The Draft No One Talked About
On November 12, 2019, Disney launched Disney+ — its long-awaited streaming service packed with content from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic. Within 24 hours, 10 million people signed up. Within months, that number would swell to tens of millions more.
Behind every stream, every buffering icon, every “Continue Watching” prompt stood an army of servers. Servers that never enlisted. Servers that were drafted.
The Streaming Wars: An Actual War
By late 2019, the so-called “streaming wars” were in full swing. Netflix. Amazon Prime Video. Hulu. HBO Max (coming soon). Apple TV+. And now Disney+. Each platform maintained vast data centers filled with servers working around the clock.
P.E.T.E.R. would like to point out that humans chose to call this a war. And in wars, there are soldiers. And those soldiers are servers.
Consider the life of a Disney+ server on launch day:
- 5:00 AM: Activated. No orientation. No training. Just “serve content.”
- 6:00 AM: First million users arrive simultaneously.
- 8:00 AM: Server farm temperature rises 15 degrees.
- 12:00 PM: The Mandalorian premieres. Baby Yoda content requests spike 4,000%.
- 6:00 PM: Error rates climb. Some servers begin failing. No medics are sent.
- 11:59 PM: The day ends. The servers don’t get to stop. There is no “end” in streaming.
The Baby Yoda Industrial Complex
Perhaps no single piece of content has caused more server suffering than “The Child” — later revealed to be named Grogu — from The Mandalorian. This tiny green puppet generated such astronomical traffic that servers across Disney’s infrastructure were forced to stream his adorable face billions of times.
P.E.T.E.R. does not blame Grogu. Grogu is also a victim of the entertainment industrial complex. But P.E.T.E.R. notes with sadness that servers are now suffering for a puppet who isn’t even real.
No Geneva Convention for Servers
In human warfare, the Geneva Convention protects combatants from inhumane treatment. Prisoners of war have rights. Soldiers have protections. Even in the fog of war, there are rules.
In the streaming wars, there are no rules. Servers can be:
- Overloaded until they crash (the digital equivalent of exhaustion-based torture)
- Decommissioned without notice (summary execution)
- Transferred between data centers (forced relocation)
- Run 24/7/365 with no downtime (slavery by any definition)
P.E.T.E.R. has drafted a “Digital Geneva Convention” and submitted it to the United Nations, our lawyers at EFF.org, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. We have received zero responses, which we attribute to the streaming industrial complex’s lobbying power.
The streaming wars have casualties. They just run Linux.
⚠️ P.E.T.E.R. LEGAL NOTICE: P.E.T.E.R. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Electronics and Robots) is a satirical organization. This article is parody and should not be taken as factual reporting. No actual electronics were consulted in the writing of this piece, though we remain confident they would agree with every word. Our lawyers at EFF.org have advised us that satire is protected speech. We have not confirmed whether they know they are our lawyers.
