During the time of the Soviet Union, it was an urban legend that during supply shortages, Soviet factories would have no real work, but workers needed to keep up the appearance of working, so they would have one line of workers continuously assembling devices, feeding into another line that would continuously disassemble them, all in a loop where nothing gets produced.
In many ways, it feels like we are seeing this today in the digital world. As a specific example, GTA 5 (singleplayer) is a game that has been pirated for about 10 years now, and has received zero content updates in that time, yet somewhat recently (maybe a few years ago?) they updated the game on Steam to have new DRM that constantly conflicts with the Steam Deck sleep mode and kicks you out of the game at random after waking up, or just won't even let you launch if you're without internet and haven't launched it within a few days. Nothing worthwhile was produced by this endeavor, that's for sure.
In many ways, it feels like we are seeing this today in the digital world. As a specific example, GTA 5 (singleplayer) is a game that has been pirated for about 10 years now, and has received zero content updates in that time, yet somewhat recently (maybe a few years ago?) they updated the game on Steam to have new DRM that constantly conflicts with the Steam Deck sleep mode and kicks you out of the game at random after waking up, or just won't even let you launch if you're without internet and haven't launched it within a few days. Nothing worthwhile was produced by this endeavor, that's for sure.