El Paquete

El Paquete

To be frank, I have never met a single person who had never pirated anything, and when you talk to them they will admit it point blank, but professionally we have never done it or even come close with it, because to admit it will be to admit you commited a crime, and we all read those FBI messages before our DVD started. Piracy has been angrily criticized, and with just cause, but what if stealing had its merits. Imagine you live on an island cut off from the outside world, an island where information is filtered, censored, or down right blocked. That is the status that Cuba lived with until 2008 when El Paquete arrived.

 

El Paquete is a one hundred terabyte hard drive filled to the brim with T.V, movies, games, and news brought to the state illegally by boat or planes, it is a complex network of media curators, smugglers, suppliers, and dealers, it resembles the drug trade except the drug is information. One hundred terabytes of information is a massive amount, to put it into context the newest Avengers movie at a decent quality will be around 1.3GB of data, therefore theoretically this hard drive can hold the entire Marvel cinematic universe starting with Iron Man, and you will still have space for all of Game of Thrones, Westworld, BBC Life, and Seinfeld all for the affordable price of five dollars for the initial purchase, then a dollar extra to keep updating it with the latest releases. While it is clearly stealing, El Paquete Robin Hoods valuable information and redistributes it to the people who need it. Before El Paquete there were no good examples of what a different society looked like outside of the island, or a different governmental system, but most importantly it continues the tradition of supplying unbiased, unfiltered information to the people, and not the elites, and while El Paquete is centered mostly on entertainment at least it gives them the choice to choose the information given to them, something they didn’t have before.

1 Comment

  1. Sebastian, I enjoyed reading your post examining the flipside of piracy. I like the idea in certain situations that pirating has merits and how it can impact people who don’t have access. The situation in Cuba bears some similarities with North Korea and they receive information through smuggling and piracy-giving them the chance to consume material that isn’t dictated to them. It shows that illegality sometimes doesn’t have to match up with morality.

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