On a recent episode of Chapo Trap House, the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, known by many for his analysis of contemporary cinema through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, explained why he hadn’t seen Joker yet. Given Zizek’s body of work, one might expect a moral, or perhaps an ideological rejection of, the most over-analyzed movie of the year. Žižek’s answer, however, was more straightforward: He hadn’t found a bootleg version of the movie that was high-quality enough.

zizek has apparently not yet seen the joker movie because there isn’t a good enough quality torrent available — spooky-commie-longhair 👻☭👻 (@BrockSHanson) October 17, 2019

man am I really gonna watch that awful camrip of joker, again, really, I'm doing it aren't I, oh my god well oK — 🎉clown pants reveal 🎉 (@qlowntine) October 22, 2019

@_frappucinhoe says, "Hey, Cole. I found a torrent of joker we can watch!" We excitedly download and launch it. Low quality, that's ok. But then. It happens. pic.twitter.com/iFiuNhxaaj — TatsuHero (@STatsuHeroS) October 16, 2019

It’s definitely a thing. Though pirated versions of the movie were uploaded onto sites like the Pirate Bay, µTorrent and Torrentfunk within days of its theatrical release, almost all of those that aren’t obvious malware are grainy, low-quality and covered in Russian, Arabic and Hindi ads for an online gambling site. Which, as you might have guessed, doesn’t really make it easy on the eyes. (For, uh, fact-checking reasons, I can tell you that my highest-seed version of Joker — i.e., the one people have downloaded the most — contained so many online poker promotions that the film’s much celebrated cinematography was more or less lost.)

Still, bootleg versions of Joker have been downloaded tens of thousands of times, bringing to mind the early aughts, when torrenting was an everyday part of online life and the place to download movies, music, porn, video games and expensive software like Microsoft Office. Of course, there were drawbacks to all this free content — namely, everyone who regularly torrented has a story about accidentally downloading a virus or a poor, grainy copy of an unreleased movie that was filmed on a Sony Handycam.

That’s why, in fact, torrenting was all but declared dead just a few years ago. Especially given that streaming sites like Netflix offered affordable subscriptions to thousands of movies and TV series, guaranteeing higher resolution, faster compression rates and, crucially, no viruses.

Obviously, none of that has changed. But with so many Netflix competitors now in the marketplace or about to enter it — from Hulu and Amazon to Disney+ and Apple TV+ — the (literal) costs are starting to outweigh the benefits. “There’s only so much disposable income people are prepared to spend on subscriptions,” writes Enrique Dans in Forbes. Not to mention, he adds, “preventing unlicensed downloading is very difficult.”

So while Netflix still claims 15 percent of all global online traffic, data published in 2018 by the digital networking company Sandvine indicates that around 25 percent of online downloading now comes via encrypted peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent — a 3 percent increase since 2015 and the first time that the number of people actively torrenting increased.

Tom, a 29-year-old journalist in the U.K. who didn’t want his full name to be published lest he gets taken to court, started torrenting again last year when he moved into a more expensive apartment with his girlfriend and realized that he’d been spending nearly a quarter of his disposable income on streaming platforms. “You don’t think about it when they’re like, ‘It’s only $10 a month,’” he explains. “But when I looked at my bank statement, I’d been paying that much for four different services, and yet, I wasn’t watching more than a couple of shows or movies a month.”

More than somewhat related, Sammie, a 30-year-old from New Jersey, believes that torrenting helps her consume content in a healthier and more authentic way. “I used to buy DVDs and Blu-rays because I wanted to watch things when they suited me,” she tells me. “I do the same thing now with torrents. I’ll download a series and keep it on an external hard drive, like I would with a DVD. Think about it this way: When most people our age torrented things as kids, we downloaded them based on what we genuinely liked or were interested in (or what our friends were interested in). But now with streaming, the algorithms basically decide what things we might be interested in.”

In other words, rather than a platform charging Sammie to hand over her data to sell to third parties while automatically recommending movies and TV shows it thinks she might like, torrenting allows her “to talk to people, to read things and to genuinely be interested in the world again.”

And that, she doesn’t need a crystal-clear picture in order to see.