[-empyre-] pirates, pirating pirates

[magnus at ditch.org.uk]

> 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,

I'm wondering, would this link to the self-reduction and refusal to work
campaigns I mentioned in an earlier post?

Magnus

>
> 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?
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> _______________________________________________
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>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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>>
>
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