Welcome to the latest episode of my blog series Breaking Up with Big Tech. In this post, I would like to tell the story of how this series came to be. In the first post, I mentioned that Windows 11 was the last straw that kicked the purge into motion. However, the sentiment existed long before that.

A few years ago, I was a happy Windows user with an Android phone and several streaming subscriptions. Today, I’m a Linux user with a GrapheneOS phone and a large collection of physical media. Fighting back against Big Tech has been a maddening process, but I sleep much better knowing that I have full control over my digital life.

And it all started with a science fiction cartoon.

I have been a big fan of Adult Swim for as long as I can remember (the adult animation block on late-night TBS). I have watched since the peak days of Futurama and Robot Chicken. It was part of my nightly routine and I loved seeing all the unique shows from talented creators. It gave us cult classics like Rick and Morty and The Venture Bros.

And then, in 2018, another gem dropped. It was called Final Space.

This was a sci-fi comedy created by Olan Rogers. The sharp humor and superb voice cast made it an instant hit with fans of the genre. In fact, I could immediately picture every character from Max and the Multiverse (my own sci-fi comedy) in this vibrant world and animation style. It hit all the right notes for quality entertainment and I loved every second. It landed on my permanent rewatch list and even had a long stint on Netflix.

Sadly, the show was canceled in 2021 after three glorious seasons. I was bummed, but it happens. Sci-fi fans have been conditioned to expect the worst from shows we like the most (cough cough, Firefly). It’s like the studios are allergic to fun. But hey, at least I could stream the show whenever I wanted. Right?

This is when things get deeply infuriating. And dare I say … radicalizing.

At the time, I had already donated most of my physical media library because I had wrongly bought into the streaming paradise. Why lug around boxes of DVDs when I can buy digital copies in the cloud, right? (We all know how that turned out.)

I kept a small collection of my favorite shows and movies, mostly for nostalgia. Every now and then, I would add something that I really enjoyed. It was like getting a nice hardback copy of a favorite book. Final Space had become comfort viewing, so I decided to get the DVDs.

I went to Amazon. No copies. Walmart. No copies. Best Buy. No copies. Uh … WTF?

As it turned out, after Warner Bros. and Discovery merged, the new leadership under CEO David Zaslav decided to cut costs by any means necessary. They pulled completed projects from release and killed a bunch of development projects. That sucked, but business gonna business. And then something truly extraordinary happened. They “wrote off” a bunch of existing IPs for tax credits, which included Final Space.

Well that’s new. What kind of accounting nonsense is this? And why does it prevent me from buying copies of an existing show?

Writing off assets is a common tax tool where companies can dump poor investments, like damaged goods or bad debt. But nobody could have imagined that studios would write off fully-realized intellectual properties. The law was never intended to be used in this way. But they did, which meant that published media was permanently deleted from existence. Can’t stream it. Can’t buy physical or digital copies. Forever.

To make matters worse, creators had no recourse. They couldn’t buy back IPs or save them from annihilation. They could only watch in horror as nameless suits ripped their babies from studio libraries, never to be seen again. It was a purely financial decision with zero regard for fandom or quality. And for what? A fucking tax credit.

To reiterate: this wasn’t cancellation. This was erasure.

Olan Rogers broke the news to fans shortly after. “Five years of my life. Three seasons of TV. Blood, sweat, and tears became a tax write-off for the network who owns Final Space. Yup. That’s it. That’s why it’s disappeared everywhere in the USA. Five years of work vanished.”

Digital copies that fans had already purchased were yanked from their libraries, which meant that all existing physical copies of Final Space were the last of their kind. From that moment on, the only way to enjoy the show was to shell out hundreds of dollars on eBay.

“How could this possibly be legal?!” I asked myself. But it was.

It then occurred to me that none of my digital library was safe. I had a ton of media purchased in the cloud and studios could rip it away at any moment. I owned nothing. I just had a license to watch content for as long as the studio deemed it profitable.

This was when anger turned into action.

I canceled my streaming services and began to reacquire physical media. Final Space became a verb in my house. “I like this show and I’m buying a copy before they Final Space it.” I often visit thrift shops and gaming stores to shore up my collection. I would rather breathe new life into old media than give another cent to the digital mafia.

And speaking of Final Space being criminally unavailable, I recently learned that the entire series got uploaded to the Internet Archive. I damn near cried when I found it. (Bless you, digital champion!) I downloaded every episode, and in an act of pure defiance, I created my own physical copies. I have enjoyed some delicious victories during my Big Tech Breakup, but none of them compare to holding a Final Space DVD, even if I burned it myself.

Side note for fellow hunters: only the first two seasons were released on physical media, so anything you find with the third season is a bootleg. That might be okay for some fans, but I still hope to find some original copies. I would dearly love to display them as a sweet triumph over Big Tech enshittification. Maybe one day.

As a bittersweet coda (and likely due to the tremendous fan backlash), Warner Bros. allowed Rogers to release a graphic novel to end the Final Space saga. It did come with stipulations, of course. It could not be crowdfunded and once it sold out, that was it. No more. As of today, it has sold over 40,000 pre-order copies and will be released in June 2026. I purchased my copy, and if you would like to do the same, you can do so here.

Once I have it in-hand, I will include a picture here as a thank you to Rogers and all the other creators who have bled for their work. You didn’t deserve this, and fans will always have your back. As one such fan, I salute everything you have done to bring joy to this bleak world. The art you created will serve as shining beacons for generations to come. No corporate suit can ever take that away.

To quote my beloved Firefly, “You can’t stop the signal, Mal.”