[-empyre-] pirates, pirating pirates

Thu Jul 14 20:45:00 EST 2011

only partly, since ' refusal to work' seems like a pure resistance strategy
?

(fyi: Magnus Lawrie on p2p foundation wiki:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Special:RecentChanges?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=0&search=Lawrie&fulltext=Search&ns0=1
)

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 5:11 PM, <magnus at ditch.org.uk> wrote:

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

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