You Already Pay for Internet, Don't Pay for the Rest

Despite the tollbooth system imposed by platforms and Big Tech, the Internet remains a space full of material available to download without paying anyone. Here's a small practical guide to avoid falling for the algorithm's mental trap.

"Everything that's on the Internet is yours," they said, and I was sold. That phrase, which belongs to the common ethos of cyberspace, reflects the flip side of the current state of the Network of Networks, where to watch a movie, read a book or comic, listen to a song or play a video game, they inevitably want us to pull out our credit card, over and over again. As we've mentioned before, data capitalism has led us to the absurdity of paying for the Internet multiple times: we pay our ISP subscription and we pay Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Max -- and who knows how many other platforms -- to access different lanes on the same highway: the Internet.

In the early 2000s, when broadband was becoming popular worldwide and persistent internet connections were leaving dial-up behind, the way we consumed and distributed web content was drastically changing thanks to several data networks: Napster, Kazaa and eMule were the go-to applications for downloading music, movies, software, and the occasional virus. Today they're all dead, except for the immortal ed2k network, popularly known by its client, eMule.

eMule, the Path of the Mule

Talking about eMule in the age of Internet toll booths might seem anachronistic, but nothing could be further from the truth. That network is today the largest bastion of comics and audiovisual productions to be found in any corner of cyberspace. Since eMule's beginnings, various groups of pirates have also acted as archivists of cultural heritage, ripping movies and tracking down comics at bargain tables. If during the early 2000s you downloaded Lost or Band of Brothers from eMule, you probably downloaded a file ripped by a member of clan-sudamerica.net, a forum community that's turning twenty these days.

Within their forum lies the largest collection of Latin American cinema and television, ripped directly from cable, broadcast TV, VHS, DVD, and CD, and uploaded almost exclusively to the eMule network. A large portion of what's uploaded there isn't on any paid or free platform. If you enjoy arthouse cinema and independent films, if you're looking for a lost gem from our television history, the best way to find them is by registering on the forum and getting lost in their threads full of invaluable film material.

When it comes to getting comics, the community behind the Comic Release Group (CRG), gathered in the La Mansion CRG forum, stands as the largest space for comic preservation across all eras. If we had to imagine a National Comic Archive of Argentina, the forum would be its building and the eMule network its library. I'm not exaggerating -- there's an enormous number of anonymous heroes, digital pirates, scanners, translators, and typesetters who collect publications from magazines and books of all eras and upload them to the network through their forum.

Today Oesterheld's name is on everyone's lips because of El Eternauta, but the most wonderful comic writer these lands ever gave us didn't just write that magnificent work -- he participated in countless comics. Most were never reprinted and died in magazines of their era, which fortunately the CRG took it upon themselves to preserve, along with the work of many other comic artists. To give you an idea, artists like Juan Zanotto or even Francisco Solano Lopez himself published many works in Europe, in French or Italian, that were never published in Argentina, but forum members obtained, scanned, translated, and typeset them. All of this just talking about national comics; needless to say, anything from Batman, Superman, X-Men or whatever comic you can think of is very likely available for download through eMule.

How to Use eMule Today

Back in the day, the most common way to use eMule was to download the client, connect to a server, and search for what we wanted from the application. The client from that era has been deprecated and the one used today on PC/laptop is aMule, an open source version available for Mac, Linux, and Windows. For the cases we've explained, we don't need to connect to anything -- it's enough to go to the forums, find the ed2k links, copy and paste them into the eMule client, and wait. For a better experience using the network, it's recommended to open some ports on your router, but it's not mandatory. Obviously, you should remember that downloads from there can take their time, since we depend on users who have those files sharing them, so when using these types of networks we need to cultivate patience.

Soulseek, the Music Lovers' Den

Considering that storing files is much cheaper than twenty years ago, and that cell phones come with enough space for offline music, it's not so far-fetched to download instead of using Spotify or similar services. Even more so if you maintain certain music consumption patterns like listening to full albums or building playlists by hand, rather than ones directed by some algorithm. For that purpose, the veteran application Soulseek, now 24 years old, remains the most used option among music lovers and datahoarders.

Those who connect to Soulseek simply choose which folders on their drive to share, thus offering others the music they have available. In this way, a community forms that interacts, recommends albums, and groups itself by musical genres. There, all you need to do is search for an album and start downloading it. Best of all, for the discerning ears, much of that music is in the prized .FLAC format, an ultra-high fidelity audio format, highly sought after by audiophiles -- not the case for this writer, who after years of punk-metal concerts now enjoys a lovely case of tinnitus.

The BitTorrent Network

If the content you're looking for falls within "mainstream" culture, whether it's movies, music, or games, the best way to get that content without paying or going crazy is to use the BitTorrent network, perhaps one of the best protocols for sharing files on the net. Torrent also emerged in 2001, almost at the same time as the eMule network, but it wouldn't take off until 2004, and also transform into a protocol in its own right. Like eMule, they share the peer-to-peer component but in different ways, with BitTorrent being a far more efficient, secure, and reliable development that allows many more connections and speeds. Any movie or series on the major platforms is practically uploaded to the network instantly and spreads like a virus.

Unlike eMule or similar tools, where you could search for things to download from within the application, BitTorrent requires external "trackers," sites that precisely track the files being shared on the network. The most well-known in its early days was The Pirate Bay, whose creators ended up being prosecuted and imprisoned, and with the site blocked by most ISPs worldwide. It's still accessible, but through various proxies, so when searching we recommend two trackers. On one hand, if you're looking for movies, especially new releases, yts.bz has an enormous catalog of films with subtitles so you don't have to struggle too much; while 1337x.to is another historic tracker for general content (series, movies, software, and video games).

The Etiquette of Seeders and Leechers

In these cases, it's enough to download the .torrent file, open it with a client (personally, I recommend Transmission, good, pretty, and lightweight) and wait. Here we need to understand how the network works when sharing files. The person who has the complete file and is sharing it is a seed, and the person who is downloading the file and sharing it in turn is a leecher. The important thing is to always be a seed and not a parasitic leech who only uses the network for a bit and then stops sharing: resilience in these types of networks comes precisely from the contribution that users make to the network, and those contributions are measured by continuing to share files after the download is complete.

This is fundamentally important with unpopular files. It doesn't matter as much if when downloading the latest Star Wars you keep the torrent client open to share. But if you download a torrent with all of Oesterheld's work, please don't be a filthy leech -- keep seeding! For this reason, when downloading a torrent you should check whether it has many or few seeds; the more it has, the more users are sharing it, and therefore the faster the download will be.

BibliotecaSecreta and Anna's Archive

That the Internet is the largest compendium of human culture we've ever created is no longer in doubt. Almost any cultural work is accessible in a couple of clicks without paying anything more than our internet connection. The metaphors of the Internet as a library, which some had already read in Borges, in Asimov, or other classic authors of world literature, ceased to be metaphors and became reality.

When it comes to accessing a compendium of books in Spanish, perhaps the largest digital library in the world, we can do so through BibliotecaSecreta. This project by who knows what group of completely anonymous heroes has a collection of over 120,000 books in Spanish (four years ago it was 85,000) available for download through a Telegram bot. A bot that gets taken down by copyright lobbyists, but as the saying goes, for every server of ours they take down, ten of theirs will fall. When interacting with the bot, you just need to type the name of a book or author and, instantly, it will bring up the info and the option to download it in EPUB/MOBI/PDF format. If the bot is down, just bookmark the BibliotecaSecreta URL to check which new pirate book ship has been raised.

An even larger library than the previous one is Anna's Archive, which works differently. This archive emerged after the shutdown of Z-Archive, a site that worked the same way as Anna: they are online metasearch engines for shadow libraries, that is, digital libraries that have books exposed on the Internet but are not easily accessible because they have paywalls, require paid subscriptions, have DRM policies, or some other accessibility barrier. In this way, Anna's Archive lets us browse over 51 million books and 95 million papers in all languages, simply by accessing it, searching, and downloading without any restrictions. Another alternative is Library Genesis for when Anna's Archive is down.

This Is What I Pay for Internet For

The Network of Networks was invented to connect different points to each other, and for those points to freely share information. The moment we started paying multiple times for the same service, we dissociated the concept of files from storage, we traversed the entire net through three or four applications, and we began to lose the beautiful habitat of cyberspace. Reclaiming these spaces doesn't come from a nostalgic memory of those early broadband years; it's more of a fight against the data oligarchs who, through toll booths and network segmentation, are imposing an Internet model that has nothing to do with the core concepts of cyberspace.

Learning to search for files, taking the time to talk with friends about what movie or album to listen to, what game to play, what book to read, is part of the battle for cognitive sovereignty. A not insignificant detail is that by downloading movies or books, and watching them outside our web browser, we're being more efficient with our computer. Specifically, watching movies via streaming or listening to music that way requires always having the browser loading that tab: on modest hardware, Netflix or Spotify devour resources. Not to mention if you have an Android TV that's become so obsolete it can't run Netflix. But that TV probably has a USB port to load data and play it without going through that app.

If we leave all our consumption up to the algorithms, in a couple of years everyone will accept as normal that to watch a movie or listen to music you inevitably have to pay for content that's already on the net. It would seem that if something isn't on a platform, it's not worth watching, playing, reading, or listening to it. Against the dopamine rationing on all platforms, we prioritize searching and waiting to see what we decide to see. If with the connections available in 2004 I could wait a whole damn week to download an episode of Band of Brothers, now that we have speeds 10, 20, 40, or 100 times faster, how could I not wait 30 minutes to watch El Eternauta downloaded completely pirated?