[-empyre-] laws, outlaws & golden pirates

[davin heckman]

> The question is how to short circuit that process? Vandalism might be part
> of that - to take away more than you put in, to ensure whatever it is you do
> its destructive tendency is greater than its creative. However, until now, I
> cannot think of a single strategy that has worked. That doesn't mean there
> isn't one...

I wonder if the solution might have less to do with the actions and
the relative rates of production and consumption, than with the
underlying ethical and social motivations.  At some level, what we are
all expressing (both the petite pirates and the official pirates) is
the fundamental silliness of an extremely focused application of a
particular enlightenment sensibility: the realization of individual
subjectivity and a notion of human rights that includes individual
autonomy, free-thinking, and the right exercise these rights over
one's body and related material possessions (a good thing) taken to an
extreme form of hyperindividuality and a radical notion of property
rights.

But these notions of rights an individuality are supported by laws,
but held into place only as far as we are willing to recognize the
"personal" nature of the rights of others.  The Law doesn't keep me
from stealing my neighbor's stuff or wrecking his car or rifling
through his mailbox.  I don't do those things, primarily because I
don't want to mess up his life.  And, I don't do those things to
people who live across town because I imagine that it would just not
be worth it.  Even if I don't like someone or disagree with someone, I
am not going to attack them.  They don't want people creeping around
inside their homes.  They don't want someone taking their mail.  They
don't want to pick up messes made by other people.  Etc.

But, really, it is simply hard to imagine an equivalent relationship
between a corporation and an individual.  I have never had a
corporation treat me as a person.  Sure, maybe the person working for
the corporation has bent the rules (or even interpreted existing rules
in my favor) out of some feeling of solidarity and identification.
But some entity that exists as the expression of a charter, that is
ruled by mechanisms which relentlessly abstract my "worth" to them in
terms of stock prices, is neither able to interact with me as a
person....  and I cannot imagine that entity as a person.  Thus,
companies have to try to humanize themselves to us....  create
characters and identities....  run ads that emphasize the humanity of
their employees...  or resort to propaganda that casts the offending
individual as some sort of anti-social person ("You wouldn't steal a
car, would you?").  But it's hard to feel like you are "killing"
someone by ripping an mp3 when people routinely starve for the global
market.

They are clinging to the very trappings of a culture they have tried
to destroy.  I think the pervasiveness of mutual piracy doesn't really
do much....  and I think this is its most important point...  it's a
mutual recognition that culture linked to materiality is absent, and
in its place we are seeing the official reassertion of culture as a
virtual quality, as a sort of puppet show (as private property has
always been).  The puppets are fighting over "ownership," but really
what's at stake is social relationships.  I think those will continue
to exist.  And, maybe they will even get better as the puppet show
gets sillier.  Property rights, like money, like food, like fashion,
like all the other superficialities really are rising to meet the
postmodern critique.  All the things we once imagined were deep are
floating to the surface, are beginning to look shallow.  But maybe
this crisis of being (of which ubiquitous piracy is a symptom) is
clearing away the dross of consumer culture, pruning back a particular
enlightenment tendency (radical individualism) that we might fully
explore the critical role that community plays in the formation of
being.   And property rights and the prices for goods and services can
be re-aligned with basic questions of justice and equity, where they
belong.

Davin