Introduction
While the transmediale festival theme 2024 asks of “how logics of content production determine and frustrate our relations to technology,” (transmediale 2024) the research workshop “content/form” calls for exploring limitations on political possibilities and collective action, and urges consideration of alternatives, especially for research practices and its tools itself (APRJA 2023). It is in this context that the following research explores the work syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care (2019-2020), focussing on the liberating and deliberating politics of media piracy and “independent” publishing infrastructures, while spotlighting similar projects.
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 and the criminalization of solidarity in neoliberal economic systems. The syllabus itself lives on an independent online publishing platform developed in-house by Marcell Mars. Sandpoints–which will be looked at later in detail–, allows collaborative writing, remixing, and maintaining of a catalogue of learning resources aims to activating collective learning from the network’s practices. 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. In addition the syllabus is linked to a literature repository on the shadow library Memory of the Word/Public Library, set up by Mars and Medak in 2012. syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care presents civic and artistic projects and activist practices such as “Sea Rescue as Care,” “Transhackfeminism,” or Soprasotto, a communing and collectivising childcare initiative in Milan, to name a few. 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” (Pirate Care 2019).
Using the project as model for commoning knowledge in the form of a technical informed care infrastructure, syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care not only enables its users to engage with the syllabus as a curriculum but to build similar infrastructures and maintain them. In the following, I will argue that the arrangement of this specific form(s) of ‘pirate care’–an open syllabus, connected to a shadow library, both built by free software that can be accessed via a git hub repository, together with the call for collective action–, produce and distribute activities and content that can be linked back to the specific form of solidarity and (hacker) ethics the project engages with. syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care offers a reassessment to the inherit violent dynamics of the realities of the publishing economy and its imperialistic logic of structural discrimination by distributing knowledge unequally. In the context of similar independent publishing infrastructures developed in recent years such as ServPub (20XX-ongoing), and others, the text aims to ask about the specific materialities, environments, politics, and pedagogies of syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care. Albeit syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care can be seen more as thematically framed project rather than an ongoing platform with loose ends, some aspects of the work offer similarities to the specifics of independent syllabi that have been around since the 2000s such as Monoskop (since 2004) or Aaaaarg (since 2005). Especially regarding the questions of political writing and political publishing syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care situates itself in the political tradition of radical publishing within a new media environment. Nicholas Thourbon, who has himself engaged in radical publishing[1], writes in a conversation with other colleagues from the field: “Political writing published more or less independently of corporate media institutions has been a central aspect of the history of radical cultures” (Thoburn 2013, p. 160). The author of the book Piracy. The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, Adrian Johns, writes that information has become a key commodity in the globalized economy and 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, p. 26). 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
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 (Sol 2019)
Regardless the claims of being an outsider of society and that piracy is a crime (though it is unclear if the everyday user or the big record label is the pirate here), 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, p. 27). Drawing on the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Mars and Medak say 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” (Mars and Medak 2019, p. 49). Courts, they continue, 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, further deepening the societal tension through the commodification in the circuits of academic publishing in the age of digital reproduction (Mars and Medak 2019). In the second part of this text, in contrast to Mars and Medak and following a close reading of Deleuze and Guattari I intend to argue that schizophrenia as a process (not as a disease) offers a potential non-reductiveness and inclusive didactics and that carrying out ‘pirate care’––such as media piracy, sea rescue, Doctors Without Borders treating asylum seekers in the UK–– although criminalized by law, can be read as a “schizoanalytic approach,” that serves to begin a “healing process” (Seem, 1983, xxii). The third part aims to exploring the relation between the pedagogies of the thinkers Paulo Freire and bell hooks (teaching community) in the context of Pirate Care.
Can ‘pirate care’ challenge the “unusable politics” (trandmediale 2024) and the “unjust laws” (Schwartz 2018) that remain intact? Does media piracy and independent publishing infrastructures as a form of activism and radical pedagogies especially in relation to academic and scientific publishing continue to have an impact on governance in the long term and might they even serve as political and pedagogical models worth to institute (TITIPI 2022)?[2]
(1) syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care, Sandpoints, and Memory of the World
explaining syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care in terms of materialities, environments, technique, and structure
(2) Pirate Care and anti-Oedipal politics!
exploring the relationship between the theories of Gilles Deuleuze and Félix Guattari (see anti-Oedipal politics) in the context of Pirate Care, and disobedience, theory as a toolbox , tools for conviviality (to cuunterfool research) (Seem, 1983, xxii)
(3) Pirate Care as Commons and Radical Pedagogy
exploring the relation between the theories of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Heart) and bell hooks (Teaching Community) in the context of the applications and commoning tools presented via Pirate Care.
Works cited:
“Call for Participation: Research Workshop 2024, “content/form”,” A Peer Reviewed Journal About (APRJA), accessed: January 23, 2024, https://aprja.net/announcement/view/1131
Jodi Dean, Sean Dockray, Alessandro Ludovico, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Nicholas Thoburn, and Dimitry Vilensky. “Materialities of Independent Publishing: A Conversation with AAAAARG, Chto Delat?, I Cite, Mute, and Neural”. New Formations, 78 (2013), p. 157 – 158.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis 1983.
Adrian Johns. Piracy. The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. University of Chicago Press: 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
Louise Sol, “The Looming Cloud,” 2019, bandcamp, accessed January 23, 2024, https://louisesol.bandcamp.com/track/the-looming-cloud
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
“you’re doing amazing sweetie,“ transmediale festival 2024, accessed: January 23, 2024, https://transmediale.de/en/2024/sweetie
Footnotes:
[1] Nicholas Thourbon is author of Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing, 2016
[2] In their 2022 publication Infrastructural Interactions: Survival, Resistance and Radical Care, The Institute for Technology In the Public Interest explores how Big Tech cloud services are financially and mentally impacting institutions and communities, and continue to intervene in the public realm. They ask: „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?“