Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as dystopian satire in threads on DRM, digital ownership, mind uploading and AI copyright, often noting it increasingly looks like reality.
What it is
Tom Scott's three-minute satirical short about a corporate-run, DRM-and-ads-laden afterlife after mind uploading. It imagines copyright law and lawyers applied to human memory and consciousness.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2013 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends selfhoster11 · 2022-04 · on “The idea of uploading consciousness is misdirected narcissism”
With current trends of surveillance capitalism and nickle-and-diming for every single useful feature, I can only imagine mind-uploading getting closer to an eternal torture than a pleasant afterlife. Some interesting resources that explore this view, which also happen to fill me with existential horror at the prospect of being uploaded (especially against my will): Tom Scott's video "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers": [this video] qntm's short story "Lena": [LINK] I can especially recommend "Lena". It's from the 'I have no mouth and I must scream' genre of horror.
Cites porsupah · 2013-03 · on “Digital Comic Publisher Quits, Customers Lose All Their "Purchased" Titles”
Though, we might also wind up in the scenario depicted in the satirical three minute short, "Welcome to Life".. [this video]
Cites andyjohnson0 · 2014-02 · on “Ray Kurzweil is wrong: The Singularity is not near”
Of course, the question then of who to trust to be your cloud provider running your conciousness-as-a-service process becomes a very serious one. The main problem is the lawyers. [this video]
Cites spiritplumber · 2015-04 · on “It's not 1999”
A lot of people who post on my facebook wall seem to think that it's the beginning of the Singularity. [this video] I hope they're wrong if it looks like this.
Cites kybernetikos · 2015-10 · on “Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain?”
So, my concern about uploading my brain, is whose cloud service do you trust to run your consciousness? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Facebook? Apple? The level of trust that I'd require is pretty high. You could imagine it once again being relevant to check the pedigree of a company. Ideally there'd be a cloud provider already running now that is known for its trustworthiness. 'established 2013' might actually mean something one day. My main hope is for indistinguishability encryption to reach the level where I wouldn't really have to trust the provider, but as long as you pay a significant performance penalty you're going to end up massively disadvantaged. [this video]
Cites etiam · 2019-09 · on “Brains are the last frontier of privacy”
There is certainly the disturbing possibility that "Welcome to Life" [ [this video] ] will rapidly be looking less and less like satire.
Cites ducaale · 2021-12 · on “Protected Content, Delete by Date, Device Management and more”
This reminds me of Tom Scott's "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers" video [1] [1] [this video]
Cites SahAssar · 2021-12 · on “Protected Content, Delete by Date, Device Management and more”
You are basically describing this old (2012) video, where this concept is applied to a brain-upload afterlife: [this video]