[-empyre-] pirates, pirating pirates

Thu Jul 14 18:01:45 EST 2011

Hi Jussi,

your contribution here about 'doing evil', gets at the point of what I was
trying to say, although it still may imply the premise of 'their evil' ...

what I'm suggesting is to do what we have to do, and to be informed of
course by institutional realities and possible hostile reactions, but to
start from our own realities and ethics first, and only secondarily as being
guided by the system we oppose and the actions of its guardians,

an argument could be that 'fighting against' as primary motivation actually
'feeds' the system, and that 'maximally ignoring it' through a
reconstructive effort direct energy in the new realities that we want to see
emerge,

Michel

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 2:01 PM, Parikka J. <J.Parikka at soton.ac.uk> wrote:

>
> Hi
>
> yes, we need pragmatics of sorts- that is what I think Michel was flagging
> and you Magnus were pointing towards; what works, what does not? Rosi
> Braidotti (who like me thinks of pragmatics in a Deleuze-Guattari way) has a
> nice little phrase "whatever gets you through the day" to refer to nomadic
> ethics that steers clear from normative rigidity and takes contextual,
> fluctuating milieus as its starting point - the fact that we need to live in
> a world, and somehow sustain our being in that. Pirating is already to a
> large extent that; less about manifestos, politics in the explicit sense of
> consciousness and goals; it is just getting by, with whatever is at hand:
> your example of larvae. This is what so often characterises forms of network
> politics (http://www.networkpolitics.org/) - that they are not even
> necessarily recognized as politics, but are so mundane, so...practical,
> embedded in everyday practices (and at times even deemed outright illegal)
> that they are under the radar when talking of politics - except economics.
> Piracy is often hanging on to some of the last possibilities of what you've
> got. Even the Hargreaves report seems to understand this bit: copyright law
> (in the UK in this case) is not seen credible by the public. Just some
> passages quoted from the report (we know this already, but just to
> articulate it once more):
>
> 8.5. "Most also cannot understand, or do not accept, that they are doing
> anything wrong by transferring a music file from a CD they have bought to an
> MP3 player, iPod or other device. A survey published by Consumer Focus in
> February 2010 found that 73 per cent of consumers do not know what they are
> allowed to copy or record.3 A Harris Interactive Poll for the BPI in 2010
> found that 44 per cent of all peer-to-peer (P2P) users stated that they
> believed their actions to be lawful. "
>
> 8.6. "It is not surprising that consumers are confused. In a world where it
> is possible to listen to music free on the radio; free or by subscription
> through a computer or smartphone from a streaming service; or by continuing
> to put a purchased or borrowed CD in a player, the concept of “ownership”
> and “purchase” has itself been redefined. "
>
> The word confused, incidentally, is mentioned in the report a number of
> times...
>
> The redefinition of ownership and purchase is interesting and of course at
> the core of this. Writing this while listening to Spotify and interrupted
> after every Tinariwen song with an idiotic and badly made advertising spot,
> I come to think of forms of piracy that have to do with those abstract but
> as real forms of world - time for instance; how my time is being
> legitimately pirated by mechanisms of capture of something that I mistake to
> be so personal - my time. (Well, we sell our time anyway to whoever pays our
> salaries, but that is only one bit of the pirating of such "personals" to
> which extraction of value bases itself).
>
> So, Evil and Evil Media Studies (Goffey and Fuller in the Spam Book);
>
> what if evil practices is where we should start? Lets for a second forget
> that we should play the game according to the rules, the legalities, the
> jointly (never) accepted frameworks, and start with what actually people do:
> we pirate, copy, plagiarize, imitate, adopt, adapt, repurpose, discard,
> trash, deceive, trick and so forth. To quote them: "To put it another way,
> evil is a good name for the strategies of the object, for what things do in
> themselves without bothering to pass through the subjective demand for
> meaning." (A short summary of the stratagems of evil media here:
> http://jussiparikka.net/2011/06/14/do-some-evil/)
>
> They map what already is taking place in "evil" places of communication
> from psy-ops to capitalist marketing, and suggest such as theory/practice
> entry points to evil media studies. Such would be the work of piracy as well
> - no need to sublimate it as a revolutionary artistic practice perhaps as we
> have millions of examples around the world of it in action already but
> still: why not. One of the most natural things in the world -- because it
> has a connection to production in a very fundamental sense, that McKenzie
> Wark flags in Hacker Manifesto: versus packing creativity into a commodity,
> bootlegs and piracy are themselves forms of distribution.
>
>
> j
>
> ______
> Dr Jussi Parikka
> Reader in Media & Design
> Winchester School of Art
> University of Southampton, UK
> Http://jussiparikka.net
>
> Adjunct Professor of Digital Culture Theory, University of Turku
> Visiting Fellow at Institute of Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin
> - Spring and Summer 2011
> ________________________________________
> From: empyre-bounces at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [
> empyre-bounces at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of magnus at ditch.org.uk [
> magnus at ditch.org.uk]
> Sent: 13 July 2011 21:42
> To: empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: [-empyre-] pirates, pirating pirates
>
> Reflecting on the interrelation between business and government, the
> background of activity in emerging economic circuits and the rise of
> cyberwarfare, I start to wonder to what degree the piracy is above all a
> relation between the bigger entities in capitalism which Jussi says,
> “...already, is rotten, anomalous and deviant itself”. Perhaps I am a
> little caught in circular relations, loops and entropy, but these notions
> seem to be quite fundamental to an understanding of conditions of the
> present moment, especially considering the imprint of political economy on
> spaces both virtual and physical. Technical, systems ecology, as I read in
> 'Digital Contagions' is one more paradigm which has been absorbed into the
> body of capital. But, as Michel suggested, the relationship is not
> necessarily one way. In this dynamic interplay of forces I am continually
> searching (like many others) for new spaces and opportunities. There is a
> kind of inadvertent mapping involved in that process, the kind of
> activity, I think, which the Keith Bunting work which Marc mentioned,
> makes explicit.
>
> I am also seeking analogies for my own and others' circumstances. The
> discussion has recast the role of pirate to locate it within the centre of
> business and government. It has also questioned the certainties of
> self-identification with fringe and underground community. Instead of
> locating ourselves at the borders, perhaps denied agency, I suggest an
> alternative, less anomalous, identity, as larvae consuming the rotten hull
> of capital - Pirate vessels of the 1600s, unable to put in to port for
> repairs, were dogged by millions of these creatures, voraciously burrowing
> into their wooden hulls. Invariably there was nothing for it but to
> abandon these ships to the tide. So, this kind of instinctual and
> destructive (vandal) behaviour may be one way to envisage the sharers of
> today – possibly acting without any kind of political awareness, doing the
> most natural thing in the world.
>
> Further on the larvae trope, I visited the Free Hetherington in Glasgow
> this week. This is the former Graduates' Club Building, occupied by
> students in defiance of cuts and restructuring being effected within
> Glasgow University: http://freehetherington.wordpress.com/
> The Free Hetherington has become a centre for numerous educational and
> cultural events and activities over the past 160 days and declares itself
> to be operating a gift economy. So, I propose such spaces as a flip-side
> to the embodied messages Jussi has described. Around such places, it seems
> to me, there is a whole cacophony of noise (of protest and participation)
> and intermingled use and quiet and reflection that distinguishes it from
> the social dynamics of Dubitinsider's co-ordinated marketing campaign. But
> I wonder if I am coming on like an old moralist too?!
>
> Jussi, perhaps you could say some more about evil and Evil Media Studies?
>
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