mass slaughter of marginalized people.
Eradicating physical media, firing the human artist to replace them with generative algorithms, and selling cloud software to guide military strikes in a warzone are all expressions of the same corporate drive to rid the world of human creation. They want a reality that is sterilized of physical artifacts, human labour, and resistant populations. They want everything uploaded to a proprietary server they control, and where human history, human art, and human bodies can simply be deleted with the push of a button.
2026, I walk into my local thrift shop for some playstation games, I find none. Confused, I ask the clerk what's going on. They tell me somebody came in and bought the whole shop and told them it was for assets. Fuming, I go home and see the same games that were a fraction of the price explode. This is by design.