I've been feeling the decline of the torrent era for a little bit now. Whereas I used to never receive copyright notices forwarded to me from my ISP, I've gotten three in the last year. I stopped entirely.

It's really sad because if you asked us in 2005 what we thought of the internet's future, the consensus was that it would be the last place where you were truly free of government oversight. Not that you still can't find places to be undetected, but it's a sea change from 10 years ago. That comic that's internet famous, comparing the futures envisioned in Brave New World and 1984, comes to mind because we aren't pirates living on the Principality of Sealand, but a lethargic, distracted population that gets its news from facebook.