Peripathetic, p.6
Peripathetic, page 6
I was crowing something about the wide variety of Winamp skins; all that range seemed useless to me in a world of only Kazaa, where the number of seeders was dwindling, likely due to creators’ attempts at converting users into paying customers. Napster had been forced to shut down four years prior. Left in its wake was a growing worry that the file-sharing application was irreplaceable. The first thing I decide to download on Limewire is the song ‘Freak on a Leash’ by Korn. I’d recently discovered music that wasn’t readily heard on the radio airwaves – what a few regulars had started to refer to as ‘noisy’ music.
On the cybercafe’s public network, speed tests run high and stay consistent. Under the weight of the 50-odd Alienware PCs all possibly running at the same time, the broadband connection serves to undergird the grid. If a connection drops out, it’s immediately audible in the form of a curse. Lives are at stake. It helps that we’re in Singapore, a country which has literally won the global internet speed race. The nation-state also holds the rank for hosting the world’s largest game of musical chairs.*
My shift typically runs for twelve hours, six days a week. Between going on WoW raids and languidly starting DoTA games with customers to keep them there, I have various activities running in the background. Forum chats. Unfinished blog posts. Entire albums leeched then seeded. The adage goes: take only what you need, then share. I feel like Robin Hood. Or the Pied Piper, depending on how you’re looking at it. Newly energised off my findings, I start another blog specifically to archive obscure nu-metal, songs painstakingly found then compiled into a .zip file, complete with album artwork. These are all facilitated by single YouSendIt and Megaupload* links, each one logged into a separate page that doubles as an index. Occasionally, there’s a lyric sheet, put together with ‘The Heretic Anthem’ pumping in the background – If you’re 555, then I’m 666! What’s it like to be a heretic?
absolute noob here. how safe are keygens? never ran one before
as safe as not wearing a condom …
… haha but seriously test it on a second machine first
how to tell the diff between real and fakes?
depends, run it in [REDACTED], use an antivirus first
out of 200 times I used them there was only a worm once or twice, easy to delete but gotta be careful cos they will damage files while deleting
set sail my friend
thanks, I’ll be back if I need more help
pleasure! good luck
‘This book is impossible to read. The file is corrupted and all kinds of strange characters obscure words. One of the gems is “feces” for “faces”.’
Amazon book review for a pirated copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four
When cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han coined the term ‘hyperspace’, he was simply observing the contemporary collapse of what had been previously known as ‘cyberspace’, the axes of globalisation and the acceleration of digital networks converging like cascading windows gone rogue. It is, according to him, a ‘completely hybrid and promiscuous space’ where ‘everything is intermingled and networked with everything else, a space where cultural and territorial markers have been deleted, a space marked by a lack of distance’. In Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, he ruminates on how the Chinese cultural phenomenon of shanzhai – essentially, ‘fakes’, but more widely understood as a kind of bootlegging – takes on the character of hyperspace to envision more possibilities. Initially a term used to describe cellphone knock-offs with names such as Nokir, iPncne and Samsing, it’s now grown to occupy the popular imagination to mean any kind of cultural product that’s adaptable and ‘fully exploits the situation’s potential’.
Shanzhai has no limits. If something can be copied, then it will be. There are shanzhai Harry Potter books, a shanzhai Nobel Prize, shanzhai politicians, shanzhai celebrities, shanzhai electric cars.* And though they’re technically forgeries, it doesn’t mean that the result is inferior – in fact, most of the time the copy is superior and even more slick. At its core, shanzhai doesn’t only bring about creativity of the highest order, it also serves to shift positions of economic power, an attempt at toppling monopolies. It is the equivalent of throwing the first brick. When Adidas becomes Dasida, for example, or when a shanzhai mobile phone is installed with a function that can identify counterfeit currency, according to Han ‘a truly Dadaist game is being played’. Shanzhai is subversion through closeness, a form of trolling that arises out of familiarity, not the product of a lone genius but an affective endeavour by a collective rhizome. As in fan fiction, dominant narratives are taken and re-appropriated. For example, in Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, Harry defeats his adversary Yandomort on the sacred mountain of Taishan together with his friends Long and Xing.
In Indonesia, shanzhai manifests itself in different ways, but its motivations are the same. What immediately comes to mind is how the British political grindcore band Napalm Death became widely known almost overnight, providing a backbone for the creation of an Indonesian heavy metal underground that has now fanned out to involve various sub-genres. Today, some Indonesian noise music incorporates dangdut and gamelan. Others, such as experimental electronic outfit Gabber Modus Operandi, mash together punk, metal, gabber and kecak to engineer a rogue futurism. The band’s singer, Ican Harem, also runs a fashion label made out of entirely upcycled clothes – imagine a Monster Energy dri-fit tee artfully cut up and conjoined with a KISS long-sleeve shirt to form an entirely new garment. When asked, he says their activities are a reaction that has come from ‘digging through our identity as millennial Indonesians in transition to digital culture’. All of this can arguably be traced back to KG-1060891, that first bootleg cassette of Napalm Death’s Harmony Corruption, a number that many local metalheads can recite by heart.
The idea of ‘intellectual property’ is a curious relic of the western world, a world that, despite its outdated notions, still continues to thrive – this position of wanting to own things is precisely what’s resulted in colonialism reigning in the first place. It wasn’t until 1967 that the WIPO Convention* treaty was passed, with article 2(viii) defining intellectual property to include literature, art, scientific discoveries, performances, broadcasts, ‘protection against unfair competition’ and finally, ‘all other rights resulting from intellectual property activity in the industrial, scientific, literary or artistic fields’. When intellectual property is given polemical and rhetorical value, it’s easy to cement wealth and power by asserting arbitrary ‘rights’ that see ownership as morally defensible; anything else becomes theft.
The Pirate Bay took it a step further when they launched ‘Physibles’ in 2012, an arm designed for sharing 3D printables. Now, eleven years later, there are many more open-source platforms and file-sharing websites that facilitate the printing of objects – Bulbasaur planters, violins, bicycles, and even guns – should one bother to educate oneself with the know-how and wherewithal to find and assemble them. Not unlike the community of marauders the BitTorrent website had gathered from scratch, Physibles was yet another indicator that there was no end point to the sharing of information, especially when it was not kept guarded behind draconian laws. One need not feel obliged to seed after leeching, yet most do – otherwise no files would exist in the first place. In other words, ‘it’s like internet karma that works’ (Reddittors) or the ‘warm glow/ cold prickle’ theory which demonstrates that a large fraction of people generally tend to voluntarily contribute to public goods even if the incentive to free-load is strong (economists). When the mindset that acts as a shroud around intellectual property is given up altogether, it becomes clear that knowledge and creative works are actually non-rivalrous and non-depletable, a lovely wellspring that doesn’t stop giving.
As Han writes, ‘shanzhai is decreation.’ If intermediaries – and consequently, layers of power – are eliminated, the idealised version of Do-It-Yourself culture emerges. No more shipping huge amounts of products around the world.* No more shipping the broken products back. No more sweatshop labour. Perhaps a pipe dream, but shanzhai allows for the possibility of dreaming.
June 2007, Bangkok, Thailand
The first time I went overseas was a celebratory event. For reasons unrelated to this essay, I hadn’t been on a plane until then. Two gal pals I had gotten acquainted with from the DIY-punk underground asked if I wanted to come along on a short trip to Thailand – a two-and-a-half-hour flight from Singapore.
Going through the motions of getting my shit together wasn’t totally arduous. Passports at the time cost $50 a pop, and budget airlines were newly booming, advertising slogans such as ‘Now Everyone Can Fly’. To some extent, this was true: I had often heard of people who would ‘just go’ to Hanoi or Bali for a weekend jaunt, as if borders were arbitrary.
For certain groups of people, borders were certainly not impenetrable. This was especially so in the ‘hub’ we lived in, which often sold the promise that we were citizens of the world regardless of class. I’d dream of becoming one of these people, the world atlas no longer a huge, unfamiliar fiction but an unlimited expanse that was open to discovery.
That year, I took a weekend off from the cybercafe, two hundred dollars in my pocket and a 5kg backpack in tow. The plane journey was uneventful, and if I hadn’t stayed awake the whole time trying to sense a metaphysical shift, I’d simply have woken up in a place which merely operated on a slightly different timezone and where people used a different script to write in, a different language to speak in.
In any case, as I got used to magically appearing in a place that wasn’t the country I was born and raised in, the luxury of travel was emboldening. It helped that each of my Singapore dollars was equal to twenty-three baht, we were crashing with friends we had met on the internet, and that locals looked at our faces and demeanours and saw the symbolic glamour of the Lion City made flesh. We slept in an upstairs room of our friend June’s family home, ensconced in the warm embrace of the scorching Thai heat and the international punk network. Drinking iced teas till the sun came up on our first night, we didn’t want to waste any time: we talked about CrimethInc. books, veganism, and the possibility of train-hopping in Southeast Asia. The subculture always proselytised ‘no borders’ – in our minds we wanted to smash them. At the time, we weren’t aware that our purported radicalism was shaped by North American hegemony; the rulebook was completely theirs. But we didn’t think there were any rules.
June also loved the films of Wim Wenders. I had not heard of the director before, my movie knowledge limited to what was usually on TV, and which I was gradually drifting away from. I despised my emotionally abusive, overworked parents, and consequently abhorred their television habits. This was propped up further by my fervent belief in punk, whose many tenets – at least in the late 2000s – often espoused that television would rot your brain from the inside out. In Bangkok, I wore my bootlegged screenprinted KILL YOUR TV t-shirt with pride, the slogan probably borrowed from the Ned’s Atomic Dustbin song of the same name. But I hadn’t watched any arthouse films because I didn’t know they even existed in the first place.
June snickered when she quizzed us and none of us had heard of Jean-Luc Godard or Ingmar Bergman. I resented her for knowing more than me. We were punks, after all. At her lead, we got on a tuk-tuk to a suburban locale on our last night to arrive at an open-air market that was identified by its makeshift tentage, with vendors selling their wares on a piece of flattened cardboard laid on the concrete ground. Most of the DVDs were porn, while others were CDs that contained bootlegs of licensed computer software, but we had turned up in arthouse wonderland. Every third stall had a pirated copy of Dogville, each cover modified according to the seller’s whim – Nicole Kidman’s mug photocopied in a lurid cyan, the title in various fonts. I saw the word ‘DOG’ again and again until it made no sense.
‘You have to watch this one. And this’. Shoved into my hands were Godard’s Alphaville, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God and Wenders’ Alice in the Cities. Doors were opening, but they were also closing in on me.* Still, I had stepped into a new room.
‘Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one’s value as an image.’
Hito Steyerl
Around 2007, Google launched a digital fingerprinting system to easily identify and manage copyrighted content on YouTube. Videos uploaded to the platform are compared against audio and video files registered with this system by content owners – its aim was to look for unauthorised matches that were possibly floating around on the site and block them (or in some cases, at the owner’s discretion, monetise them). To circumvent this, an anonymous pirate began to create videos that featured a cat watching an old JVC television set. This TV screen could be playing Moulin Rouge or episodes of Sesame Street and go undetected. While this was probably useless to cinephiles seeking a watchable copy of a rare film, the proliferation of these types of videos was confusing to the system. What was playing on the TV screen-on-the-screen could be a copy of a popular movie, but the system only saw a cat watching TV. Still, it was impossible for the artificially intelligent system to root out all instances of so-called piracy; rare films can be watched on the site today, albeit in low resolution. It’s common for some to disappear after a month, to reappear a few months later.* Rinse, lather, repeat, whack-a-mole.
Similarly, pirated Kodi boxes† play on this ethos, of which there are over a million in the world at the time of writing. Devised as a free, open-source media player software that allows users to view most online streaming media, its unlocked nature has enabled the existence of ‘fully-loaded’ boxes that come with third-party add-ons that help with accessing so-called copyrighted content. There are so many of these modified boxes floating around that some people have unwittingly associated them with the company. And while Amazon has pulled the box off its store and Google has removed the word ‘Kodi’ from autocomplete search queries, customised Kodis abound unrestricted.
In South Korea, less is even more, as external devices are made completely unnecessary. Much like the Megauploads and Rapidshares of yore, a substantial part of online piracy takes place via what is referred to as ‘webhards’, a type of local file-sharing site disguised to look like a typical login page. After paying a small fee to receive a password, its insides open up to reveal unlimited content. Everything is for sale and nothing is licensed. Each member is allowed to have up to 1TB of storage. On a webhard, an .avi of Old Boy could be the 900th copy, yet its quality is crystal clear.
When I was searching for a copy of Marguerite Duras’ novella The Lover, it was in a similar way. Log on to the now-seldom used mIRC software, find a chat room, and e-books are abundant. Elsewhere, GitHub domains are filled with manga; other sites with academic books and papers typically locked behind expensive paywalls. The only time I was able to access Sylvia Wynter’s On Being Human as Praxis was through a complete stranger on a Facebook group.*
Many reports say that piracy is on the decline as streaming giants dominate and redefine mainstream possibilities of media. It’s convenient when everything is in one place. Yet other studies say that piracy is increasing, with television the most sought-after content, followed by music and film. While the dominance of streaming services today leads to questions such as ‘Where is it on?’ when recommended a film or TV show, the grey market teems with anything you could possibly want. You wanna watch Princess Mononoke right now? You got it. The pirate ship appears to be sinking, but the seas are only getting wider, and its holes are leaking shit.
In December 2018, new music from Beyoncé and SZA dropped on Spotify and Apple Music. Yet what was strange about this event was that there had been no preceding anticipation. Released under the names ‘Queen Carter’ and ‘Sister Solana’ respectively, it seemed initially like a sneaky, unpublicised Easter egg to drum up hype. But the songs sounded unpolished, and some die-hard fans recognised the Beyoncé ones from old recording sessions.
As news of this circulated, it soon became apparent that the tracks had been fraudulently uploaded onto the audio streaming platforms. Three months later, a fake Rihanna album followed suit. Titled Angel and distributed under the moniker ‘Fenty Fantasia’ on iTunes, with tracks such as ‘Counterfeit’ and ‘Bitch I’m Special’, fewer people cottoned on to it than they did the Beyoncé and SZA fakes – it climbed up to #67 on the iTunes worldwide album charts before being detected and removed. When asked by a fan via DM on Instagram (‘What’s with this mess Rih? Get their ass to jail ASAP’) she merely shrugged. ‘Shit’s crazy,’ she replied.
In a bid to game the notoriously vetted music streaming app, which leans on a purported ‘free-for-all’ music library that then sells its information about its users, pirates are not only using the above tactics to cash in, but to stretch the limits of how far hoaxes can run before they’re exposed. A particularly ingenious example comes from funk band Vulfpeck, who put out a silent album titled Sleepify in 2014, asking fans to play the roughly five-minute album on loop while they slept. They were hoping to use the money earned to go on tour. Fans complied, and the gambit went on to accrue $20 000 in royalties until Spotify took the album down. The band never saw their money.
Perhaps Vulfpeck would have done better to not have made their scam known in the first place. Funnily enough, John Cage’s similarly silent 4:33 continues to stream on Spotify unrestricted.* In a much cleverer twist, an anonymous Bulgarian collective earned a cool million from the same platform by uploading several third-party playlists of their own songs, creating a flurry of fake accounts to boost their play counts. Unlike Vulfpeck, they managed to reap the cash rewards.
