Peripathetic, p.7
Peripathetic, page 7
Jenny Odell writes in How To Do Nothing that our ‘margins of refusal’ are shrinking, especially as corporate monopolies become omnipresent and insidious, leading to a sense of choicelessness. If it seems more convenient to watch a film on a video-on-demand service than it is to acquire and learn how to use a virtual private network (VPN), then why would I go the extra mile? If being more informed about algorithmic power involves taking the time to get past technical jargon and then promptly quitting certain services that play into this power – sometimes even having to join an entirely new social network – why would I risk losing everything just to start over? In a world that increasingly gives precedence to the atomisation of selves, intimacy and connection increasingly hinge on corporate terms – when the channels of connection are controlled and profitable, the threat of isolation looms over the landscape.
pondering how to get up, so you download a pirate copy instead—@botaleptic
half the sockets don’t work, so you download a pirate copy instead—@botaleptic
a copy of the most remarkable things I ever saw— @botaleptic
a copy of minima moralia—@botaleptic
… in the antagonistic society, the relationship of the generations is also one of competition, behind which stands naked violence.
Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia
The next day I go back to being completely anonymous. I put on a light grey t-shirt, blue jeans, a maroon jumper, no makeup, my hair tightly combed and tied in a loose ponytail. A coffee on the stove, no ice, unsweetened, no milk. I pour out a small bowl of rolled oats, then add in a few splashes of tap water. Munch munch munch then wash it down with more water. I turn on my laptop, feeling moderately optimistic; didn’t Sun Tzu say something about controversy being the last resort of the talentless? Or was it ‘all warfare is based on deception’?
A flurry of deactivated accounts: each one a chore to navigate, each one repeatedly throwing me through hoops as they ask, repeatedly: ARE YOU SURE? I scratch an itch on my neck, pause to look at the clock above me. My pal Sam Handwich6969 in another window egging me on. Cut off the nodes, it takes some getting used to but I promise you’ll stop feeling it. Asceticism.
The lure of total communion snakes around me like a boa constrictor about to get fresh. I open and close my laptop multiple times. I don’t stop seeding or leeching, log off my chat with Sam. Each move I make I’m striking a deal with the villain.
*A BitTorrent tracker is a special type of server which keeps track of where copies of files exist on peer machines. It also sorts out the files which are available upon client request and helps coordinate efficient transmission and reassembly of the copied file, providing network performance statistics.
*I’m just assuming. There are no records of this.
*This is where it gets murky. What constitutes a ‘safe space’ (and consequently, ‘freedom of speech’) when maintained at the expense of others’ safety? The ISP has been criticised for hosting paedophilic websites as well as a French far-right blog.
*The confluence of art, institutional backing and the interest in power consolidation becomes more apparent when projects that begin with utopian political intentions emerge from the underground. I don’t know what The Pirate Bay did with the bus, but I’m imagining this as a prank they would play to drum up more hype.
*This is a figment of my imagination.
*For all their purported left-wing ideals, it sure didn’t seem to bother them where the money was coming from. Some reports have accused them of keeping up a ‘non-profit’ facade, and Lundström himself was reported to say, ‘There’s around 30 000 to 40 000 SEK flowing in per month. The cost of internet lines, server hosting etc is less, so they are doing well financially.’ It’s impossible to know who is telling the truth.
†There are no records of this either. However, it was around this time that global attention on them was at its peak.
‡You’d think I made this up, but no!
*During the trial, The Pirate Bay’s lawyer confirmed that anakata, TiAMO and brokep no longer held ownership of the site. But there was no evidence that the site had been sold either: no contract, no bank transfer, nothing. In 2009, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN traced its ownership to anakata. It wasn’t long until brokep took to his blog to declare a forgery, then proceeded to press criminal charges against head of BREIN, Tim Kuik.
†The trio continued to appeal the case, alleging bias on the part of the judge. The case dragged on till 21 May 2010, where the Svea Court of Appeal decided not to change the orders on anakata, TiAMO, or brokep. They pressed on for another two years, but the Supreme Court of Sweden refused to hear another appeal and upheld their original sentences. A few months later, anakata was arrested in Phnom Penh (where he fled, and where he had an international warrant placed on him after not serving his sentence). He would continue to crack jokes on Twitter while in jail. The others were arrested in their respective hide-outs shortly after. Since their release, they have all remained low-key, insisting they no longer have any connection with The Pirate Bay.
*There have been a few more crackdowns by authorities on the site, including a shutdown in December 2014, with brokep responding in a blog post that he was happy to see it happen, as he felt that his successors ‘had done nothing to improve the site’ and that the site was ‘ugly’ and ‘full of bugs’. In 2018 and subsequently in 2020, TPB users frequently came up against Error 522, but the cause has been undetermined. Many proxy sites still exist.
†It’s worth noting here that The Pirate Bay has inspired the existence of other torrent sites outside of these proxies. At the time of writing, kat.rip, Demonoid and x1337X remain active.
*Other accolades include: World’s Best Airport, Most People Applying False Eyelashes, Largest Reunion of People Born at the Same Hospital, Most People Wearing Balloon Hats (of which Tony Abbott was a part), among others.
*RIP 2005–2012. At the time of writing, the charges against Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom rage on, with no end to the legal battle in sight.
*Another example of shanzhai is a phone advertisement for a Blockberry phone with an image of Barack Obama as its ‘spokesman’.
*Formally, they are referred to as the Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Bit of a mouthful, I suppose.
*In an ideal world of shanzhai, hyperlocal markets would spring up around the world of their own accord, much like in China. In so-called ‘post’-pandemic times, we are seeing many more examples of these around the world.
*I would stop watching TV altogether, filling my life with films that didn’t necessarily make sense to me, especially as I blindly jumped into them without any foundational understanding of the genre(s). Now, I have large gaps in my knowledge when it comes to screen media.
*This is especially so for films and documentaries that are considered politically controversial or banned by governments.
†There are now more sophisticated and user-friendly versions of this model. Plex and Stremio are two examples.
*Much of my theoretical knowledge comes from books downloaded off Libgen and Monoskop.
*Art, but make it legit!
THE LIFESTYLE CHURCH
There is always a ‘before’ and ‘after’ once you begin.
It was six years into the new millennium. The end of the world did not end up happening. A massive global financial crash was looming. I was looking for something but didn’t know what. At the cybercafe I worked at, the answer gradually made itself clear, floated in my direction somehow.
‘We should meet,’ my LiveJournal friend said. I had been friends with Christine since 2004, and she had interests I considered noteworthy. They seemed mysterious and worldly. I had joined the goth and extreme music communities she was in but I wanted to know more.
People like us experienced a kind of hyperinvisibility, where you can stand out in a crowd and yet also be treated as if you don’t exist. The whole idea, in this climate, was to make yourself seen when you previously were and weren’t. It was a kind of fuck you to the society we found ourselves born within, one we gradually grew to realise prided itself on manufacturing drones. It was simply how the state ran itself, its statecraft whittled down to a distinct, inviolable precision. In this climate no one was allowed to be truly critical; it was often encouraged that the status quo went unquestioned. The state owns the entire media! There is no independent judiciary! It was common knowledge that the more you looked the other way, played by the rules, the higher you’ll ascend. But the yardsticks also always seemed to be changing, at least from observing the way my parents seemed to keep failing, even more shocking when days before you thought they were winning. Nothing was good. It was beginning to dawn on me that I had been brought up in a society that was run like a corporation. At the time it was just a teenage inkling, although it would prove to be accurate years later.
Christine suggested meeting up at a gig around the central part of town. A beat. ‘Because someone I’m dating is playing.’
‘What do I wear?’
‘Anything you want.’
I ended up in jeans and a t-shirt. Something with a distorted scribble print that looked like a child had gone over a painting with coloured pencils. When we got there, Christine was only one amongst a small handful of people who was dressed in a big way. She introduced me to the person she came to see, said his name was Navin.
When J.M. Bernstein wrote about ‘life-styles’ in Theodor Adorno’s posthumous banger The Culture Industry, he couldn’t possibly have predicted the specific forms they would assume more than three decades later. Adorno himself, who was so fixated with the culture industry – the production of culture at industrial scale, what he asserts as something that ‘perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises’ – that he wrote scores of literature on the subject throughout the course of his lifetime, could only condemn it more and more vehemently as well; there were few directives on how it could be contained, or solved.
Adorno would keep writing about the culture industry, and his work would continue to get translated and published long after his death in 1969. In what would become the latest iteration, from the 2023 translated collection Without Model, he offers a striking provocation beyond the grave: ‘What presents itself as progress in the culture industry, the constant novelty it offers, remains the outer shell of the ever-same; every instance of variety conceals a skeleton that changes as little as the profit motive itself has changed since gaining dominance over culture.’
The band sang songs about revolution. ‘There’s a fight to be fought; we’ll find the strength somehow,’ one of them went. It was called ‘Spirit’. Navin had the manner of a youth leader. Warm, charismatic, knowledgeable. It felt like I could ask him anything and he’d tell me the answer. He invited me to join him and Christine for dinner afterwards; his bandmates were also coming. They were similar in demeanour, except much more reserved. Navin seemed to wield some authority over them. They were rapt every time he shared his political theories. I wasn’t sure how I felt, to suddenly be amongst a communal experience. Was this … friendship? Could it be one? That afternoon was life-changing.
‘It’s the closest experience I have to sports or church.’
Brooke Smith, Sunday Matinee
‘Conversion stories about rock and particularly its most fanatic sect, “punk”, eerily resemble born-again stories of being “saved”. […] The Reformation in rock would be “punk”, which in turn spawned a thousand sects, each one announcing its claim as the bearer of the true flame.’
Ian F. Svenonius, The Psychic Soviet
‘Punk was an incredibly important formative influence in my life because it was my first activist community, where my politics grew up. I still like some of the music and see having come up in that scene as an integral part of who I am. But it shouldn’t surprise anybody that I grew out of and grew alienated by the punk scene, then submitted to a punk zine to talk shit about it.’
Nia King, ‘The First 7-Inch Was Better’:
How I Became an Ex-Punk
We became friends very quickly. They were always wanting to show me things. We talked on the phone a lot. Just testing out thoughts and ideas, having little debates. Through Navin I came across a zine titled Against Prisons, and while I didn’t understand why my father was in prison I at least had language against incarceration. Evidently I was too early to some of these ideas – it took me several more years and many more readings before I fully understood it.
Coming across these ways of thinking contained an air of loftiness – they seemed so secret, so wrong, so immoral. Our society had (has) yet to abolish the death penalty. It was illegal for queer people to have sex with each other. We were (are) not allowed to protest. There were (are) no trade unions independent of government. Bloggers were (are) taken to court for sedition. I’d managed to read Nineteen Eighty-Four through another online friend who gave me her copy of the Orwell novel she had studied in her final year of junior college. It was crazy to feel like we were living in Winston’s world, but the more I read* the more this theory proved itself increasingly possible.
It really was so overwhelming. To bear all that new knowledge, and then not feel like you were able to disseminate it further, because technically that was against the law? Only the state could print on news print, because that was a symbol that represented the official source of knowledge. The state owned (owns) nearly everything. Taking your own life was considered a crime. We couldn’t replicate the news print fanzines we loved so much from the USA, how they’d crinkle in our hands as we turned the page, become yellow with age. The fact that we knew this was against the rules only terrified and motivated us further. Freud might call it the death drive. I couldn’t unlearn what I had already learned, yet I was also trying to unlearn what I had previously learned.
Thinking about lifestyles in our concentrated present, the memefied ‘starter pack’ comes to mind. Its genesis: a curated form of ‘taste’, where one defines themselves by what they choose to consume, further intensified in the social media era. A more outdated phrase might be ‘personal brand’, which gives you a hint as to how quickly the culture industry moves. Lifestyle today is an aesthetic, an identity, a vibe. It is the ‘Lifestyles’ section in newspapers and magazines, exploded. It sends up images of summer holidays in Europe, glasses of orange wine next to plates of oysters on a flatlay; stacks of books that include Marx’s Capital and Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu; A24 tote bags styled with ironic varsity t-shirt Nike TNs and straight-leg linen pants; selfies with death metal t-shirt and can of Monster energy drink in hand. Carly Rae Jepsen t-shirts with the pop singer’s name in a metal font. A long-sleeve t-shirt with the original cover of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish tastefully re-adapted on its front. A cap that simply reads ‘RACHEL CUSK’, ‘TAHINI’ or ‘SHE’LL BE RIGHT’. A tote bag that proclaims ‘Never Trust a Cop’. Lifestyle in these times can be considered a kind of ‘junkspace’, neoliberal detritus, what Rem Koolhaas defines as ‘a fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed.’
It’s not meant to make sense. It’s the logical conclusion of capitalist excess, where even invoking the word ‘capitalism’ allows others to get a sense of ‘who’ you are. We are slotted into particular genres as items would be in a supermarket or book-store. Well lemme tell you this could be autobiography! If ‘life style’, ‘lifestyle’ or ‘styles of life’ (which do you prefer?) once referred to one’s living conditions, memories, thoughts and behaviours or consumer taste, they have now agglomerated. Images – via all of the above – have been disseminated so rapidly that they have evolved into true and self-sustaining commodities. The vibe is of Adam Curtis’s films, on fast forward.
The other thing that made hanging out with the trio even more fun was the gigs. It had been a few years into our friendship and Christine had already hung up her boots, telling me one day that she’d have to assimilate into the regular world now, be a ‘good girl’ and all that. Why would you do that? It was so much fun here where we were.
One gig is particularly memorable. 2008? A band from the United States was touring the region, and this was one of the shows on their tour. When I met up with the trio at the train station and walked to the venue I was trying to hide my surprise that it was located in an industrial area, in a part of the city-state only they had been to. Inside, there was a makeshift stage built from timber off-cuts, raised about two inches above the ground. The room itself wasn’t very big, maybe 70 people at most. When we were shoulder to shoulder sweat pouring out of every pore it could probably fit 150. There were zines and records laid out for sale on the ground outside the venue, distros selling their wares. For a few hours, the scene contained a roomful of sweaty misfits, all literally dancing to the beat of their own drum, even if ventilation was scarce. The music poured out, raging and bleak, and the binary between ‘fan’ and ‘idol’ dissolved.
Joy James talks about the ‘agape’ when it comes to revolutionary love, in how it’s ‘not a narcotic’, but a journey; ‘a form of love but it’s not the love of the marketplace’. Taken from ancient Greek, ‘agape’ is a Christian theological concept referring to the highest form of love and affection, but distinct from ‘philia’, self-love. Perhaps we have to be consumed by fervour in order to act accordingly. A kind of devotion so overwhelmingly sacrificial that there is no need for reciprocity. A type of belief so all-encompassing and total that we can dedicate our entire lives in service of it.
Things I learned: critical thinking, hand-sewing my own rips, being comfortable performing on a stage, navigating cultural differences, dealing with conflict, self-publishing, consent, standing up for my rights, sharing within your means, changing my own bicycle tire, abolitionist politics, planning a timeline, organising events, making things work with little to no money.
