Trans-Piracy

• Piracy under western eyes.

Introduction

At the conference Piracy Imaginaries a cluster of people interested in piracy set out to re-imagine the understanding of piracy. At present, the contemporary global practice of piracy forms around material assets and property. From the piracy context, we wanted to form a political lesson by broadening this conception.

In this speculative text, through the presentations of the conference, I will also aim towards a new model that I call “trans-piracy”. In it I attempt to connect two particular agencies: a global feminist based model of learning and the exploration of local possibilities with the hands-on approach of the pirate. Trans-piracy makes an ethical - technical - creative connection and has the potential to form a resistance to patriarchal global state-capitalist institutions. This is the model to which my research aims, as in it I try to understand how new creative agencies such as pirates and hackers try to find a critical position on legal edges of the network society.

The first presentation offers an alternative to the predominant focus on the white, middle class, male pirate agency that seems to gravitate towards a harmonization of patriarchal capitalist logic in different ways. The presented alternative broadens into a global feminist discourse.

The next presentation focuses on urban pirate practices that occur on the edges of cities, and where gray zones and shadow economies form as a consequence. The fragmented character makes these piracy practices minor, still they are constantly up for re-capture and pressure of the global-state-capital. Since these practices are on the edge of the accounted, we need a theory that entails pedagogical imagination to make them more visible. With the aid of the perspective of Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s learning endeavor I try to make a cohesive model of trans-piracy.

Global Piracy

I start by presenting a discussion on global piracy held by Sonja Schillingssand Martin Fredriksson, based on two texts:  Media Piracy in Emerging Economies the anthology^[1] by Joe Karaganis and What is a technological author? The pirate function and intellectual property^[2] by Kavita Philips.

In their presentation, Sonja Schillings and Martin Fredriksson propose a broadening of the discourse around copyright and piracy into a global perspective. As an Anglo-American perspective has been predominant, there is significant potential in re-imagining the pirate. The re-imagination relates to issues of gender, class, and ethnicity.

Failure of affordable access

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies.

The report “is the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico, and Bolivia.”^[3] The primary conclusion of the study is that high prices for media on legal markets can be “conceived as a failure of affordable access.” Piracy disrupts the uneven market equilibrium, by staying ahead with new technologies and creates opportunities in emerging economies by both reducing prices on media and paving the way for innovation in local media services. 

Prior to the study, most piracy research has been funded by the copyright industry and their multinational trade organizations. In the regime of intellectual property enforcement and tactics, there has been an underlying premise of the negative role of piracy. The relevance of this assumption has been hard to verify independently, and the report highlights that it is not possible to make a coherent image of piracy. Instead, the model differs depending on where one looks, which media sector, country, when and over what timeframe. The image also changes with media formats and reactive pirate tactics. The coherence seems to be in the constant renegotiation of parasitic and symbiotic positions between global and local powers.

The takeaway here is that the fixed image of the pirate can be seen as part of a narrative to establish a harmonized Western-centered global power regime. In reality, the extent to which piracy plays a negative role is uncertain. Rather piracy can be seen as a way to find non-fixed possibilities in a gray zone between global and local powers.

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies can be found online at http://piracy.ssrc.org.

The pirate function

What is a technological author? The pirate function and intellectual property^[4] by Kavita Philips.

The text starts by comparing the different views on piracy held by Lawrence Lessig and Lawrence Liang. Lessig seeks harmonization under the copyright law and establishes a liberal discourse around free speech. For Lessig, it is urgent to find ways to recognize the potential of the remix culture and enable the transformative flow of innovation and ideas, all in line with the logic of Creative Commons, founded by Lessig. As we saw in the report Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, staying ahead with new technologies makes bypassing old locked-in mechanisms possible. Liang wants to go further and establish a materialist discourse where piracy can play a part in overcoming global power differences.

Feminist Global

Beyond the male “fair use” white pirate (the remixer) and non-white “evil” pirate (the street vendor), Philips suggests a possible shift towards a formation on the material divide of global capitalist powers to a non-white female pirate, a contemporary pirate Jenny. This focal point became central for our piracy discussion and imaginary as well as in my research. It does not only contradict the view of a predominantly masculine pirate but also suggests a connection between the pirate agency and a global feminist discourse.^[5] 

This cover of Wired from February 2004 is one of the illustrations in Philips text.

Under Western eyes - trans-piracy

I will now take Philips’ shift even further and unfold the discursive dilemma that forms between the global feminist approach and piracy. To do this I add the perspective of Chandra Talpade Mohanty and her text Under Western eyes^[6]. The goal is to focus the idea of piracy into a learning endeavor of the unaccounted, unrecognized, and unseen. The reason that I choose Mohanty’s work is that it addresses the main topics of the conference; 1. the global intellectual property regime, 2. a postcolonial discourse, 3. locally organized resistance and 4. a global to local learning model. Thus, Mohanty's work makes a cohesive foundation for the model for networked creativity I am pursuing. In the context of network technology, Mohanty’s pedagogical vision could grow to become a radical pedagogy of global solidarity, aimed at revealing the hidden powers of discourse patterns as well as technology enclosures. One of the key issues in this discussion is how the material conditions and symbolic work together with the imaginary to create the image of the pirate.

Shadow Economies

The word pirate in meanings like pirate copying, pirate radio and pirate ships forms a global associative connection between the historic maritime Caribbean pirate and contemporary digital piracy. As Sonja Schillings said, one way to connect these various types of piracies is to regard them as shadow economies. Piracy forms as an informal economy that can work under the radar of the colonial powers and utilizes the local possibilities created by the high threshold of the royal rent seeking systems. Wherever rental zones are in effect, an anti-space is formed on the edge, from where the totalizing strength of the dominion starts fading. Here, away from the imperial sovereignty a creative space unfixed gray zone is created on the edge of the legal possibilities.

We are dealing with visual metaphors that are aimed at trying to understand both the real nature of the marginal and the voices of the subaltern^[7]. With this visual metaphor of pirates working in shadows and gray zones, we can try to grasp the discursive impact of the unseen central to the marginal. As Jacques Rancière says in the Politics of Aesthetics:

Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.^[8]

It is a fundamental question of discourse - what we see and make visible - which voices are allowed and who is speaking. To have something to work with on this edge we need to work with two types of reality checks: both a critical perspective that can reveal discursively hidden patterns and an exploratory force that can create new spaces.

The postcolonial is a method to see patterns where colonialism continues and consciously corrodes the world, and is an ongoing history. With that vision we can see intellectual property as a weapon in the hand of colonization, the white, inventor-explorer, the originator, the imperial cultivator is cutting off the history to unknown worlds by mapping it with new measurements and standards and reinventing it as property.

Mohanty writes about the expanding intellectual property and takes bioprospecting (a form of ongoing global piracy) as an example. It is part of a regime of global capital that is privatizing and colonizing Third World women’s lives and reduces the ecology of common knowledge. In the text, Mohanty quotes the feminist scientist Vandana Shiva

“Through patenting, indigenous knowledge is being pirated in the name of protecting knowledge and preventing piracy. The knowledge of our ancestors, of our peasants about seeds is being claimed as an invention of U.S. corporations and U.S. scientists and patented by them. The only reason something like that can work is because underlying it all is a racist framework that says the knowledge of the Third World and the knowledge of people of color is not knowledge. When that knowledge is taken by white men who have capital, suddenly creativity begins.... Patents are play of colonialism, which is now called globalization and free trade.”^[9]

Detail of Book Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity.

The secluded backyards of postcolonial capitalism are where the non-white woman is the most exploited and situated furthest away from the wealth of global capital. The obscured and hidden can gradually become more visible with the global feminist process presented by Mohanty. Instead of centering on liberal western rhetorics, (like Lessig) where central organization tries to form a coherent image of capitalist modernity, we are focusing on local material appropriation and organization. Mohanty’s global feminist perspective connects local struggle and survival to the cracking image of modernity. Mohanty points to the place-based local organization to become a force against the local domination of global capitalism. As Mohanty references Grace Lee Boggs that suggests:

“place consciousness . . . encourages us to come together around common, local experiences and organize around our hopes for the future of our communities and cities. While global capitalism doesn’t give a damn about the people or the natural environment of any particular place because it can always move on to other people and other places, place-based civic activism is concerned about the health and safety of people and places”^[10]

Now with the other presentations we can deepen the central connection between local creativity and place and learning, from the piracy point of view. It is about how piracy and hacking practice can form knowledge models and survival strategies in the midst of the cracks of the everyday of modernity. Take the feminist pedagogical perspective that Mohanty’s suggests, and add to it piracy and hacking as a method. Additionally, we find a way to discuss the fragmented voice of subaltern.

Piracy out-of-the-mist

Piracy as a learning, hacking practice played a significant role in Geraldine Juárez’s and Magnus Eriksson’s session on Urban Piracy, Piracy, and Place, as well as in Donatella Bernardi’s and my session on Education and Piracy^[11]. Piracy and hacking, in this sense, means exploring legal and material gray zones by testing, prototyping, and probing. The Greek origins of piracy in the concept of "Peria" means "a trial, experience, attempt" or "learn to know by experience". This original meaning of piracy connects the material everyday with knowledge ventures into the uncertain - into the local terra incognita.

Urban Piracy

The book Pirate Modernity^[12] by Ravi Sundaram was the starting point for Geraldine Juárez and Magnus Eriksson's presentation. In the book, Sundaram analyzes Delhi’s massive urban expansion from the 1950s and how top-down modernity is manifested from above in series of city planning projects. The modernization of the city is accompanied by a media image, a kind of propaganda model trying to persuade all citizens of the benefits of the structures and standards of a top down modern identity. The image of control becomes increasingly fragmented at the edge of the city. Meanwhile it is at this expanding edge, where urban management fades and become unstable, that a Pirate Modernity takes place. Unauthorized neighborhoods, squatter camps and piracy markets create an opportunity for the subaltern to enter the legal city by bypassing legal, technological infrastructures of media and electricity.

Detail of the book Pirate Modernity by Ravi Sundaram

Pointing at this transformative edge, Juárez and Eriksson connect piracy and place/locality through hacking; in this case material interventions break with, rather than follow, dominating institutional arrangements and communication channels. Through hacking and tinkering, the pirate agency is created - ventures into material knowledge processes result in a continuous accumulation of understanding. It forms an ability to navigate the materiality of infrastructural and cultural assets. Piracy operates by highlighting and exploring the processes behind the black boxes of the plug and play technology that "just works". Moreover, piracy also points towards other socio-technical arrangements that are removed from the path of the top-down modernity.

It connects creativity and survival strategies and everyday life on the street with globally defined economic power structures. It shows how the local place and environment must be bent to produce knowledge and possibilities for survival. In addition, how knowledge, pedagogy, and skills can form a significant source of autonomy for the agents on the edge of modernity.

In Media res

The pirate agency makes it more possible to find ways to survive at the edge of colonized territories. However, can it form a narrative? In the book, Sundaram writes about the instability and contradiction of piracy modernity and how because of that it does not fit a counter-narrative.

Pirate modernity has no clear representative language, but a series of mutating situations. It emerged as a pragmatic appropriation of the city, perhaps more in media res than "marginal." Pirate modernity does not easily fit classic representations of the political, the resistant, the tactical, the marginal, the multitude or the "movement." (Sundaram 2009:16)

The piracy modernity is at the edge but does not form a coherent “marginal”. It regenerates at the heart of technological, disruptive change, in media res^[13] (Latin "in the midst of things") but forms no apparent narrative. Therefore, Juárez and Eriksson described the pirate as a somewhat tragic figure, in a recursive U-turn away from the modern and stuck in a fail-reconfiguration loop - a contemporary clown? This U-topia might well have truth to it and can in its fragmented style be a vital way to work against the promise of the image of upward mobility^[14] and the constant failure of top-down modernity. However, it might also be possible to find something more solid as we continue to explore the fragmented. The question is if the performativity connected to information technology and real-time struggle of the everyday can construct a counter narrative.

Minor practices

To understand the fragmented everyday, Juárez and Eriksson also stresses Michel De Certeau’s idea of minor practices. As De Certeau writes:

A society is . . . composed of certain foregrounded practices organizing its normative institutions id of innumerable other practices that remain "minor," always there but not organizing discourses and preserving the beginnings or remains of different (institutional scientific) hypotheses for that society or for others.^[15] 

However, as the pirate modernity forms a piracy for survival it presents a self-organized anti-image to the failing edges of the top-down modernity. As hacking practices, piracy is vital and unclear in its emerging nature. The starting point in an uncertainty of possible connections is just that, a starting point for the learning venture and a radical praxis of sharing. Even if pirate modernity is fragmented, informal, and evasive, its massive scale is sublime. Its multiple forms point to numerous strategies and tactics on how to organize and sustain resistance in media res. The trans in trans-piracy in this context is a process of filling in the gaps by hacking, creating a bricolage of residue, reassembling the remaining material at the excluded edges.

Here piracy and hacking make up the norms of creativity that establish how far the transgressive nature of technological creativity should be able to go. To use the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari from Mille Plateaus - piracy and hacking offer a way to bridge over the striated (discontinued) global territory to establish a smoother local space. It is a reutilization of resources to create movement. The process of piracy and hacking creates a new flow in a field of other possibilities and, as an existential definition of creativity to create alternative movement in between the possibilities offered by top-down modernity.

Foregrounded practice

While we look at the male pirate street vendor, we may not recognize a global struggle but what is in the foreground is undoubtedly a life on the edge for survival rather than the global-state-capital-narrative. Here the top-down modernity and its structural state-capital fails and forms a global edge and habitat. The outside of top-down modernity manifests as shadow economies. The invisible can never create a cohesive image but in itself makes up a body of resistance.

Here, we need to continue to learn from critical feminist eyes; we want to grasp these edges to make the systematic exploitation tangible. In some way, we need to accept the challenge in this narrative of the fragmented to be able to see it. To further point to the unfixed gray zones as a vital point of departure to create a commons image of exploitation, we can point to a particular feminist critique of Jürgen Habermas thinking. This summary is from the book Feminists Read Habermas:

 “Jean Cohen finds Habermas's political theory enormously important as well, and is particularly interested in his analysis of contemporary social movements, though like Fraser, she argues that Habermas's analysis suffers from a gender blindness that fails to differentiate the social and political status of men and women. This leads to a failure to appreciate a certain fluidity between the public and the private spheres, which in turn leads to his dismissal of many contemporary social movements as particularistic.

Cohen argues that Habermas's characterization of most contemporary social movements (including feminism in some of its moments) as purely defensive and particularistic responses to the encroachments of the market, media and power, and thus as not furthering the universalistic emancipatory goals of modernity...” (Feminists Read Habermas, 1995:8)

This approach can inspire our understanding of the fragmented edges, to form a feminist plan, a program, and a model^[16]. To use the pedagogical global feminist perspective could be a way to get to know the fragmented and make sense of local struggles at the same time. To create a vision of the emerging movement we use a global feminist puzzle-piece that can inform the fragmented. In my vision, Mohanty’s perspective extends radical educational praxis to teach a discursive hacking and piracy practice. The imaginary piracy aims beyond white pirate towards a global feminist pedagogical hacker-pirate practice, expanding the commons and bypassing or deconstructing the top-down modernity. The connection between global feminism and piracy would seek to capture the real time processes of control. It would form a commons in opposition to the enclosing control of privatizations conducted by states and multinational companies. Trans-piracy sets off a reorganization outside top-down modernity and its coherent narrative of property rights. With global feminism, we can see piracy, both as movements on the edge of the fading and failing modernity, and recognize the knowledge reproduction that exists on this side of top-down modernity.

The learning model

Mohanty suggests three educational models or curricular strategies on how to approach and understand the other. I find Mohanty’s example called “The feminist solidarity or comparative feminist studies model” the most inspiring for the piracy context. Mohanty explains:

This curricular strategy is based on the premise that the local and the global are not defined in terms of physical geography or territory but exist simultaneously and constitute each other. It is then the links, the relationships, between the local and the global that are foregrounded, and these links are conceptual, material, temporal, contextual, and so on. This framework assumes a comparative focus and analysis of the directionality of power no matter what the subject of the women’s studies course is—and it assumes both distance and proximity (specific/universal) as its analytic strategy.^[17]

The globalized everyday is based on constant connection that could form a feminist global experience. However, trade routes do not come with accountability or communication channels of coherent collective knowledge projects or history. The local experience of the repressive regimes of capitalism and its control mechanisms forms a common experience from Cairo to New York, from Ferguson to Palestine, from New Delhi to Chiapas. In Phillips Pirate Jenny there is a potential for redirecting the organization of global capitalism. With Mohanty's pedagogical perspective added to this, the piracy imaginary leads to an extended pedagogical hacking practice. It would form a model and tools for survival that continually uncover the black box of global production. The model is a way to take control of real-time survival, in media res. It is a pedagogical pirate project of leakage, alternative memory, mutations, and solidarity.

Piracy as radical pedagogies of solidarity.

Such a pedagogical vision of hacking and piracy was also the theme of Donatella Bernardi’s and my presentation that evolved around knowledge processes of appropriation and mutations.^[18] In our presentation, we point to how Silvia Federici points to a potential of a greater commons forming from “many proliferating commons” . Federici refers to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt:

...the theory proposed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and recently Commonwealth (2009), which argues that a society built on the principle of “the common” is already evolving from the informatization and “cognitivization” of production. According to this theory, as production presumably becomes production of knowledge, culture, and subjectivity, organized through the internet, a common space and common wealth are created that escape the problem of defining rules of inclusion or exclusion. For access and use multiply the resources available on the net, rather than subtracting from them, thus signifying the possibility of a society built on abundance – the only remaining hurdle confronting the “multitude” being how to prevent the capitalist “capture” of the wealth produced.^[19]

The constant recapture

Such a consistent capitalist “capture” of the commons that Federici talks about was the topic of Rasmus Fleischer summary of the presentations. The principle of computer design and Internet protocols was from the beginning part of forming a new commons of technological openness. This commons has the constant potential to change the world, but there are ongoing media backlashes. Some pirate politics form as an answer to privatization strategies to rollback disruptive openness of gray zones.

Gray zone between Private and Public

Fleischer spoke about how the commons can form beyond the public and the private dichotomy. Copyright law is fundamentally dependent on this distinction and divides (between) the private and the public, as Fleischer says. That goes on throughout the whole history of copyright; private copying is an unregulated sphere while public distribution and public performance are part of the copyright. The question then is how we can draw the line between the private and public and if it is at all possible to establish a relevant separation between them. The border between the private and the public breaks and something else is revealed in the unsettled, uncertain terra incognita.  

Ideas of Free

As Fleischer said, a politics of piracy must go beyond the preservation of the commons and be active in making of the commons. Moreover, to talk about Commons can have quite an ambiguous effect. He continues, the air is free and part of the commons but while we start to talk about the air as commons, it is as its freedom is under attack. By talking about freedom without specifying or understanding the condition of sharing, we can quickly slip into a liberal logic of enclosure and colonization. For instance, by saying that we wanted music for free, we accepted that it should have a price tag^[20]. Even though the air is free, the commons cannot be reduced to a mass consumption attitude of having access to media. For us piracy was never only about the files - it was about sharing, learning, self-organization, and social change. As the Commons provide a context for further mutations the commons, also mean not restricting the protocols of how the community shares.

Counter-revolution of the cloud

If piracy is reduced to a discourse of downloading - pirates are just people that want media for free. Consequently, as the matter is made private, semi-free music services like Spotify are offered as a solution. As Fleischer said, this has in the last years formed as a counter-revolution of the cloud where consumers trade control to free access. As an answer to a consumerist need of access, the control of interactions and mutations has been handed over to a few large companies. If one saw piracy as a process of communities and variations, one would understand these free services as an enclosure and as a counter-revolution and re-colonization of the expanding and mutating commons. ^[21] 

Kopimi

Fleischer then talks about how we in the Piracy Bureau tried to cultivate a pro-piracy politics as we wanted to go beyond the consumerist attitude in the affirmation of the Commons. The concept of Kopimi came about as we were rethinking piracy. Kopimi points to the processes of differences that copying produce there. The many contexts in which copies turn up, a selective process that creates something new in the community where one shares data. It was not about maximizing access but building tools and contexts for sharing. The access was a starting point and not the end; access already existed as a Commons, both concrete tools, and communal-personal experience.

One of the many variations of the Kopimi symbol.  

Pirate media and social media

In this context, Fleischer suggests a categorization of pirate media and social media. Social media is colonizing media; centralized, commodifying, corporate, standardized while pirate media is decentralized and distributed, antagonistic and subversive. When files and copying are disconnected from the community and controlled by a few large companies, we get social media. Social media does not allow for community modification since corporations control the server and registers all the interactions, decide the terms and privatize the information. In this case, Pirate media means a constant renegotiation of terms of use and modification of interpretation of private and public.  

Losing access and orientation

“Social media” is a counter-colonization of the cloud, Fleischer say. Is it a way for state capitalist power to regain the control of how we share. The new control of access and storage displace the power of the community by managing links and the mutations. It leads to a displacement of memory and history. The remote protocols of access to the files also generate a void and uncertainty, where to go next and creates a lack of agency. It creates alienation - anxiety to stare into the empty search box, as Fleischer continues. It is not a longshot to start paying subscription fees to media services and now the abuser becomes the savior that can help organize network thinking and experience.

Trans-piracy can uncover the black box of elite modernity and reveal the global power regimes of states and multinational corporations in their quests for continued enclosures of the commons. It becomes relevant to think of contemporary piracies as local reactions to global change and as a product of an ongoing colonial history. In line with the discussion in the previous article on Patrick Burkart's recent work, a trans-piracy can be a way to halt the colonization of Lifeworlds and stop both discursive and material enclosures.

Beyond the city

This shift may make us see the backdrop of why piracy is important and why it forms at the heart of patriarchal capitalist modernity and property.

Fleischer also noted that a broadening of urban piracy could go on to broaden piracy further in spatial terms. Then we could see both squatting house and occupation of city squares and migration and illegally crossing borders as distinct forms of practices that are piratical. Also, Mohanty says we should address these diverse forms of resistance and survival forms as a global anti-thesis to patriarchal capitalist industrial complex found in privatizing of prisons^[22], border control, and intellectual property enforcement.^[23] 

Final discussion

One way to think pirate politics is to question the divide as open-ended discursive and technical edge down-down modernity and capitalism. The final open discussion is focused on the constant negotiations of shadow economies and these gray zones. Moreover, cases for the emerging, the excluded, the unregulated, under commercial scale, the temporal, and the minor as an establishment of these borders. The group talked about the media res as the real-time of digital media and how internet services and digital technology as surveillance become material conditions. Then piracy is in the media res can be seen as a way to contest the real-time control of States and global capital that otherwise lacks a political forum. To form agency in the technological everyday or the media res is a way to be able to control mutations and different forms, to intervene between the private and public where a global feminist perspective is a key. A pirate is someone who does not accept the separation of the public and private a modernity from above, but the quest for alternative possible that the unsettled media res offers a solution.

Conclusion

The global perspective proposed by Schillings and Fredriksson aimed at broadening the intellectual property discourse with perspectives of gender, class, and ethnicity. Juarez and Ericsson explored how a pirate modernity, shadow economies, the media res forms an edge of top-down modernity is for part global capital logic. Piracy is a constant mutation on the edge and forms a vital zone for survival between local and global powers. Taking/At this mutating edge, I imagine how a trans-piracy could form feminist activist hacker pirate pedagogy as a model to constantly uncover the enclosed systems of global capital as something both discursive and material. It is a process that aims at opening up a broader Commons in a collective knowledge processes. The intersectional knowledge process of perspective, gender, class, and ethnicity would not have been possible without understanding the feminist pedagogical shift offered by Mohanty and Philips, to make something coherent from the fragmented media res. To understand knowledge as a vision to give power to those who are furthest away from global capital is something that can become less abstract with pirate and hacker pedagogy as it forms a starting point of exploration. It is an exploration of the socio-technical condition on the edge of fading and failing top-down modernity. As Mohanty ends, “So the borders here are not fixed. Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations.”^[24] With the group, we decided to continue to work in different projects and one of them was to make a collaborative course proposal (Learning for piracy) where we could continue the investigation of these moving borders of the contemporary.