Learning from piracy

Introduction

Learning from Piracy refers to an intended one-year interdisciplinary course proposal^[1] that a group we playfully called the Piracy Cluster put together. The course was a collaboration between persons^[2] from Royal College of Technology, The Royal Institute of Art and Linköping University, and was developed at meetings and email conversations during April 2013. It took its blueprint from the educational project by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s famous Ph.D. course and research project Learning from Las Vegas^[3] from 1968.

“Duck/Decorated Shed,” from the project Learning from Las Vegas.

We wanted to produce a practical and discursive endeavor by posing the questions of what one can learn from piracy. To steer away from the preconceived and to give space and time to think about piracy as a possibility and as cross-scale potentiality. Whether one sees the theme of piracy as an opportunity or a threat, we were sure that an investigation would tell us about the conditions of the present and how network culture manifests. To quote from the course proposal:

Just as “Las Vegas” in 1968 made visible and tangible a postmodern American architecture and society, perhaps “piracy” (in its many manifestations) contains the truth of a post-capitalist society in a state of permanent crisis.

With persons from the other institution as backers, we submitted the course proposition to The Royal Institute of Art. For many learners, teachers and students it could have been an exciting opportunity to learn more about the role piracy plays in directing and redirecting the contemporary. However, this time the proposition did not win the hearts and minds of the course board committee, and the proposal was rejected.

Call for Papers

The Piracy Cluster used the rejection as a new point of departure, and we formulated a call for papers^[4] for a conference session called Learning for Piracy hosted by the ACSIS Cultural Studies Conference^[5] in Norrköping in June 2013. It became a way to continue the examination of contradictions in contemporary culture, defined in the research questions about institutionally defined borders of creativity and transgression. The questions focused on the possible inability of knowledge institutions to risk investing in the unknown and unpredictable. Side this fear of the unknown with the necessary transgressions that creativity in a society based on open networks form. I see the proposition as a rejected artwork; exemplifying the ambiguous position of transgressive creativity in the network society.

The course proposal imagined as an artwork in 2013. The artwork is playing in the borderland of research, learning, and art.

The conference

Donatella Bernardi, Martin Fredriksson and I organized the conference session Learning from Piracy^[6] at ACSIS Cultural Studies Conference. It included presentations and abstracts from Maria del Arcuri, Magnus Eriksson, Ana Betancourt, Konstantin Economou and Anne-Li Lindgren, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ulrik Volgsten, and Amadeo Policante. In the end Denise Ferreira da Silva and Amadeo Policante did not make it to the conference. However, especially discussion leading up to the conference with Ferreira da Silva was vital. This report from the conference is from my partial notes and memories of the session. My summary of the presentation is expanded with additional reflections, and consists of three parts:

1. How piracy and hacking can inform the organizational learning processes of creativity in higher education.

2. How piracy and hacking are a productive force in remix-culture

3. How piracy and hacking are vital in urban reorganization and activism.

Conference Part 1: Piracy and higher education

Donatella Bernardi started the conference session with a presentation of the process of making the rejected course proposition, and I illustrated some of the concerns of institutionalized learning with the so-called Las Vegas script. I made this visualization in the weeks before the conference when we discussed how institutions make room for participation, how skill-based knowledge is shared between individual and collective processes and how institutional structures enable or disable creative possibilities in the network society. This discussion was held in the context of the hackerspace workshops at the Royal College of Art.^[7]

I had already begun working on a visualization for the first conference with The Piracy Cluster (Piracy Imaginaries). It was an attempt to map an idea of a piracy Commons as a kind of battleground. With Richard Bartle's player types as a starting point,^[8] I wanted to point to different strategies to uphold a Piracy Commons.

The first visualization made for the conference Piracy Imaginaries was mapping the Commons from the perspective of Richard Bartle's player types.

The new isometric visualization was a playful way to suggest different scenarios formed around the limits of institutionalization on network potential, on creativity, participation, and transparency. The central narrative of the visualization is similar to the course proposal, but it also forms the context of my research. There is a field of thinking tinkers, which I exemplify with activists, hackers, and pirates, that represents a vital potential based on new forms of knowledge production, through self-organizing in open networks. These creative clusters expand the limitations of institutions by new network possibilities and establish alternative models for creativity and organization. In a society where the crisis of hierarchical and closed systems is ongoing, these agencies become important. The main agenda is to further the emancipatory goals of the modern project by open knowledge processes and to point to alternative routes for creativity and survival beyond the enclosures of the state-capitalist logic.

Las Vegas script a scripted visualization, an isometric perspective based on Richard Bartle's player type model. The process of making the visualization also pointed forward. The visualization became a track that later would result in one of the research project installations, Riot Chat, showed in London Autumn of 2014.

Both Bernardi and I work in a visual artistic practice and in the higher education context. Any lock-down and control of free creative investigations concerns us. We also acknowledge that the transgressive possibility of art has a historical record and is still forming critical trajectories of democracy. Institutional rules, norms, and laws can decapitate the democratic potential. In this light, the rejection of the learning from piracy course proposition can symbolize a larger problem of institutional potential.

Adaptation to digital network processes of openness and transparency by individuals, collectives, and institutions forms both risks and opportunities. Next, I want to present a couple of models and ideas that were important in our discussions about knowledge models for contemporary creative ventures, based on the idea of pirates and hackers. The common theme is how security and a sense of the real, forms between predictability and the not yet codified. In the most general terms, it is a question of how we can understand the inherent risks between the “organized” and freedom.

1. A model of Predictability  

In our narrative, the idea of New public management^[9] is presented as a negative example. To create efficiency, New public management wants creators to inhabit an entrepreneur's spirit and educators to see students as customers. New public management is an example of how the contradiction between freedom and top-down management and predestined roles form within late capitalism. We imagine how processes of management have taken stronger root within the field of higher education, for instance with the standards of the Bologna process.^[10]

Las Vegas script, the scripted visualization, the institution as an employability factory.

One example that Bernardi raised was that the Swedish government demands higher education to be transparent, predictable, and secure.^[11] The requirements are part of a model aim to ensure the relation between the goal of the education and student by a transparent and predictable curriculum. While this demand might be partly relevant, it does not answer to the many anomalies that come with securing the model. One problem is that top-down control fundamentally contradicts equality, and monitoring contradicts a wider sense of security. This kind of predictability can be an instrumentalization that cuts the connection to subjectivity, living knowledge, equality, and a sense of the real.

A text that explores these contradictions of contemporary higher education is “Axiomatic equality Rancière and the politics of modern education”^[12] by Nina Powers. The theme of the article is how the predictable reproduces already existing class systems and stereotypes. Powers explores how we could find a wider quest for equality beyond models of predictability through Rancières thoughts.

In an experiment, we can swap the word predictability with equality and get another word list: transparency, equality, and security. Now, if we accept the unpredictable, insecurity becomes something we have to take into account.

The openness of network society creates and breaks frontlines between institutions, collectives, and individuals in quests for an interaction that is more complex. The contradicting interpretations of such principal words as predictability, freedom, equality, security, and transparency is something we experience daily in digital networks. I suspect that this gap in interpretations is due to the ongoing breakdown of barriers in leaky open systems, where network practices form something that current codification and models cannot fully grasp.

2. Learning as a model of insecurity

In open networked systems, it seems contradictory to look for precise individual predictability as it limits the context of network creativity. With its models, monitoring can place a restraint on the unknown and intervene in matters of the preconceived and the actual, models and processes, and between mind, hand and matter.

In this case, visual art education can work as a way to oppose management trends by 1. holding on to the imaginary potential central to visual art.^[13] and 2. looking at working models outside the over managed institutional in the pirate potential in hacker and DIY-culture.

2.1 The imaginary potential central to visual art

In one example on how we can hold on to the imaginary criticality, Bernardi pointed to Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze. In the chapter The Image of Thought Deleuze writes:

“To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field. This conjugation determines for us a threshold of consciousness at which our real acts are adjusted to our perceptions of the real relations, thereby providing a solution to the problem. Moreover, problematic Ideas are precisely the ultimate elements of nature and the subliminal objects of little perceptions. As a result, ‘learning’ always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind.”^[14] 

Learning and interaction with the world entails something unknown by an ongoing hands-on exploration of an uncertain field. The change we experience is something we cannot predict, but that produces knowledge. In the context of Image of Thought and the reproductions of stereotypes, we can see the problem of curriculums as a choice between superficial descriptions or staying away from codification.

Visual arts education holds an alternative educational ideal that accepts a great deal of insecurity. The process of constant fusion of horizons between professors, teachers and students, between concepts and practice, forms around the materiality of the work, in “subliminal objects of little perceptions”. Christian Wideberg writes about one of the central formats of visual art education, the studio critique, as a form of living knowledge:

This process addresses the challenge of integrating concept and material, the ultimate goal of which must be a seamless fusion of the two if the finished work is to possess sublime qualities. One can regard the studio critique as a process where the student reaches a deeper knowledge of self and his or her artistic goals, where subjective and creative impulses are essential for the developmental growth of this form of living knowledge.^[15]                 

        
The layering of horizons that interact here cannot be reduced to something objectively secure or predictable. Moreover, the subjective and personal process is hard to codify into hierarchically ordered progressive goals. Exploring, getting to know one's subjectivization process is one of the primary goals of higher artistic education. I would think that a higher education that can harness a diversity of artistic skill sets, is ideal. From the point of view of the curriculum, much of the quality of the art education must remain invisible whether we choose to codify it or not. 

Instead of a security based on monitoring with already established goals, we should try to find another kind of security. The security here is to give space to creative processes and take care or give room for the insecurity of the subjectivization process.^[16] Now, we can use the insecure knowledge process of the pirate as an artistic model. As we discussed in the first pirate conference, the Greek origins of the word piracy in the concept of "Peria" means "a trial, experience, attempt" or "learn to know by experience". We can go further and see the unpredictable nature of the human condition as a base for practical knowledge ventures. In this unsecure knowledge model, the creative testing spirit of the pirate can create practical virtuosity from the unknown and the open^[17]. This leads us directly to the next point.

2.2 Looking at pirates potential in hacker and DIY-culture

As the quest for a more formal educational curriculum comes from inside and outside the educational institution, we need to find resistance and inspiration from other knowledge contexts. One thing we can do is to side the management demands of institutions with the vivid pirate and hacker knowledge production of networks defined by change, leaks, transformation, and collective processes.

Ivan Illich^[18], Henry Jenkins^[19], and Noam Chomsky^[20] all have given different perspectives on how education could be reformed. The self-organized hackers, slackers, remixers and pirates that utilize the conditions of the commons and networks that are more open and not controlled by particular institutions, form an ideal. My research is particularly concerned with common knowledge processes and how pirates and hackers self-organize in hackerspaces. It is a vital potentiality in how education and creativity take place elsewhere outside institutions. An illustrating example that can serve as a kind of program for a decentralized, anti-authorial and self-organization production and creativity outside formal education is the purpose of Whole Earth Catalog. As they explained in 1968:

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.^[21]

Detail of page, The Whole Earth Catalog.

The vision has amplified with the sharing potential enabled by the Internet. With digital networks, the self-organized hands-on sharing spirit continues to grow the contemporary common of hacker and DIY culture.^[22]

We understand that pirates and hackers are key agencies to engage the leaky open, network potential. Next in our narrative, we A. question the idea of employability. The potential can become a B. force of capital, and we form C. a classical media critique based on the stereotyped and D. how that creates a network risk. In the conclusion of this report, we will return to the potential of formulating a political project of a more open vision of education, forming from the biopolitical opening of the Commons.

A. Employability

We want to put focus on the epistemological presuppositions of employability. The reason is the same as before. A managerial force of abstracted capital places itself as a shallow goal in processes that are unknown and define a partial vision of learning and ultimately what determines human life: a sense of reality and security. Partly because of a weaker economy and labor markets, there is a greater emphasis on that the goal of education should be to train students to become employable. From the perspective of the institution, this is a rational thought and maybe in a time of crisis also something to hold on to. However, the problem is one of map and terrain, nature and mind, and what becomes before and after, work or innovation. Many times, the result could be an overly cautious approach where educational institutions construct a one on one relation to workforce demands. In this process, education, teachers, students, and research become less free. By aiming for hard links between job markets, educations risk slowly suffocating innovation and learning, at least locally. It can happen both in the short term, by streamlining yesterday's requirements and in the long term, gradually limiting the possibilities of the educational institution to be at the forefront of innovation.

B. A force of Capital

If this description is not only hypothetical, it seems to be a lame and dangerous vision and model for the future of knowledge society. The negative feedback should also be a concern for the spirit of capitalism as it could be seen as counter-productive because the unknown is a major trajectory for innovation. (The idea here is that by trying to use too much management, one risks killing potentiality.) By stating that the goal of education is to create workers for the creative industries and make the students employable - institutions put the wrong kind of fate in the hands of the students.^[23] If it is a fact that the discourse of higher education rejects certain types of creativity, we could imagine that other ways and sub-strategies within or as a parallel to higher education will surface.

Parallel to this perspective, we can see that the vision of employability still does not capture the spirit of capital^[24]. Many hackers and other autodidactic and digital natives flow directly to the industry, as companies bypass higher education in their quest for cognitive power. How enterprises organize so-called hackathons is an example of harnessing the emerging collective spirit of hacking. When the best mathematicians from universities are headhunted to make stock exchange algorithms, employability is out of sync. Because the forces of capital both live from and kill the emerging - employability will always be an inadequate tool that entails risk. As we soon will exemplify, the question in the end is how different models push the risks in various directions.

C. Media critique 101 - stereotypes and the predictable
All of this can be seen as a mass media critique 101 in the age of state capitalist control. The circles of innovation spiral inwards, as education tries to mirror the market. At round tables visions and strategic leadership change for surveys and quarterly reports. As digital services build on monitoring behaviors, higher education makes a model of the world with simplified ends towards a streamlined average, standardization is a goal. Mundane interfaces, products, services and media are rendered through the stereotyped and on the path of predictability. We should consider the risk that, instead of creating diversity and empowered criticality - clichés and already existing power structures continue to build on the reproduction of stereotyped agencies and “marketified” institutions. In this narrative, higher education becomes a restricting service that builds a knowledge debt to the emancipatory goal of equality, transparency, creativity and democracy.

A cultural collapse between state and capital would not have to be the end of the world if it was not for the power of employability as a biopolitical enforcement of control. The state capital formation represents a creativity that produces knowledge services with reduced ethical considerations and possibilities for the future. At this one-dimensional plane without possible escape, hacking, piracy and leaking seem essential for art and democracy, as well as for the capital. With the inherent limitations of all systems, access to be able to tinker, enable leaking and piracy, and continued hacking is a necessity in contemporary digital models, systems, and networks.

From the perspective of the pirate, media and data, both free and pirated, play an important part in the everyday production of knowledge. From the perspective of intellectual property, piracy is seen as an “anomaly”, to be expelled. Anyway you see it, these leaks feed production and democracy in the knowledge society.

 
Las Vegas script a scripted visualization, the high-density pirate space.

D. MIT - open networks as possibility and risk

Finally, I want to bring up two illustrations on how the predictable and unknown entail patterns of risk. Leaks, hacking, and piracy find ways through personal opportunities, within and without institutions, but also form as an endeavor defined by risks. The two examples I want to consider are about openness and leaks at the education networks of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  MIT is a suiting example because many of the first generations of hackers came out of MIT^[25]. With these examples, I want to illustrate two types of risk and possibilities, as a relation between the individual choices and global knowledge contexts.

MIT Example One.

The first example is MIT's OpenCourseWare^[26], which is an interesting example that utilizes the networked learning possibilities in an institutional setting. Founded by MIT, OpenCourseWare has become a model for many other universities and provides a set of open and free online courses to a global student body. Here global competition is created based on the open protocols of Internet. It makes it possible for Swedish students as well as any others to enroll in these courses. It is an example of a displacement of the regional dominance of universities, which in the global context risk becoming less relevant. In the network society, the learner’s choice expands. Other universities are not the only bodies that compete for the student’s time; there is also a more unsettled new kind of a leaky-pirate-body of knowledge. As representatives of higher education, we should consider whether these form a threat, possibility, or risk to the dominant fixed order of higher education.

MIT Example two

Pirates are those who will deal with the risks of exploring and opening the unknown. Piracy and leaks play a critical role in forming alternative narratives. The state capital creates boundaries and defines elsewheres through expulsions. In the case of Aaron Swartz: suicide, people behind The Pirate Bay (for instance Peter Sunde): incarceration and Edward Snowden: forced migration.^[27] In their quests of leaking and facilitating sharing, and in trying to find possibilities for work and life, they transgressed corporate and state laws of property. For most of us, their endeavors present general possibilities for pirate media, new knowledge perspectives, and better network possibilities. Information wants to be free, but individual pirate agencies risk expulsion. In this context, Aaron Swartz suicide becomes the second MIT example. As the legal pressure from copyright lawyers played out around Aaron Swartz JSTOR-leak, the programmer and activist committed suicide. It is a devastating example of our contemporary pirate history and one sad ending in the game of openness and control. Swartz family’s official statement captures the essence of the problem of modern higher education and how we can try to understand the meaning of transparency, equality, and security.

Make no mistake, the fight over freedom of information and internet regulation is the defining political struggle of our time, and failing to choose sides may prove fatal to the future of both higher education and all other public services. At stake is the definition of what constitutes the political and what is subject to public debate, of what is withdrawn from scrutiny under the cloak of property rights or the laws of economy. ^[28]

With new technology, a knowledge space forms through the biopolitical conditions of cognitive capitalism. Michel Foucault points to how control becomes decentralized and personalized and how it works on many levels, scales and areas and describes it as the biopolitical. In the biopolitical context, piracy can be one way to define a person to a political trajectory for the new materiality of digital networks. We can pick up the investigation from the first conference and point to the fundamental investigation of the unknown and how pirates embrace and are defined in media res (Latin "in the midst of things"). In the imaginary of trans-piracy, I investigated the possibility to find a global feminist learning model.

From the hackable, pirateable and leakable it is possible to point to how the openness of networks and sharing can become a starting point for a more radical reformation and expansion of education. Education could form as an extended idea of the network as well as a more common knowledge possibility with the potential of accessible networks. As we referred to in the first pirate session, the Piracy Imaginaries, Silvia Federici refers to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's work of the multitude and the Commonwealth. Federici writes about how network society and cognitive capitalism is based on informal relations and how through rerouting of property relations knowledge production can flow into a greater commons to enable the multitude. Access to knowledge becomes a disruptive and educational endeavor as well as an alternative route and an alternative model for society. On the edge of this possibility, the spirit of testing is critical. What we are interested in is how pirates and hackers can create a field of sovereignty. It is a position that can engage other possible models outside institutional protocols and potentially escape the capitalist logic of enclosures. Here we can rest on Foucault’s discourse of madness and how the law and institutions can be shaken by the sovereignty of self-organized autodidacticism. With biopolitical networks to recreate the human by sharing, we have to become post-queer witches, mad bio-scientist, and trans-pirates.

The next two presentations continue to explore how networked media offers a gray zone of creativity that entails both personal and institutional risks and possibilities.    

Conference part 2: Privacy and Remix Culture

The second presentation of the conference (session) was by Konstantin Economou and Anne-Li Lindgren. Education, social critique, and media production form in cross-scale dynamics between a popular remix culture and professional media production. Here, in the gray zone “the next professional media class is formed.” as Economou and Lindgren point to in their presentation: Childhood re-edits abstract^[29]. They illustrate this with videos from the YouTube channel of Snedvriden (Adverse selection).

Snedvriden presents Bröderna Lejonsprut, Screenshot Youtube.

The videos are re-edits of the classic Swedish children's movies produced during the 70’s based on the iconic Astrid Lindgren books. The Snedvridet selection is fun and provocative but also shows a possible productive remix-skill and therefore, works as a kind of a job portfolio in the attention economy, as I understood it. Economou and Lindgren continue: The Snedvriden production displays how the remix of culture artifact leads into a learning process through a knowledge schema. The works are mutations that do not fit the binary logic of copyright or employability. In the end, it still forms a base to be productive. Illegal remixes and modifications are vital transgressions and create new work and tokens to the lopsided path to professionalism and the labor market. But at the same time, with a potential to create a social critique of what is considered a professional work. Shifting positions is necessary for both the agency and the work, over the semi-private and the semi-public, to be able to take this shortcut to the job market.

As a coincidence, Snedvriden illustrates a relation between two different adverse selections, the anti-market of copyright and the anti-copyright of the remix culture. An adverse selection^[30] is an anti-offering that gives undesired results and occurs when adversaries have asymmetric access to information. The adverse selection is something that can lead to a greater likelihood to poor and overpriced products. It is informative because it shows the direct relationship between the artificial divisions that copyright creates between digital-material possibilities and abstractions of laws.

It seems to be the goal of mass media and mainstream within the copyright paradigm of centralized services to direct flows to an untouchable consumer Read Only culture^[31]. However, in remix culture, on the edge of media where consumers become media users copyright loses this principle grip. With files over the wire, media is out of the container, a semi-private-public creative possibility of access and creativity exists. It is a space, which the authorized copyright capital itself cannot engage directly. Nevertheless, the tokens created can still be a key to find skills to be incorporated as work in capital production at a later stage. Therefore appropriation plays a double game of skill and attention, media and message, where unclean relations away from the copyright divisions of public and private is vital also for the next generation of media production.

3. Garvest Boon

Garvest Boon, Mariadele Arcuri Rossini's project, and presentation illustrate the space of fan-fiction with a precision that is also an example of creativity playing in the Commons, in a semi-private-public gray zone. Garvest Boon is an artwork by Arcuri Rossoni that explores the possibilities of modification, by a recreation of the legendary SNES Harvest Moon game from 1990. Rossoni works in a tradition of remix and fan-fiction. The game was reconstructed from Rossini's memory of the game and mixed with media snippets (sound and graphics) from the Internet, creative commons license media and community game media. This innovative space of modification enables a personal take on the original game but also makes an artwork on the insecure border of homage and provocation. The artwork still has an unsettled future that will depend on attention, community acceptance, and copyright enforcement.

Garvest Boon is an artwork by Arcuri Rossoni

Part 3: Piracy and urban reorganization

The next two presentations informed my research in an interesting way: Magnus Eriksson's Piracy, code and law, and Ana Betancourt’s Mapping the Commons. The central theme for both presentations is models and standards of organization and protocols of networks and cities. Beneath the surface of “the ordered”, it is about how leakage and piracy of dominant control structures shape society, culture, and politics. Here, rather than an anomaly, leaks, piracy, and hacking continue to be a rule and a possibility to open up new meaningful contexts of the everyday. The primary model of a hegemonic system provides and transforms patterns of living, and lay out the possibility of the everyday life to be pirated or hacked, to make life livable.  

Piracy, code and law

In his presentation, Eriksson begins in empires, in the opposite of leakage and piracy - in how to create compliance, predictability, and standardization. We can call what he describe a kind of Ohm's law of control (the law of power). It is about how the relation of resistance, flow, and power can make messages work. The law decides how the power of command and control can perform an action at distance. Power needs a medium to deliver messages between the central administration to other places and still maintain message integrity. For example, the public road in the Roman Empire (cursus publicus) leading power, paved the way for crucial decisions. Remote messaging used these roads as its command and control medium. The sovereignty of messages was dependent on the power flows, the integrity of laws, infrastructure between cities, roads, and outposts. These roads were founded for the logic of rent systems, for rent to be collected and central ruling to prosper.

Before something can happen, there has to be power, creating consistency between materiality, control, and flow. Eriksson takes the power consuming process of forging and packing transistors on a microchip to make microprocessors, as an example. As a military organization, control circuits with command potentiality must be “drilled” before being able to execute commands. Next, with this alignment produced by power, power can be abstracted as command over material conditions. Then, code and commands can be activated by a button and become infrastructure and architecture that “just work”. We can look at today's marvels of planning. Facebook data centers and Amazon's warehouses, stock market algorithms, drone attacks all striving for perfect alignment between materiality and organizational possibilities. The underlying processes are unseen and abstracted executing under the hood of today's society - far away from public scrutiny or transparency.

Pirates

Now Eriksson points to hackers and pirates to make secondary connections by looking behind the dark infrastructure and enable alternative possibilities. By breaking the untouchable, a new space can is created, disabling the continued control systems of rent. Digital and analog networks, hardware and city structures can be probed, pirated, hacked, and redirected by the peripheral power. These gray zones can be observed in both the analog and digital, in the growth of cities, commercial networks, popular hardware, and software, in real virtual possibilities^[32].

Code as Law

Eriksson then elaborates on Lawrence Lessig’s idea of Code as Law^[33]. The idea is that possible flows are embodied in digital systems and closely connected to performativity and affordance of users. What piracy and hacking then simply offers, is a starting point of resistance to alternate flows of the remote control. To be understood as a form of decolonization where power is retaken, rerouted, and recreated as local powers, formed from the remains of central power using the necessary standard infrastructure. “Piracy is a performative statement of law,” Eriksson says. What defines piracy is a changing matter of ambiguous and ongoing alignments of central powers.^[34] Against the power of law, we have the law of power. Between what is possible and what is legal, there is a virtual^[35] anti-space of power, ruled by pirate norms.

Wizards of the cloud.        

Eriksson next envisions the abstraction between code and law as a spell by the Wizards of power. Software coupled with hardware, the digital/electronic/mechanical forms the TCP/IP stack of remote command and control. The alignment between computer command and analog control creates a temporal space of sovereignty, as long as power can flow without interruption. As power stacks up with time, the cloud can remotely enforce rent and overpriced goods. In the prevailing server-client model of the Internet, sorcerers cast spells and perform actions at remote screens.  In Facebook, Instagram, and Google, we trust. Like in patriarchs before, Fathers, Gods, and Empires, Wizards of the clouds enforce control. Certainly away from us, codes running the machines of the cloud, not only for storage but also, with expanding machine process power amplified remote control. The cloud, another word for remote control, is making the clients thinner and thinner.

Normalcy?

One way to look at the ambiguity of the central order is to recognize that what is considered piracy in one cycle can change into innovation or be a question of survival in the next. We can try to understand the validity of piracy in a state of emergency. Think of what happens in any urban environment when there is a power outage. Everything stops for a while, but instantly, strategies for survival kick in to restore normalcy. Production can resume with diesel generators and with local solar power. Here piracy-like acts can reroute flow through local initiatives, and this is considered the sane thing to do.^[36] In this thought experiment, the unsecured central power is sided with local solutions for continued normalcy. In cities, like Delhi and Lagos, where the central power grid is unreliable and power outages are typical, local backup systems, and illegal rerouting of power can be necessary. With an imperfect central infrastructure, backup system and the pirate solution are vital for the production of normalcy and safety.

The state of emergency

To conclude the argument of normalcy and safety we should turn to another emergency and security definition - the state of emergency that had been enforced by liberal governments after 9/11 by instating the US Patriot Act. Giorgio Agamben has described it as The State of Exception - prolonged in the War on Terror - defining laws without borders^[37].

In the days before the conference, the Snowden documents had been released. They revealed that trusted services such as Facebook had served profile data to NSA and that US had spied on European and UN state officials. It verified what civil right defenders had argued, that the privacy depraving laws working in non-transparent security institutions would lead to unintended measures.

Democracies are ideally defined by the separation of law, capital, and power. The hidden agenda that formed between state (NSA) and capital (Facebook), revealed by the Snowden leaks, was made possible by a centralization and monopolization of network communications. In this light, we could reconsider the position of the state-capital foundation, ownership and control of standard protocols.

In a democratic society, we need the openness of common spaces and virtual possibilities for sovereign agency for creativity to form. I think these spaces form in between and beyond the monopolies of state and capital of surveillance, monitoring and control. In this narrative, hidden power seems to be a sure recipe for corruption of the commons and virtuality in a wider sense. To side state-capital hegemony with self-ruling, hacking, piracy and piracy-like acts becomes a pressing matter.

Eriksson stated that piracy is a performative statement of law. To further understand how we could create democratic agency and individual sovereignty and what we can learn from piracy I quote Agamben:

To live in a state of exception means that to experience both possibilities and separating and dividing each time these two elements, means to attack, to break, to interrupt and arrest the function of the machine that is leading the world to a permanent state of [illegible]. So to exceed it in some way, the law, in its non-relation to life and to exhibit life in its normal relationship to law means to open up between them a space for a human action which we used once, a long time ago, to make politics. Politics has undergone perhaps a lasting eclipse because it has contaminated itself with law. Thus it has conceived itself either as 'pouvoir constituant' (constituted power.. so that it is to say low-posited violence) or, even worse, it has reduced itself to an endless exhibition with law. On the contrary, the truly political is only that action that is able to cut the relationship between violence and law.^[38]

To understand the network agency in the context of a state of exception and capitalism, we can return to Foucault’s discourse of madness. The discussion points in the same direction as Agamben and can help us understand how the path of the pirate is one that creates sovereignty beyond the law. According to Agamben, it is necessary to break the bond between law and state for the political to occur. Here one way to reverse the power of undemocratic institution we have to become pirates - that is how we create a position of sovereignty. Piracy is a quest to find a model of sovereignty. Suggesting ways to find, look for and modify local learning patterns where we can figure out to what extent we should, and can be dependent on the central models of communication and to what extent we can and should build alternative structures of communication. Some questions: Can one find a good middle ground between trust and ruling of remote powers? Can we trust central control with the common stack of communication? Is freedom possible without central control? Can we ensure a safe society where non-transparent protocols, in the hands of powerful governments and enterprises rule our communications?

In the first piracy conference, Piracy Imaginaries, I suggested that practices in relation to such question are a model for a trans-piracy. A feminist learning model is forming from global connections and out of the mist of global patriarchally controlled technology. The following presentation can, in many regards, be seen as a practical implication of such a learning model.

Mapping the Commons

The next presentation was on a collective project “mapping” common urban spaces that Ana Betancourt had initiated and co-organized. Mapping the Commons was mobilized in the protests sparked by conflicts over urban development plan of Istanbul’s Taksim Square.^[39] The conflict peaked on the night of the conference as police evicted Gezi Park on 15 June 2013.

The conflict around Taksim Square started because of reorganization of the square to allow traffic flow. As part of a neoliberal logic of enclosure and privatization, the city planners planned new shopping venues, not recognizing the life already there. The reorganization privatized a public space with symbolical value for many. It seems that city officials were too blind to understand the value and importance of the square as a public space and an informal Commons. Additionally, the process was opaque, symbolized by temporary walls cutting the park off. With the slow progress and insecurity about the schedule for the reopening, frustration grew. The sit-in organized at Taksim Square was evicted by the police on the 1st of June 2013. The eviction led to protests all over Turkey for press freedom, freedom of expression and the right to assembly. Simultaneously an activist camp established in Gezi Park.

As Betancourt says, what should be part of the Commons is a matter of belief, and has been debated and struggled and fought over. It is an important part of what defines our creative possibilities, democratic rights, and sustainability of life.

The smart city

Finding the potential of the more integrated city, Betancourt takes as an example the vision of the smart city (also discussed by Eriksson). Found in the analog-digital integration, where real-time protocols can master the complexity of what before digitization was an uncontrollable level: the real-time of the street. When central control structures realize that the digital is colonizing the analog, a dream of a decentralized control of the smart city emerges. It is services and devices making life more convenient, giving agents new networked possibilities, integrated electronics, and real-time data for new visions of the direction and surveillance of urban living flows. Integrated biopolitical services - smart cities, homes, mind, and bodies.

Urban spaces are the pinnacle of modern planning, sometimes often maintained and developed in an over-confidence in top-down plans manifested in managerial architecture. The smart city is a vision of a deeper control of urban life. It is an attempt to find ways to organize the high-density flow of the urban spaces and streets where top-down planning cannot take root.

The idea of Mapping the Commons can then be understood as a diverted version of the smart city, concentrating on the distributed life already there, the informal life of the streets. Here Mapping the Commons intervenes as a pedagogical project to understand relationships between local resistance, colonization of the commons, self-organization, open streets, city trust, common memories and sharing knowledge. In the context of the conflict of Gezi Park, Mapping the Commons consisted of video documentation and workshops to understand and describe the commonly shared social possibilities beyond state capital enclosures.^[40]

A model of reorganization?

Betancourt mentioned that liberal, fascist and leftist organizations shared Taksim Square while envisioning very different kinds of flow, alignment, and organization. This  "openness" of the public shows how activism and the commons are up for grabs. When an urban space is opened up by occupation and activism, the next stage might see the space closed again by a common lack of solidarity. Following this train of thought, one can ask where to draw the line of enclosure, without destroying the condition of openness and democracy?

Conclusion

The virtual

The virtual can be understood as possibilities, affordance, what can be imagined and realized. I think it is closely connected to the transgressive goals of the pirate. The virtual applies to all of the themes of the conference session; in education, remix culture, and urban reorganization.

Free software has worked well in regulating the enclosures of software development by producing many positive examples. Internet was in many regards an open liberating space of difference. The successful model of openness promised new organizational forms and visions for a less hierarchical organization. While activists turned to the open models for inspiration, there has been a backlash in the possibilities of online communication. State-capital surveillance and centralization of a diversity of services have reduced the capacity for variety in online communication. It has also become apparent how easy it is to pollute and dominate open forums and conversations with sexist and racist opinions. Self-organization in itself lacks the moral and ability to inspire openness in a more ethical sense. Anyone can utilize the Commons for their purpose. When racist and sexist (de)activism has become the new “normal” and when openness is used in the hands of surveillance, we need new thinking: a model that takes care of the risks while not destroying its purpose.

Social movements for freedom, from the uprisings of Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, can open up a temporary space of negotiation for democratic reforms but with time these too seem to fade or even divert into its opposite. While an uprising starts in a symbolic action and results in local strategic lockdowns, there seems to be a lack of resilience. Maybe further investigation to the virtual can answer why it is so hard to sustain democratic uprisings.

Similar conflicts between control and openness are apparent when we attempt to codify education and markets, and when trying to find a more diverse urban commons. The question is: in the process of creating common urban spaces, virtual or knowledge spaces, that are based on difference and equality - what levels of regulation, alignment, and organization are necessary? It all seems to be about organizing knowledge processes between predictability, stereotypes, and the not yet codified, finding security and safety without destroying the sense of the real or equality.

Bernardi pointed to two texts on alternative ways to walk the thin line of structures and organizing freedom: from Michael Hardt’s procedures of love^[41], continued trust and openness to Jo Freeman's tyranny of structurelessness^[42]. It is all about finding structures and anti-patterns of the unforeseeable and the familiar.

In the subject of the virtual and what is possible an interesting subject for further investigation is how to combine inner safety and external security. Political utopias can be formulated with question like: Are there regulatory alternatives? Can the models of resistance scale and still maintain a civic equality and external security? How do we simultaneously keep secure while upholding a safe, non-sexist and non-racist internal organization? How do we find calmness with the external and internal pressure while both being learners and teachers of the rights and means of the commons?

On one hand, a model for the basic needs for external organization and on how to create a foundation for protest, is Vinay Gupta’s model Simple critical infrastructure, that he playfully calls Infrastructure for Anarchists.^[43] Gupta's model explains how to form resilience by avoiding six ways to die during a disaster. The model explains how individuals can keep safe and what is needed in crisis. The infrastructure and security otherwise provided by society has to be self-organized. It is about the fundamental necessity for safety, shelter and supplies to survive and sustain, and can be applied to temporary reorganization needed in an Occupy camp.

On the other hand, a parallel and equally pressing concern is how to self-organize internally in an equal way. The practical tasks generate plenty of creative solutions, but labor also has to be organized, and there has to be a division of tasks, organized by individuals. We need a parallel model for taking care of internal negotiations of equality, let us call it Critical Microstructure for Anarchists. A quote from Christoph Spehr 2003 on Free Cooperation gives some direction:

"First, you have to dismantle the instruments of domination, you have to abandon the idea of using them for better things. Taking over the citadels and then pursuing a better policy - no, you have to bring down these instruments of force, you have to find alternative ways of cooperation and negotiation, alternative rules of the social, which… I use the term of the politics of relationships because it's used in the Italian feminist discussion. You could also say you have to find alternative ways of socializing, you also have to develop new social abilities, which we do not have or which we lose in our social systems because we are not trained in how to negotiate with each other. You also have to develop forms of getting independent and forms of articulation, critical articulation, of reclaiming public space. So if you do this, you will get a kind of matrix and then you will see that the concept of the politics of free cooperation is not something that somebody invents as a blueprint, it's something that's derived from what social movements have been doing in the 20th and 21st centuries."^[44]

Illustration of Vinay Gupta’s model Simple critical infrastructure.

In the call for papers for the conference we write:

“Piracy can be envisioned as a struggle over resources that are located in the borderlands between the public and the private, encouraging us to imagine a new vision of space; a struggle that creates and exploits leakages between enclosed properties and the commons.”^[45]

This struggle implies a fundamental not yet realized redefinition of the relationship between information and technology, and the human endeavor and digital control. Piracy can intervene in the path of technology that creates new control models of our cognitive processes while state-capital seems to be aiming for seamless control between consumers and digital services. The pirate figure works as a reminder of the normative force of late capitalism and harbors a potentiality of rerouting capitalisms universal claim. I hope that some of these open questions can be addressed in the upcoming conference Whitewashing piracy, also organized by the Piracy Cluster.