The following research explores relations between academic publishing, media piracy, its criminalisation, and mental health conditions through the work syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care (2019-2020) and the closely related shadow library Memory of the World (20XX-ongoing), and intersections with activism, technology, pedagogy, and notions of care. Initiated in 2019 by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak, syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care serves as a transnational research project engaging activists, academics, and artists concerned with the crisis of care in neoliberal economic systems. The online syllabus gathers and presents knowledge from a network of activists, hackers, and researchers who work to build common systems of care for people (Mars 2015). It delves into questions of open access, education, healthcare, and housing, highlighting the loss of rights to these services and the criminalisation of those who oppose the decay of once socially democratic basic values. syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care presents civic and artistic projects and activist practices such as “Sea Rescue as Care,” “Transhackfeminism,” Soprasotto, a communing and collectivising childcare initiative in Milan, and many more. While I deeply appreciate each single project and theme and the bringing together as a collective and political moment, I would like to focus on the “Politicising Piracy” section, which understands “cultural piracy as form of politics”. The author of the book Piracy. The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, Adrian Johns writes that piracy today goes beyond intellectual property theft, affecting core aspects of modern culture, science, technology, authorship, policing, politics, and the very foundations of economic and social order. “That is why the topic of piracy causes the anxiety that it so evidently does” (Johns 2009). On both ends, for the attacker and the attacked. The title of this text is borrowed from the song The Looming Cloud by Naarm-based singer-songwriter Louise Sol and parts of it go as follows:
Depressiooooooon, depressioooooon
Copyright and piracy, crippling anxiety, outcast from society, battle with sobriety, everybody’s lying to me, mum and dad are tired of me, f**k, the cat just died…
Depressiooooooon, depressioooooon
Sorry mum and dad I didn’t do things with my ATAR,
Couldn’t be f***ed doing law so thought “plan B, might do it later”
Why have a house and car and strive for perfection?
When I could deal with shame, poverty, loss of respect and dignity, no more original content, arguments with Centrelink, copyright infringement, unconstructive criticism, selfish record labels, incredible unpayable HECS debt, undeniable regret and the ever-present, looming cloud of depression
Ohhhhh
This presentation was authorised by struggling musicians everywhere. All proceeds go to the record label not the songwriter. You wouldn’t steal a movie. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. So why steal a song? Piracy is a crime, TM
Regardless the claims of being an outsider of society and that piracy is a crime, two paradoxes become apparent here, first: “The pirates, in all too many cases, are not alienated proles. Nor do they represent some comfortingly distinct outside. They are us” (Johns 2009). Drawing on the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari on capitalism and schizophrenia, Mars and Medak argue we are living through the metaphor of schizophrenia in the age of discrete and digital reproduction. They argue that “in the present, the legal system only reproduces the schizoid impasse, where the metaphor of property over land is applied to works of intellect that have practical become universally accessible in the digital world.” Courts, they say, constrained by viewing intellectual property through a property lens, have failed to reconcile the conflict between access to knowledge and fair compensation for intellectual labour. Instead, they predominantly support the commercial interests of major copyright industries, deepening the societal tension (Mars and Medak 2019). The authors refer to the commodification in the circuits of academic publishing.
It is precisely in this aspect that I see a strong connection, on the one hand, to this year’s transmediale festival theme of “how logics of content production determine and frustrate our relations to technology,” but also to the “content/form” workshop, in the context of which this research is being developed and presented, which call for exploring limitations on political possibilities and collective action, and urges consideration of alternatives, especially for research practices and its tool itself. While “content/form” asks what alternatives to the narrowing of the space of political possibility we can imagine, including for research itself, I want to present syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care and the shadows library Memory of the World as examples that serve as ways out of the metaphor of schizophrenia and anxiety or at least to make these states less harmful. I intend to highlight the deliberative, empowering aspects of these projects as examples of radical pedagogy, inclusive didactics, self-governance, and alternative curricula and what Medak, with reference to his colleague XY, calls “skilling latterly”. The syllabus itself lives on an online publishing platform developed in-house by Marcell Mars. Sandpoints, which allows collaborative writing, remixing, and maintaining of a catalogue of learning resources aims to activating collective learning from the network’s practices (we will look at these mechanisms and examples in detail during the workshop).
And yet, this does not detract from the fact that we are dealing with Minor Tech and the fact that the two projects act somehow outside a mainstream system. The questions remain how these mechanisms simmer down into everyday live? Also, those who use civil disobedience tactics are more exposed to mental stress than others, precisely because they operate in a system that they perceive as unjust. The balance of power between state and judicial authority is disproportionate to the individual who acts upon it. The words of Aaron Schwarz’s Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto sadly resonate: “There is no justice in following unjust laws” (Schwarz 2008). It is precisely for this reason that I would like to add to the text the ideas and practices of collective action, as advocated by The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest and focus on legal and instituting alternatives rather than resorting to piracy (I don’t want to claim that TITIPT would discard piracy). In their 2022 publication Infrastructural Interactions: Survival, Resistance and Radical Care, TITIPT explores how Big Tech cloud services are financially and mentally impacting institutions and communities. “We need to look at how Big Tech cloud services are financialising literally everything on a rentable model, thereby indebting institutions, communities, and individuals to their values and services” (TITIPT 2022). The publication discusses the impacts and the need for collective responses and demands public data infrastructures that serve the public interest, drawing attention on feminist and decolonial efforts. Big Tech, they argue, continues to intervene in the public realm, bringing together various services, and is largely responsible for how the computational infrastructure shapes public institutions, therefor TITIPT question is: „How can we attend tot o these shifts collectively in order to demand public data infrastructures that can act in the „public interest? An how can we institute this?“
To conclude this first outline for now, during the workshop and prior I would like to look at how piracy as a form of activism, especially in relation to academic and scientific publishing, as well TITIPT’ activities around copyleft publishing and reflexive methodologies and workshops on dealing with questions of how to achieve more just infrastructures for education and publishing may continue to have an impact on Big Tech and governance in the long term and how they serve to continue to overcome “unusable politics”.
Works cited:
Adrian Johns. Piracy. The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago 2009.
Marcell Mars. “Public Library/Memory of the World. Access to knowledge for every member of society“. 32C3, CCC congress 2015. https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7279-public_library_memory_of_the_world
Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak. “System of a Takedown: Control and De-commodification in the Circuits of Academic Publishing,” in: Andrew Lison, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak et all. (eds.). Archives. Lüneburg: meson press 2019, p. 47– 68. https://mediarep.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/4a989279-9d37-4ca9-b0ad-9f55f40971aa/content
Aaron Swartz. “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto”. July 2008. https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto
The Institute for Technology In the Public Interest, Helen V Pritchard and Femke Snelting (eds.). Infrastructural Interactions: Survival, Resistance and Radical Care, Brussels 2022. http://titipi.org/pub/Infrastructural_Interactions.pdf
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