1 HN user recommended this comedy video1 month2013–2026score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN cites it as dystopian satire in threads on DRM, digital ownership, mind uploading and AI copyright, often noting it increasingly looks like reality.
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.
“will rapidly be looking less and less like satire.” (HN, 2019)
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.
Explores a bleak view of mind uploading under capitalism
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]
Satire of trusting a cloud provider with consciousness
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.
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]
Satire about mind uploading under corporate control
"any more than the life of the reader of a novel becomes a derived work of its story." I fear that is only a limitation of our current tech, rather than a bedrock foundation of our law: [this video] (see around 2:00, though the whole video is necessary for context)
So, an AI Karen? >the generative AI system censors any output containing a category of error I can see the ruleset now… "This picture of a woman is revealing hair, so it must be censored because it is objectionable to some people and we must respect all people whose beliefs are guided in a sanctioned way." "This picture shows unadulterated fun, which must be censored because…" etc. [this video]
> One day a robot is going to be walking around the world. Will it have to pay someone every time it glimpses a video / book / logo / car design / etc? Looking at all of the people happily deciding to interpret copyright as widely as possible is kinda horrifying in this context: [this video] > Your stored mind contains sections from 124,564 copyrighted works. In order to continue remembering these copyrighted works, a licensing fee of $18,000 per month is required. > Would you like to continue remembering these works? > [you have insufficient funds to pay this licencing fee] > Thank you. Please stand by. > [Copyrighted works are being deleted] > Welcome to Life. Do you wish to continue?
> The questions about the copyright of models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. exist solely because it infringes on the rights of thousands of random artists all around the world How does it infringe? Are your memories of a movie copyright infringement? [this video]
The results don't exactly match your description, but a cloud-run self in which multiple plans are available and in which the implications of copyright enforcement and advertising-supported options figure prominently was depicted in the short video “Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers” on Tom Scott's channel. [this video]
Depicts tiered cloud-run self with copyright enforcement and ads
I think this is an odd comment considering not even a week ago you posted " I'm hoping when I hit 80( mid 30s now), I'll be able to have my brain hooked up to the matrix or something. Would be awesome to effectively "live" for 500 years with options to pilot androids every now and then. " You want your brain connected directly to, effectively, the FaceBook MetaVerse/Googleverse but are afraid of Reddit knowing enough about you to show you adverts. See also: Tom Scott, "Life, the singularity ruined by lawyers": [this video] (3 minute video).
Short satire about uploaded minds and corporate control
> If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse. This reminds me of Tom Scott’s “Welcome to Life: The Singularity, Ruined by Lawyers” [1] [1] [this video]
Satire of charging for remembered copyrighted works
The attitude is derived from a general animus many have towards AI companies. They resent the efficacy of AI because it devalues individual expertise. I can't imagine it really justifiable to say that training off data is the same as "stealing", when that same claim, that learned information that a person could retain and reproduce constitutes copyright infringement is the subject of many dystopian narratives, like this one, where once your brain is uploaded to the cloud you have to pay royalties based on every media product you remember. [this video]
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
20 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more
Read more