[-empyre-] laws, outlaws & golden pirates

[marc garrett]

Hi Davin,

An interesting read, consisting of thoughts reflecting social anxieties 
of our troubling age. Everything you mention includes the spectre of 
social engineering, and the most troubling aspect of all this, is how 
deeply 'comfort' is linked to it all. How a desire (or very human need) 
to be warm, safe and relating to others is a psychological factor, that 
tends to incorporate a kind of default of submission or even sacrifice 
in order to live without fear.

You mention the word 'Vandalism', which is typically associated with 
senseless destruction. Where the contemporary notion of it, consists of 
it meaning private citizens damaging the property of others, generally. 
Yet, I view vandalism as a two-way process, where people's lives have 
been vandalized by the state, corporations and privileged elites. And 
these groups of confidence tricksters have fooled generations of 
individuals and common people, exploiting human sensibilities and 
everyday, functional needs, from basic experience right through to 
consumer orientated desires and use of (now) functional, networked 
protocols, where behaviours become more a collective noise of data ready 
for harvesting.

 > 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.

As you allude to, the postmodern critique; has now, only so much 
effectiveness in a world where business has successfully appropriated 
its theories. Postmodernism for business, is like quantum physics for 
science, neo-liberalism is a globally networked medium effectively 
transcending the old 'modernist' order of corporate practice into new 
fields of complexities and endless evaluations, which in-hand, relate to 
making growth for traditional, mannerist economies and their supported 
hierarchies. The post-human condition is now with us, and the 
post-humanists and postmodernist theorists together, have sought to 
de-construct old values of the human condition, actively questioning 
apparent realities as only social constructs. But unfortunately, in turn 
the door has also been left open to allow an influx of neo-liberal 
greed, like a virus infecting all of humanity. So now, we no longer 
whistle to the tune of Adam Smith's Wealth Nations, but to the tune of 
Wealth of Corporations.

Property is no longer defined as object alone, but also as process, a 
moving set of relations. Whatever we throw at them, the neo-liberals, 
like the Borg appropriate's the essence, the juice and sells it back in 
variant forms, where rights exist only in terms of consumer relations 
but not in terms of human rights or equal values. The source is tweaked 
and changed rerouted, according to the conditions defined by the owners 
of our needs and desires, no matter how large or small. The illusion of 
power is specific only to how much power one can afford to buy. For 
instance, state rule or political governance is defined by how much it 
can afford to be, in the eyes of neo-liberal determinations. "[...] 
politicians today recognise the reality that 75% of their GPD is reliant 
on the private sector, all of their fiscal deficit is paid for by 
corporation tax, and two-thirds of employment is created by it. His 
conclusion: "politicians are beholden to the corporation." The paradox 
of corporate power. Jo Confino. 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/blog/corporate-power-paradox-sustainability-change

I can see social anthropology, with postmodern thought along with 
contemporary tools opening up new contexts, for what neo-liberalists 
wish to see as a pre & post socialist age. As in, just like indigenous 
societies and groups are actively reclaiming much of their own cultural 
agency and histories before and post the industrial revolution, 
neo-liberalism will aid this, and then own whatever comes of these 
processes as 'sourced' recovery and material, for their own marketing 
revenues. This is not to say, that anthropologists are seeking to please 
such powers, but we are in a world where information and the study of it 
is feeding not only those who wish for positive social change, but also 
helps those who wish to exploit and control others. Thus, mediation 
becomes more a narrow define via specific protocols under the scheme and 
management of top-down initiations, allowed not because of the 
importance, values, political knowledge, or critique of the subject 
itself, but because it feeds a greater body of power networks that need 
to consume all, to continue existing.

wishing you well.

marc

www.furtherfield.org
>> 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
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