The correct answer is the collective ownership of a major streaming service. The ‘e-anarchist praxis of forming a small cell with like 10 people’ is just so much reactionary “utopian” yeomanism washed in neon and chrome.

Revolution is not a retvrn to a mythologized, pre-capitalist past. It is the socialization of the profits of all of the labor that capital has socialized. Netflix and similar are initially progressive forces, they (should) make mass access to the entirety of media ever produced available instantaneously from everywhere. What we need is not one hundred competing, paywalled archives, but one free centralized archive available free of charge.

Here is a passage from the bad and didactic but entertaining ‘Iron Heel’ from Jack London (basically a communist precursor-mirror to Atlas Shrugged) where a small-capitalist is in debate with the protagonist:

And why not?’ [the capitalist] demanded. ‘Why can we not return to ways of our fathers when this republic was founded?..It is true that we smaller capitalists are after profits, and that the trusts are taking our profits away from us. It is true that we want to destroy the trusts in order that our profits may remain to us. And why can we not do it? Why not?

‘Ah, now we come to the gist of the matter…You see, you fellows have studied business, in a small way, but you have not studied social evolution at all. You are in the midst of a transition stage now in economic evolution, but you do not understand it…Why cannot you return? Because you can’t. You can no more make water run up hill than can you cause the tide of economic evolution to flow back in its channel along the way it came. Joshua made the sun stand still upon Gibeon, but you would outdo Joshua. You would make the sun go backward in the sky. You would have time retrace its steps from noon to morning.

‘In the face of labor-saving machinery, of organized production, of the increased efficiency of combination, you would set the economic sun back a whole generation or so to the time when there were no great capitalists, no great machinery, no railroads—a time when…production was primitive, wasteful, unorganized, and costly…But God has forsaken you small capitalists. The sun of the small capitalists is setting. It will never rise again. Nor is it in your power even to make it stand still.

Let us not destroy those wonderful machines that produce efficiently and cheaply. Let us control them. Let us profit by their efficiency and cheapness. Let us run them for ourselves. Let us oust the present owners of the wonderful machines, and let us own the wonderful machines ourselves. That, gentlemen, is socialism, a greater combination than the trusts, a greater economic and social combination than any that has as yet appeared on the planet.

Man writes as purple as they come but the scene illustrates the point nicely. Netflix et al. are a major advancement in video distribution. You are not going to outcompete them. Banning or destroying them sets back video sharing technology and infrastructure enormously. What we need is to socialize them!

But what you do in the short term, get that bag and watch your shows lmao.

The practical ability to host rich media services at the scale of the individual is there, but the primary blockages are the limited ability of an individual to handle the upkeep and organizational work, and the fact that the Internet today is awash in digital landlordism. “Hosting” is simply renting space on someone else’s computer, and pay for an Internet connection is an imposition by ISP monopolists.

Accounting for this, I believe there’s a lot of possibility in regional, collectively hosted digital services. I’m working on just such a thing with my local comrades. In an environment with municipal broadband (admittedly a fantasy in North America), there’s nothing preventing it.

In my wildest dreams, municipal libraries host everything in their collection on a simple network filesystem for free copying.

I like my Jellyfin server, it’s MOTD is a ton of hammer and sickles and tons of my buds watch pirated content for free on there. All costs considered it’s been cheaper for me than one netflix subscription

Honestly?

I’m fine with self-hosting so we can eventually grow an alternative to the “mainstream” Internet.

But I wouldn’t mind an, err, “alternative” to self-hosting itself.

Because otherwise, we’re still, well, “competing,” so to speak.

So the dichotomy is utilize the resources of a giant mega corporation , or atmozied PMC individualism? Doesn’t sound like there are any communisms here.

I would say though, that taking control of anybody’s information away from a mwgacoproration is a step towards building a parallel system that might move towards a more egalitarian socialist internet

I’d love to have a peoples’ AWS, but as long as the booj is in control of the internet’s architecture self-hosting is gonna be the best anticapitalists can do short of some kind of P2P shit.

I googled “neoliberal Obama PMC eye lasers meme” and found this. Thank you.

Large, cooperatively owned & hosted apps using self-hosted tech.

I’ll say this:

I want to make my own website and I’m drawing up some plans for one (but, like, it’s super-easy to get a domain or whatever so it’s not like it’s an actual process or anything).

Chances are: I will probably self-host it.

But I agree with the criticisms in the OP, tbh.