Piracy is Normal, Piracy is Boring

What is often called ‘digital piracy’ is nowadays a mundane and everyday activity. As such, piracy is a commonplace disorder within the order of information capitalism; it is both created by the ubiquitous orders of information capitalism and suppressed by those orders. In the myriad points of view of its participants piracy represents an order which is implicit within contemporary life, which we will call ‘pirarchy’.

The attached chapter entitled ‘Piracy is Normal, Piracy is Boring: systemic disruption as everyday life’ by Francesca da Rimini and Jonathan Marshall was written for the book Piracy: Leakages from Modernity edited by Martin Fredriksson and James Arvanitakis (Litwin Press, USA, forthcoming 2012, http://litwinbooks.com/piracy.php).

From the Introduction
What is often called ‘digital piracy’ is nowadays a mundane and everyday activity. Peukert (2010, p.6) points out that millions of ordinary “good” people who would never steal a book, a CD or a DVD routinely “continue uploading and downloading”. Digital sharing “is an everyday practice by millions of people, and in that sense normal” (p.15). As such, piracy is a commonplace disorder within the order of information capitalism; it is both created by the ubiquitous orders of information capitalism and suppressed by those orders. In the myriad points of view of its participants piracy represents an order which is implicit within contemporary life, which we will call ‘pirarchy’.

For non-corporate producers it constitutes a way of distributing their work which threatens their ability to survive off that work, while potentially opening previously unavailable possibilities of acquiring income or status from their products or expertise. Many corporations see it simply as a disorder which threatens their future. We assert that pirarchy is a non-resolvable part of what we have elsewhere called the ‘information mess’ (Marshall, Goodman, Zhowghi, & da Rimini, Disinformation Society: the dynamics of networks and software , Routledge, New York, forthcoming).

There has been little interest in the ways that pirarchy derives from and becomes embedded in everyday social and informational life. This neglect may arise because of the illusion of privacy afforded by the software enabling pirarchy, because the drama of landmark legal cases eclipses ‘daily life’, because prospects of prosecution makes practitioners reluctant to share information with researchers, or finally because most theory assumes that important networks are robust while pirarchy is overtly unstable and uncertain. We attempt to describe some social characteristics of pirarchy, through consideration of the literature and news-stories about piracy, but mainly through interviews with self-identified file-sharers.

To read the entire paper download the attached PDF below.