Impulse

Sometimes the bat­tle between good and evil is really the bat­tle between what I want long term vs what I want here and now.

Up until recently, I was only merely curi­ous about the TV show Heroes.  (Having my TV hooked up only to my DVD player gives me lots more free time, but takes me out of pop cul­ture).  That curios­ity ended when I walked into Hollywood Video ten days ago to rent the first disk of Heroes.  Two hours later, I looked at the clock and thought, “11:30… They’re still open for another half hour.  Plenty of time to get the next disk.”  I man­aged to hold out for a day, but I gave in.  One week and 21 episodes later, I’d seen the entire first season.

The first step towards recov­ery is admit­ting you have a problem.

I’m com­pletely addicted to Heroes.  Sure, the writ­ing falls flat every once and a while (Why did Niki help Peter in the finale when she’d never met him?), but it’s fun! A good mix of com­edy, sus­pense, and cathar­sis (who wouldn’t be attracted to as story about aver­age Joes fight­ing back the evil malaise many of us feel?).  I need more.

But there’s a prob­lem in Metropolis: to catch up with the cur­rent sea­son, I need to watch the first seven episodes of sea­son 2 — and these are kept under the lock and key of my neme­sis, DRM.  The pre­mier and 2nd episode are only avail­able on Amazon’s Unboxed — which only plays through Amazon’s DRM-laden down­load­able player — and I have sworn years ago to boy­cott all DRM products.

Curses.

I hate DRM because it puts the bur­den of main­tain­ing the media industry’s aging busi­ness model on the shoul­ders of tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies.  I hate it because it assumes that all cus­tomers are unscrupu­lous.  More prac­ti­cally, I hate it because DRM schemes pre­vent me from play­ing my media the way I want.  (e.g. Amazon’s player makes it impos­si­ble to watch those two Heroes episodes on my big TV in front of my comfy couch).  Thus, years ago, I vowed to fight DRM by boy­cotting all things DRM (includ­ing iTunes), and donat­ing time and money to fel­low cru­saders like the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and iPac. 

But I really want to see those episodes.  I need them.  It’d be so easy to just fork over the $2 each, install Amazon’s damnable player, and feed my addi­tion on through my lap­top.  Who’s going to know? 

It’s a bat­tle of short term gain — sat­is­fy­ing my Heroes crav­ing — vs long term gain: elim­i­nat­ing DRM from the mar­ket­place.  Selfish needs vs the com­mon good.  A multi-dimensional con­flict of desires.  All heroes must go to their Personal Hell.

And so I must wait.……

Related posts:

1. Psychological pol­i­tics
2. Magically rebelling against reli­gious dictatorship