piracy as activism | Re-public: re-imagining democracy

Piracy as activism

In spite of its long and intense presence in the popular imagery, piracy is a concept that has only scarcely and timidly been linked to forms of political activism. Mostly seen through the lens of criminalisation and policing (including also the transgression of the existing order by the heroic pirates) piracy has rarely been analysed in relation to its influence in shaping the everyday life of contemporary communities. Piracy, in the seas or lands or digital networks, encompasses a wide array of practices that shape, and often transform, these spaces and networks. Apart from this constitutive power, pirate practices also challenge the formal organisation of spaces and networks, by projecting and instituting alternative mobilities, hierarchies, boundaries, and social relations.

Alexander Galloway – Piracy, control practices, and alternatives of control

Alexander Galloway, author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks discusses the connections between piracy, networks and control practices. He insists on making the distinction between pirate practices and collaborative sharing on the basis of their differing approaches to commodification. Galloway claims that although it might be “tempting to romanticize the pirate or hacker as someone who eludes control, this is simply not the case…The only way to elude digital control systems is to be quite militant and not to interface with them at all. Instead we need to think in terms of ‘alternatives of control’ or ‘control practices’.”

Jonas Andersson – It takes (at least) two to tango

The French social theorist Michel de Certeau acknowledged a phenomenon called la perruque; the processes by which workers trick their employers into thinking they are working when they are actually doing personal things, using the resources of the workplace. Nothing is really stolen, except time. A creative process is clearly taking place, but nothing is produced in the monetary sense. A tactic is established, which makes use of ‘the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them’

Rolando B. Tolentino – Media piracy and Philippine cosmopolitanisms

The democratization of digital technology has intensified the cultural specificity of media piracy in the Philippines. Media piracy is a racialized and class-consigned activity: it is bound to ethnic and religious identifications, since its main agents are mostly Muslim Filipinos, coming from the southern island of Mindanao (their autonomous region being one of the most poverty stricken in the country) and it is also class-consigned since this type of entrepreneurship connotes low-end origins that serve the more affluent economic groups in the country.

Irmak Ertuna-Howison – Pirates, authors, and the fear of collective intelligence

As the chain of neo-liberal ideology tightens around our necks, it becomes harder to pull on the leash and attempt to break away from its influence in our thinking. Even cultural historians, critics, and authors- those who have traditionally taken the role of vanguard of progressive thinking – submit to conservative ideas. One such author is Jaron Lanier, whose book You’re Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, published in 2010, received enthusiastic reception from conservative critics such as the famous The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. Her review “A Rebel in Cyberspace, Fighting Collectivism“, as the title suggests, cuts right to the chase of the issue and pinpoints Lanier’s caution against the “wisdom of crowds” and threat to intellectual property posed by free Internet content as the real virtue of his book. Collectivism of cyber content, in distribution and production, is seen as an insidious threat to originality and imagination by conservative authors.

Olivia Swift – Pirates at home, hostages abroad: Piracy in Somalia, the Philippines and the academe

While maritime piracy is an ancient and ever-present phenomenon, the recent upsurge in Somali piracy is notable for its scale and use of sophisticated weaponry and technology. Somali pirates are holding some 400 seafarers hostage and almost one million people signed a petition urging the United Nation’s International Maritime Organization to lead governments in taking stronger action against piracy in the Gulf of Aden and surrounding Indian Ocean.

Governments under pressure to end piracy face a daunting task. NATO, the EU and a third international coalition, the Combined Maritime Forces, operate naval patrols of the Gulf of Aden’s Internationally Recognised Transit Corridor.

Roberto Verzola – The piracy debates: A question of ethics or national interest?

Those who use the term “piracy” instead of the appropriate legal term “infringement” to describe the unauthorized copying of copyrighted or patented material are masters of propaganda. They know the power of language and suggestion. Over the years, they have managed to associate copying with immoral, criminal, or even barbaric, acts. They have been so successful that media and the public now generally accept the presumption that copying protected materials is theft and, even worse, piracy. It is not far-fetched that, in the future, they will go even further and associate infringement with terrorism.

Ernesto (founder of TorrenFreak.com) – Piracy and the formation of public opinion

Ernesto, the founder of TorrenFreak.com, one of the most prominent online sources for news about file-sharing, talks about the politics of the Pirate Parties, the productive effects of digital piracy, the increasing penalisation of piracy by the pro-copyright forces, and the future of file-sharing. He argues that “people will always find ways to circumvent laws and regulations and in the end technology will always be a step ahead of the anti-piracy outfits,” and adds “that the only way to decrease piracy is by making content available more easily, and at a decent price.”

Thanasis Priftis – Imaginary piracy

On Christmas of 2009 YouTube was “hacked” and many profiles’ icons were changed to other images, faces, new thumbnails. A multi avatar hacker under the title MeiAIDS was credited with the hack that, mostly, involved avatars around a community creating “YouTube Poops”. In short, this is a method of video editing, which became popular through YouTube’s always increasing fame. “YouTube Poops” are bizarre, quasi artistic creations, an in-joke between a group of friends or clips of cartoons and other assorted junk strung together to form nonsensical moving images on Youtube. Such a complex communication, affiliation system inter-connecting language, entertainment and even piracy needs to be revisited.

It seems as if the city, its space, its future, its production, were almost exclusively the result of a series of processes and flows taking place at unreachable distance, in un-known locations, mostly determined by the interests and wills of un-localized powers, actors and flows. As if the city could no longer be produced and shaped after the desires of its inhabitants, articulating one or another form of collective will. As if the city was no longer the soul and reason of urban politics but just the mere object of a kind of witty and hygienic managing that understands built space as a market and a product, placing economy at the very center of society.

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