Where Is Our Dongle?

When we were kids in the 1990s—art-school kids coming of age alongside the birth of desktop software—something extraordinary happened. Tools that once belonged to studios, corporations, and institutions suddenly appeared on personal computers. Photoshop. Early video-editing software. 3D design tools. The means of production for a new generation of artists and creators arrived almost overnight.

We didn’t have the money to afford them. We barely had rent. But we had time, curiosity, and obsession. So we did what young creators have always done when the gates are closed: we found a way in.

We stole the software.

Licenses were passed around like samizdat. Serial numbers scribbled on scraps of paper, emailed, whispered, copied from friend to friend. It was piracy, undeniably—but it was also education. Practice. Play. Identity formation. Entire creative careers were built on tools we technically weren’t allowed to touch.

In retrospect, one of the greatest marketing moves of all time may have been Adobe’s—intentional or not—failure to lock things down too tightly. By allowing their software to be “borrowed,” easily shared, and widely used, they created a generation of future professionals who were fluent in their tools before they ever earned a paycheck. We stole the software, and then we made our lives with it. When we finally could pay, we did—because the tools had already become part of who we were.

Some companies, of course, tried to stop this. They introduced the dongle.

The dongle was a small, joyless piece of hardware—a physical key you had to plug into your machine to prove legitimacy. Lose it, and you were locked out. Forget it, and your work stopped. For young artists and early entrepreneurs, it was dreaded. The dongle killed the grift. It made stealing impossible by tethering software to something you had to physically possess.

It worked.

Fast-forward to now, and the story has inverted.

Today, it often feels like software is stealing from us to make its life.

Every keystroke. Every voice command. Every pause, scroll, like, share, interaction, reaction. Our labor is no longer just what we produce—it’s how we behave. The tools don’t simply enable creativity; they observe it, record it, model it, monetize it. We are no longer just users. We are inputs.

What a strange twist in the story.

In the 90s, we pirated software because we wanted access to power. Today, software has access to us—total, ambient, continuous—and we barely notice when we give it away. There is no serial number prompt. No warning dialog that truly explains the exchange. No moment where you’re asked, plainly, are you sure?

So where is our dongle now?

What is the hardware key that prevents the inevitable capture—or complicit theft—of everything? The device, the boundary, the constraint that says: this far, and no further. What protects the private interior of thought, intention, and creation from becoming just another dataset?

We once feared being locked out of our tools.

Now we should ask whether we’ve been locked into them—and what it would take to unplug.