Compared to the golden age of piracy, online bootlegging is pretty tame.
Your average modern pirate has never had to fear the rope and, if they've got scurvy,
it's probably unrelated to the nine seasons of illicit Seinfeld sitting on their hard drive.
There are, however, places around the globe where the internet is heavily restricted and
uncensored access to all that the digital world has to offer is provided by hidden networks
of smugglers, risking imprisonment or worse, to bring their clientele the dankest memes
and latest Hollywood blockbusters on disks and flash drives, effectively creating an
underground, offline internet.
This is partly because adoption of the internet has been incredibly uneven.
By the year 2000, only 5.8% of the global population was connected to the worldwide web, which
included 43% of US residents.
Even two decades later in 2020, only 60% of the world was online compared to 91% of the
United States, but that's not because people in those places don't want the internet.
These gaps on the map are typically due to some combination of poverty, remoteness,
corruption, and the intentional suppression of information by local authorities.
But the development of dense, durable, and most importantly, portable storage options
like flash drives means that digital media can go anywhere that people can.
I don't know what kind of download speeds people are getting in downtown Pyongyang,
but a small backpack has a theoretical carrying capacity of thousands and thousands of terabytes
of highly illegal K-dramas and American sitcoms.
Now details are scarce due to the danger involved, but many North Korean defectors report having
watched pirated Western content before leading the country.
Films like James Bond, Titanic, or Pretty Woman, the definition of decadent Western
media. Getting caught with Russian or Bollywood films could result in three years in a labor
But getting caught with contraband from America or South Korea could mean a far longer sentence
or even execution. But repressive policies like these haven't stopped people from getting ahold of the content
they want. One of the best documented data smuggling networks is Cuba's Paquete Semanal, or the
Weekly Package. Cuba got its first internet connection in September 1996, a 64 kilobit per second link
to the US mainland courtesy of Sprint. After that, however, efforts to connect Cubans languished for years.
In part, this was due to the weak state of the Cuban economy. The fall of the Soviet Union had left them with few international allies, and the US
embargo made infrastructure and even basic hardware very expensive.
The Cuban government was leery of both foreign investment and the possibility that advanced
telecommunications might be used to turn the population against them.
In a country where all magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television channels are
state-owned, if the government doesn't invest in a big telecommunications project,
it's probably not getting done. So by 2012, only 21% of Cubans were using the internet, compared to 43% of Dominicans
who were connected to the internet in the same year. And it wasn't great internet either, relying on telephone lines and Soviet satellites until
the first fiber optic cable was finally activated in 2013.
Even then, bandwidth for personal use was rationed and fairly expensive, so you had
to go to the government-run internet cafe if you wanted to read Jujinshi, and the download
speeds were terrible. But did everyday Cubans just accept the shoddy infrastructure provided them, or did they
take matters into their own hands? We'll tell you, but first, our officially mandated sponsor.
After it became legal for Cubans to buy a personal computer without a permit in 2008,
the market for international media boomed. Infrastructure-like satellite dishes became easier to get a hold of, and some Cubans installed
them on roofs, hidden inside fake water tanks.
Digital storage was also now cheap, durable, and compact, making dissemination of uncensored
media from the United States and other nations a simple matter of flash drives trading hands.
Since then, the weekly package has circulated throughout Cuba, featuring a constantly updated
roster of movies, music, software news, internet videos, and even ads for local businesses.
The notable exceptions are politics and pornography.
That's because, though there are severe penalties for selling smuggled material at all, it's
easier to avoid becoming a law enforcement priority if you stick to illegal copies of
Die Hard and leave the Manchurian candidate and Girls Gone Wild out of it.
By at least 2017, this system was so sophisticated that a film could debut in the United States
on a Friday and be watched in Havana the following Monday.
The vast majority of Cubans are aware of this system and, in fact, have used it themselves.
Some show up to distributors with flash drives for the newest episodes of their favorite shows,
while others bring Karabite hard drives and transfer the entire package of new material
for that week. Concerned about the effect that mindless and violent American content was having on the
general public, in 2014 the Cuban government actually tried to set up their own competing
package of pirated media called Mochila, or Backpack, filled with government-approved
movies, music, and educational material. It was extremely unpopular.
What, isn't that everyone's favorite pastime?
Using Spanish translations of Crash Course and The Iliad with a seal of approval from
Castro? In this era, it wasn't unusual for small groups of tech-savvy Cubans to create isolated
local networks by running cables from roof to roof in their neighborhoods and repurposing
consumer-grade routers and personal computers to act as nodes in a mesh network with no
central server. The largest such network was the Havana Street Network, or SNET, created in 2011 by the fusion
of several of these smaller networks. At its peak, SNET was estimated to have around 100,000 individual IP addresses, despite having
no direct connection to the outside world. What did they use it for?
Well, the same thing that the rest of us were using the Internet for in 2012.
They had forums, blogs, social media, video streaming, restaurant reviews, and locally
hosted copies of external sites like Wikipedia.
Some even used it to play hacked versions of online games like World of Warcraft or
Dota, really pushing the definition of LAN party on the one side, but not quite doing
MMO justice on the other. Being part of SNET meant strict, self-enforced rules.
No politics, no pornography, no controversy.
Not if they wanted to keep their network free from government interference.
But it wasn't to last. The Cuban government has been expanding, officially sanctioned Internet access as part of its
development strategy, and in 2019, the Havana Street Network and its infrastructure were
absorbed into the state system. As of 2021, 71% of Cubans had some kind of Internet access.
It's becoming both cheaper and easier to connect to the outside world, and sooner or
later this will be the standard way that they get movies and music from abroad, rather than
buying a burnt CD off a teenager on a street corner. Still, as long as there are some blank patches in the worldwide web, in some places the Internet
will look more like this. If you guys enjoyed this video, you can leave a like if you didn't, well, you can leave
a dislike if you want to see a future episode of Techquickie, you can leave a comment
suggesting it, and don't forget to subscribe.