Outside, in the hum of the street, the world had already learned to trade images like loose change. There were services promising instant access, clouds that swallowed reels whole, and networks that stitched global tastes into tidy playlists. RapidShare had been one of those mythic marketplaces in the age of eager uploads and midnight torrents: a promise of immediate transmission, a place where a film could be possessed in the space of a click. It was efficient, unromantic, and dangerously democratic. Anyone could scatter their work there; anyone could pirate beauty back into the air.