pavlos hatzopoulos on Wed, 9 Feb 2011 16:14:20 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> A. Galloway - Piracy, control practices, and alternatives of control |
from "Piracy as activism" special issue - http://www.re-public.gr/en/ P.H. - T.P.: With what types of practices would you relate the concept of piracy in networks? Is it problematic, from a critical standpoint, to confine piracy to file-sharing? Alexander Galloway: The pirates are on the rise. With their black markets and black hats, pirates commandeer ships and copy DVDs. They crack software systems and resell them under the counter. At the same time immaterial goods proliferate in file-sharing networks, many thousands labor away on their contributions to open source projects, and millions more labor away in online games. So perhaps to begin one might make a basic distinction between piracy and the kind of collaborative sharing we associate with culture and community. In a strict sense piracy is a form of commerce, illicit to be sure, but commerce nonetheless. Something is stolen and resold via the black market. Pirates are above all businessmen. Contrast this with the anti-market activity of sharing, borrowing, or stealing. The continuum is broad here-for example one is free to endorse sharing while rejecting stealing-yet it is clear that such activities are not black-market activities in any traditional sense. In fact I would guess that very little real piracy takes place in file sharing networks. It's mostly sharing, borrowing or stealing. I include stealing here simply to appease the right. I personally have very little against these kinds of activities and find it difficult to label them "stealing" in any real sense of the word. In fact there are lots of cases in which borrowing or even stealing is justified, particularly in today's economy in which so much of human life is stolen and debased by commercial and state interests. Reverse stealing is often a necessity. In contrast to piracy I have mentioned the communitarian cultures of sharing, borrowing, copying, and openness. It must be stated emphatically, against the hysterical protestations of the business world: sharing and borrowing are as old as culture. From Homer and Virgil to Richard Wagner and Thomas Mann here is no artist who does not borrow and steal. There is no one who does not share language, share the common aspects of life and culture. Private property, particularly intellectual property, is a rather recent invention in human history and a cancerous one. The values we hold dear derive not from commercial hoarding and market-driven necessities but from the communitarian values of sharing and openness. P.H. - T.P.: How do pirate practices relate to the control of digital networks? Are there cases when they can elude control? Alexander Galloway: Networks are always a question of control. This is true for the pirates just as much as it is true for Microsoft. Computers are control technologies, plain and simple. It is tempting to romanticize the pirate or hacker as someone who eludes control. That's simply not the case, except of course in the movies. The only way to elude digital control systems is to be quite militant and not to interface with them at all. Instead we need to think in terms of "alternatives of control" or "control practices." Perhaps the root of the question is really one of power and sovereignty. How is it possible to entrain a given network to do the work of a given sovereign interest? Such questions are crucial for they touch on the relationship between the one and the many, the sovereign and the multitude-always a crucial issue for understanding networks. P.H. - T.P.: Do you see connections between digital piracy and coding practices such as viruses, worms, spam? Alexander Galloway: These are all control practices that rely heavily on vectors of exploitation. Pirates, worms, spam, etc. all take advantage of affordances existing within systems. So they are all phenomena, I would say, which are quite normal and native to massive interconnected systems. They also tend to extend horizontally and leverage the contagious nature of networks in order to propagate far and wide with ease. P.H. - T.P.: How do you assess the increasing policing and criminalisation of digital piracy? Would you say that these measures are part of the paradigm of control or that they fall under disciplinary forms of power? Alexander Galloway: Increased policing and criminalization in recent years is a good indication that the fledgling network sovereigns are finding their wings. They might be nation-states. Or they might be commercial powers. It does not much matter. While protocological control used to be a threat to disciplinary power, jeopardizing the dominance of entrenched power centers, one witnesses today power's newfound familiarity with issues such as horizontality, contagion, and rhizomatics. The old powers are, if you will, putting on the face of control. One would be wise not to speak so much in terms of control "versus" power, but rather the ways in which power interfaces with control, or control with power. One might look at how protocols are used selectively, based on certain circumstances, all the while relying on a backdrop of classical models of power (which is to say, the theory of sovereignty). P.H. - T.P.: It seems that there is a growing awareness among digital pirates that existing internet protocols constrain their activities. How do you see their efforts to construct new alternative protocols, such as a distributed DNS system? Alexander Galloway: Networks have always contained contrasting political diagrams. Some diagrams are more centralized, while others are more distributed. DNS has been a problem for a long time, given its hierarchical nature. But at the same time DNS is becoming more and more irrelevant. When was the last time you typed in a URL? Search has replaced domain names for the most part. Even so I have said for a long time that DNS is irrelevant. Only humans need domain names. They are merely mnemonic conveniences masking IP addresses. Eliminate them and the web will still function fine. The last ten years has seen the rise of platform-specific namespaces (often commercial but not necessarily so) such as those of online game universes, VPNs, semantic namespaces like search engines, Facebook, Bittorent, etc. Domain names don't matter in these worlds. It is the centralized and hierarchical nature of these addressing namespaces that is the issue. So to address your question, yes a robust distributed addressing technology would be valuable. Although in many cases IP addresses work nicely, depending on the technology in question. We often don't give the Internet Protocol (IP) enough credit! It's a fairly radical invention. The protocological developments I'm most curious about are those involving ad hoc networking. This kind of networking has tremendous potential, particularly in it's rejection of the top-down, statist model of the connectivity backbone. We don't need superhighways. But ad hoc networking is still waiting for the "killer app" that will propel it into the public arena. P.H. - T.P.: Is there the potential that piracy can embody a politics of asymmetry? Alexander Galloway: The question of asymmetry is a challenging one when speaking about networks. The reason is that networks are themselves built up through relationships of asymmetry. Networks connect entities which are by definition unequal. (If they were in some sense equal they would not be obligated to "network" but could communicate directly.) So yes, piracy and sharing embody a politics of asymmetry to the extent that they express a unique network formation. But this might not mean much. The more important question is not the existence as such of piracy but the quality of this existence, its ethos. Asymmetry by itself means little. One must investigate the various aspects of asymmetry in order to determine their utility for democracy and the fostering of community and human freedom. P.H. - T.P.: Could you be more specific on these "various aspects of asymmetry"? Do the potentially emancipatory aspects of asymmetry all have to do with the formation of conscious political actors or of social practices that support broader political movements? Or can, in other words, piracy foster community and freedom as an unintended consequence? Alexander Galloway: I speak of aspects as eidos (είδος). One might therefore think in terms of the many aspects of asymmetry, of the many epithets for connectivity. The "temporary autonomous zone," the enclave, the rhizome, the swarm, datamining, outsourcing, the sleeper cell, the digital divide, the global-single event, etc. But one must not fetishize form for its own sake. Asymmetry is not a panacea. There are no guarantees granted by form alone. This is one of the most difficult lessons to learn in one's political education. An attention to context is therefore very important. In this sense, community is never an epiphenomenon. Community is a primary ontological category. We will notice unintended consequences spinning off from it, indeed-happiness, the law, reality. But one must always begin from the law of the common, for example the law of "the inclusion of the excluded." What emerges is called the political. ------------ Alexander Galloway talked via e-mail to Pavlos Hatzopoulos and Thanasis Priftis # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org