To Content Providers: Don Draper Speaks for Me (Kinda)

Gawker dot com has the video (sadly not embeddable), the relevant passage of which is Don's:

Put your nose down and pay attention to your work, because there's not one thing you've done here that I couldn't live without. You're good. Get better. Stop asking for things.

That's how I feel having reached a threshold for the number of times I've been treated to a lecture on how I'm just not paying for the 'content' I enjoy. I am tired of self-pitying whines telling me I am a parasite.

I am paying and paying and paying for content. My monthly broadband-cable bill is embarrassingly large. What the fuck is that if not paying for 'content'? If not 'content,' what am I paying for? For the privilege of inside sales calls from the goddamn Comcast staff? Some infrastructure? If I'm not mistaken, that would be the same infrastructure whose costs have been offered as justification for Comcast's monopoly and quasi-monopoly on broadband for -- how long is it? Just exactly how many years will this pity-party last before we're all squared up?

The image at the right is a partial -- very partial (lacking, for starters, books) -- snapshot of some of the content I've amassed over the years. I've been amassing this 'content,' scrap by scrap, dime by dime, since I had the independent means to buy things in stores.

I do pay for content, early and often, through the nose, out the ears -- and a great deal of it, by the way, turns out to be paid advertisements and thinly disguised paid advertisements I would never willingly pay for.

If the assorted creators of all this content are not in line for the substantial sums I throw in, or do not consider their share a fair one, this is regrettable. You almost certainly have a point. It is also not my problem, nor my fault. I can assure you that money-for-content is flowing briskly.

I happily pay for quality. I resent paying for shit for which I never asked and would never ask. I steal nothing. Content providers of the world, especially Comcast: put your nose down and get your hands out of my pockets. You're good. Get better. Stop asking for things.