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Biodun@bbcnews.com

Wednesday, 26 January 2011

Theory Beyond the Codes: Part 2--presented by Biodun Iginla, BBC News
Topic: technology, internet, economics
CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 34, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online:http://www.ctheory.net***

TBC 016 01/25/2011 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________

*************************

THEORY BEYOND THE CODES

*************************
_____________________________________________________________________

CTheory Interview

Digital Inflections: The Einstein's Brain Project
=================================================

~Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow in conversation with Ted Hiebert~

"[B]odies are never event bound and event defined, but event
defining -- and always at the point of becoming. This is a
continual shudder across our work -- the body as an
ever-receding event horizon. A hole in the fabric of the world,
a non-alibi, a white hole."

-- Einstein's Brain Project

Introduction
------------

What does the world look like when we turn out the lights? Does it
not first surprise us -- not with nothingness but with a dance of
after-images which, fading, are transformed into patterns of visual
noise? And, even after the noise begins to fade, does not the
imagination kick in -- whether dreams of day or night or blind-spot
hallucinations of what would be there if only the eyes were open to
see? It is as if the closed eye compels a cognitive hyperactivity
that ensures there will always be something to see, even when that
vision has no real correlation to the world around us. Even the
closed eye knows no solace from the visual.

One imagines that for the camera the situation is different -- the
camera not being subject to false appearances as a result of what was
seen a second before the room went dark. The camera does not know
darkness -- the camera knows only the nothingness that is a pure
absence of stimulus.

Or so one might imagine...

But the real question is whether machines can imagine too, whether in
the darkness there is anything that might cause the machines to see
as humans do -- to see things where there are none, and to recognize
within these visual mistakes optical or aesthetic possibilities?
Maybe not on purpose, but when properly configured even cameras can
be made to see in the dark -- and to make up images where there would
otherwise be none. Consider the possibilities of the following
scenario -- seen for the ways it might make the machines themselves
imagine:

A camera and a sensitive microphone are turned on, but enclosed in a
completely light tight, anechoic box. They record no image, receive
no light and sense no sound. The camera input is adjusted with
maximum gain and brightness to reveal the video noise inherent in the
system. This noise provides a medium that can potentially be modified
by external electromagnetic forces. [...] Face tracking algorithms
using a cascade of Haar classifiers scan the random noise in each
video frame and look for any combination of pixels that form the most
basic characteristics of a human face -- areas that can be loosely
characterized as eyes, nose and mouth with a sufficient degree of
symmetry. When the software finds such a combination of pixels and
symmetry the area is zoomed to full screen, its contrast and
brightness adjusted, blurred and desaturated to clarify the found
image. [1]

The project is called ~Einstein's Brain~, a collaboration among Alan
Dunning, Paul Woodrow and Dr. Morley Hollenberg, who have for more
than a decade been examining the aesthetic possibilities of machinic
rendering. Using a variety of biofeedback equipment, pattern
recognition software and interactive media interfaces, the work of
the ~Einstein's Brain Project~ (EBP) explores technology as an
allegory for human consciousness, and human consciousness as a
contributing participant in the development of our technological
future.

In their words:

~Einstein's Brain~ is a collaborative, immersive, virtual and
augmented reality work that explores the notion of the brain as a
real and metaphoric interface between bodies and worlds in flux, and
that examines the idea of the world as a construct sustained through
the neurological processes contained within the brain. It suggests
that the world is not some reality outside ourselves, but that it is
the result of an interior process that makes and sustains our body
image and its relationship to a world, and that the investigation of
virtual reality, its potential use as a perceptual filter, and its
accompanying social space is an exploration of the new constructions
of consciousness and the consequent technological colonization of the
body. [2]

What follows is an edited series of electronic conversations with
Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow on aspects of recent EBP projects and
ongoing topics of inquiry.

Ted Hiebert (for CTHEORY): First, thank you both for agreeing to this
conversation, which I hope will also be an opportunity to highlight
some of the very innovative work you are doing with your
collaborative project, ~Einstein's Brain~. In a general sense, I want
to say that your work is about questions of digital subjectivity,
consciousness and perception, though I know that for you it is also
about a whole range of other things as well. In a pragmatic sense,
however, what I think is truly unique about the work that you are
doing is that it reverses the terms according to which technology is
popularly understood -- not necessarily only an operational assistant
to human productivity but as itself a series of interpretive systems
that are subject to aesthetic renderings of various sorts.

Einstein's Brain Project (EBP): New technology always creates new
aesthetic possibilities. What you have identified is our sense of
technology as something that constantly generates analytical
potentials that can be realised by systems that go beyond mere
representation. One of our ongoing concerns has been with invisible
energy fields as components that surround and attach themselves to us
and to themselves, and a large part of our project has been to
visualise these in ways that reveal and capitalize on their capacity
to excite and instigate new structure and novel form. We have given
ourselves over to the idea that technology is a form of life, and our
work tries to suggest what kind of life this is.

CTHEORY: Your later work, in particular, emphasizes these ideas --
which I'll get to in a minute. First however, I want to contrast them
a bit to your earlier work, which I think does this too but in a
slightly different way. For those who aren't already familiar with
the work you've done, I wonder if these earlier projects might not be
important for the understanding of how your ideas have developed, and
the nuances of your more recent projects.

Take, for instance, a project such as ~The Madhouse~ in which you had
a sculpture of a human body coated with thermochromic paint, coupled
with an EEG-enabled HUD, as trigger interfaces for audience
interaction. When the viewer touched the model it changed color and,
if I'm not wrong, the viewer's thoughts also interacted with a
programmed database to provide a series of EEG-selected visuals.
There are many things that are interesting about this project, among
them the fact that you titled the body/sculpture ALIBI, as if to
purposefully provoke the question of agency and placement when faced
with the technological interface. In your later work, it becomes
clear that this is not about using the technological as allegory for
the human, but the opposite -- not subjecting the human body to the
machine but purposefully subjecting machines to the human body. Not
technology, as McLuhan had it, as that which extends the body outside
of itself, but instead the body as that which forces technology to
internalize -- adapting to the messiness of human input. In other
words, this wasn't just about wiring bodies to the machines, but also
an exploration of what happens when the relationship is seen the
other way around.

[Figure 1: ALIBI, Pandaemonium, 2002]

EBP: ALIBI (Anatomically Lifelike Interactive Biological Interface),
the interface to the Madhouse cycle of works, was conceived as an
interface built around ideas of absence and invisibility, even as it
was intended to be tangible and present. Its surface disappeared as
the thermochromic paint became transparent at a certain temperature,
creating a fleeting index of a touch. Its main interactions were
enabled by moving within large invisible, electromagnetic fields that
encircled the body. These interactions enabled a participant to
navigate a complex virtual 3D environment that was generated
on-the-fly by evoked potentials harvested by an EEG equipped HMD.

ALIBI is entirely a non-alibi -- a direct interface to a boundary
that is diffuse -- neither properly here nor there, akin to a
dissipating, permeable boundary reminiscent of a rapture of the deep.
Not protected, like the astronaut in his suit, from the coldness of
space, but caught, like the diver, in the overwhelming desire to meld
with the ocean.

The body was never conceived of as an interface ~per se~ but rather
as a sensory blister caused by the friction between two ever-changing
worlds -- the immediate past and the immediate future. This is more
apparent in later work ~Ghosts in the Machine~ and ~The Sound of
Silence~, in which even the suggestion of an interface has been
eliminated forcing us to imagine machines imagining a past and a
future in lieu of a discernible present.

This comparison of machines wired to bodies or bodies wired to
machines is interesting, and is one that has emerged through an
imagining of both bodies and machines as organisms that are subject
to the vagaries and whims of the other. It is this notion of affect
that is important in how we have come to think about subjectivity.
But in the end there might be less of a distinction than a polar
comparison suggests. Our sense is that bodies and machines are
inextricably enmeshed and their relationship constantly changes at
speeds that are out of step with any mechanical or biological clocks.
For us this problematises not just what such a body might be, but how
we might locate such a body that is at one and the same time, both
all too located, subject to the passage and ravages of time, but
strangely, in technoetic enviroments, non-spatial and atemporal, as
it is as is constantly re-defined as bio-illogical organism.

Our physical bodies might age, tire, change shape, and even disgust
us, but are always remade when distributed by the technical
apparatus. Where is the body that is super-distributed, that is
omnipresent? The body is simultaneously present and absent -- fixed
and present, mutating and absent -- always on the verge of becoming.
The body is driven to new forms, new imagined and re-imagined forms,
even as it posits itself as fixed entity.

For us, then bodies are never event bound and event defined, but
event defining -- and always at the point of becoming. This is a
continual shudder across our work -- the body as an ever-receding
event horizon. A hole in the fabric of the world, a non-alibi, a
white hole.

CTHEORY: In a curious way, might this have the effect of reversing
the terms of phenomenal engagement as well -- or perhaps simply
adapting them to the technological equation? One might even here
propose something along the lines a techno-phenomenology, a type of
phenomenology particular to the ways machines themselves inhabit this
non-present that you describe. I agree that this sort of relationship
is articulated in particularly poignant ways in recent installations
such as ~The Sound of Silence~ and ~Ghosts in the Machine~. These are
the pieces referred to in the introduction to this interview, in
which you enclose cameras and microphones in perceptually-vacant
spaces so as to subject the technologies themselves to their own
internal processing noise as stimulus for image and sound generation.
With ~Ghosts in the Machine~ the interface is a light-tight box that
contains a camera; with ~The Sound of Silence~ a sound-proof space
with a microphone -- in both instances the technologies are wired to
see or hear what is not there.

These two works interest me particularly because they make clear a
number of larger trends in your collaboration -- among them a real
refusal to let subjectivity off the hook when faced with questions of
the invisible.

EBP: This descriptor of a proposed field of inquiry is good in its
ambivalence. What you refer to are the sensory experiences associated
with certain products of recent technological invention, mainly
projected images and screen images -- otherwise we might say that all
"images as artifacts" are products of technology and can talked about
in some phenomenological context.

When it comes to the perception of an image we can talk about it as
an event -- as Alva Noe has suggested -- a kind of action. It's an
action that includes a relation, in fact a number of potential
relations, between the observer and the observed. The difficulty in
thinking about this is to make a true distinction between the
observer and the observed, since there seems no clear dividing line
between the two in an objective way. So in a sense when you talk
about Einstein's Brain Project not letting subjectivity off the hook
when it comes to the invisible, there are always in every action of
perception imperceptible qualities that accompany those phenomena
that we as observers acknowledge as perceptions. This is made more
complex by that fact that the act of perception itself is virtual --
we are in the process of creating potentialities for possible worlds.
How is this possible without a subject? But maybe this is not what
you mean by letting subjectivity of the hook -- and for what?

[Figure 2: Ghosts in the Machine 2008]

CTHEORY: In the context of your later work, I think maybe this could
be framed as a question of interactivity, specifically in the sense
that you begin to engage subjectivity as a dialogic space, rather
than one of incommensurability. There's an important distinction to
be made here, I think, in terms of works that extend the human body
and mind and those that also reciprocate -- beginning to challenge
the machines themselves as well. To put terms to it, it might be
called the difference between interactivity and interface, with the
former demanding a reciprocal engagement that extends beyond the
simple machine processing of human stimulus.

EBP: Interface suggests a plane at which a transition between two
worlds occurs -- but in ~Ghosts in the Machine~ there is no membrane
but an intermingling of two worlds at the atomic level. The interface
in ~Ghosts in the Machine~ references an ongoing unexhibited work,
~Permeable City~, looking at micro interfaces between skin and world.
The interface in ~Ghosts~ is a sort of bio-noosphere in which machine
and body are lost in the generative system. The work itself is
actually invisible -- seeing only in its shadow: the flickering of
pixels, the shapes of faces. The invisibility for us was occasioned
by some ideas we had about the hypermorphic or prestomorphic -- the
movement from one state to another at such a rapid rate that objects
had neither form nor substance. In filmic terms this might be the
gaps between the frames, but extended into a new space developing out
of the movement towards non-linear modes of recording that allow the
development of a completely fictive space wrapped in a non-solid and
invisible moment.

CTHEORY: This is a wonderfully complex counter to some of the more
aggressive theories of technology, such as those of Paul Virilio in
which technology harvests and co-opts and, ultimately, renders
obsolete the human face of data through its philosophy of "more,
better, faster" -- suggesting that life, rendered informatically,
cannot keep up to its technological potential. Yet, what
interactivity demands, and what works like ~The Sound of Silence~ and
~Ghosts in the Machine~ deliver is a more human side to these same
technologies. It's potentially a point of reversibility, where in a
certain way technology cannot keep up to the simple question of human
inadequacy. As a result the human experience is enriched as well --
or frustrated, depending on one's comfort level with these states of
rendered invisibility -- rendered non-experience, perhaps.

[Figure 3: Ghosts in the Machine 2008 1]

EBP: The works to which you refer, ~Ghosts in the Machine~ and ~The
Sound of Silence~, contribute to the conscious awareness of the
perceptual process. Brian Massumi talks about this process with real
depth, comprehension and clarity. In his essay "The Thinking-Feeling
of What Happens," clarifying Susan Langer's notion of semblance,
Massumi concludes:

A semblance takes the abstraction inherent to object perception and
carries it to a higher power. It does this by suspending the
potentials presented. Suspending the potentials makes them all the
more apparent, by holding them to visual form. The relays to touch
and kinesthesia will not take place. These potentials can only
appear, and only visually. The event that is the full-spectrum
perception is and will remain virtual. A life dynamic is presented,
but virtually, as pure visual appearance. [3]

~Ghosts in the Machine~ and ~The Sound of Silence~ are works that
create conditions for observers to consciously experience the
potentiality of their own visual process and create a situation in
which they are able to question the fixity of the world in which they
presently inhabit -- to begin to discover the phenomenal world and
its equivalences. The work is neither didactic nor demonstrational.
What is important and interesting for us is that the participant in
the work senses a series of contingencies, as if he or she is always
on the threshold of being transformed -- its as if the work is able
to create an feeling of anticipation within the viewer that exists
within the work in another form.

CTHEORY: Indeed, there is something poignant about these works that
frustrates the attempt to reduce them to demonstration -- perhaps it
is as simple as to privilege the act of perceiving over any
assumptions about the fixity of what is seen. Here, most obviously,
you suggest that machines might be made to perceive information where
there is nothing but their own internal processing mechanisms to
witness. One might even go as far as to say that, in these works, you
make the machines hallucinate, subjecting them to an absence of
stimulus but insisting that they perceive anyways, and in turn
harvesting this technological imaginary for its potentially
recognizable patterns. Despite the fact that there is nothing to see,
there are still images that appear and consequently processed
experiences of one sort or another that, despite their errors, were
nevertheless witnessed in one way or another.

EBP: Thomas Metzinger's theory of the phenomenal self-model is
applicable to the work at a very elementary level. Metzinger's
central notion is that no self exists, saying that all that has ever
existed are conscious self-models that are not recognized as models,
they are what he terms the phenomenal self. The phenomenal self is
not a thing but a process. The subjective experience of being someone
derives from a conscious information processing system. You are such
a system, although it is transparent and you don't see it. But you
see with it. Metzinger's central claim is that we confuse ourselves
with the content of the self-model currently activated by the brain.
According to Metzinger this conscious self-model allows an organism
to conceive of its self as a whole and thereby to causally interact
with its inner and outer environments in an entirely new and
integrated and intelligent manner. This notion is reminiscent of V.S.
Ramachandran's idea of the phantom body. What we seem to take on as
our body is an image, derived from the body, that is projected to the
brain in all its phenomenal hallucinatory qualities.

In reference to our work, it is in the process of experiencing
technological hallucination that we construct our own bodies as
hallucinations or, better still, as phenomenal. Yet, there is the
desire for a light body, an immaterial body -- a body that doesn't
necessarily carry a lot of baggage, that is not weighed down with
knowledge -- a body that is ready to act, a bodily potential. This is
what Metzinger suggests with his notion of the phenomenal self-model
of subjectivity. The title of his book _Being No One_ evokes the
invisible. As an aside, Paul used to use Mr. Invisible as a pseudonym
-- even though he might have been joking. So when you pose the
question of interactivity as symptomatic of an emergent form of
subjectivity it seems to make sense. However in current thinking
about technology this type of interactivity doesn't seem to be widely
acknowledged, as you point out in your initial statement.

CTHEORY: Is it possible then that what is hallucinated is ultimately
secondary to the momentum responsible for hallucination? This strikes
me as quite a new way to think the question of phenomenology -- not
grounded in the tangibility of the senses, but grounded exactly in
their potential for making mistakes. The concept would have
precedents in things like Ramachandran's mirror treatment for phantom
limb syndrome -- in which the mind is conscientiously "fooled" into
seeing a limb where there is none -- or, in a strange technological
twist, a remix of the Situationist concept of psychogeography as, in
this context, a re-claiming of the urban environment through
experiential psychoses. One might speak here of a technological
psychosis that is less a demonization of technological subjectivity
and more an acknowledgement that the mind on technology sees the
world differently -- hallucinating or making mistakes in advance, so
to speak.

This is what I meant also with the idea that your work refuses to let
subjectivity off the hook -- namely for the invisibility that informs
the horizon of encounter. I think the pseudonym Mr. Invisible is
great -- and all the more provocative when mentioned in conversation.
It becomes necessary to cast doubt in order to preserve the accuracy
of the situation.

EBP: The idea that what is hallucinated is secondary to the momentum
responsible for the hallucination is appealing. You are suggesting
that there are these continuous flows that do not end up separating
themselves as objects, but are potentialities that are on the
threshold.

The notion of the potentiality of making mistakes is very strange. We
have written about identifying something as something it is not. It's
like the question of what is a proper hallucination. At the level of
everyday life we are always involved in the construction of partial
identities even with someone we know, because at the time of
interaction we seem to want to use what is necessary as per the
outcome of the interaction. We don't summon other data, even at the
level of memory, when we engage in social interaction -- we can say
that many of our actual dealings are with the currency of the
virtual. When we are afraid to do something or feel it might be
against the law, who is it we are addressing? It seems to be related
to the notion of our own identity as being phantom. The example of
being consciously fooled (in Ramachandran and the phantom limb) is
reminiscent of Gibson's "consensual hallucination."

CTHEORY: In a sense, it might be seen as setting the machines up to
fail, and harvesting from them the images of technological failure.
Here, you have found a way to make the machines imagine -- and to
turn this into a spectacle for the human witness. It is an exact
reversal of the way the question is typically thought -- and it is
both a humanization of the machines and a poignant insistence on the
spectacle of failure. Here not only do the machines begin to
hallucinate, but there are established protocols for understanding
how they do so, and how to filter such hallucinations -- generally
called noise -- out of the picture. Except that you have factored it
into the picture instead -- pre-empting proper optical data in favor
of that which requires machine interpretation.

EBP: If we want to be a bit more extreme, we could even ask the
question whether machines possess a phenomenal self-model, and how it
might be constituted? It would have to be a self-model without a
consciousness. And of course it couldn't be something that machines
possess on their own -- this wouldn't make any sense. However if we
look at machines as not being independent from their operation, being
(existence) and configuration would include a relation with humans --
then it is possible to think about this question in another way: the
consciousness of machines comes from their relations to humans. Is
this just another form of the cyborg, but reimagined with your
thoughts on the "body as that which extends technology inside of
itself" in mind -- a reverse cyborg?

One wonders whether all technology is an adaptation to human input --
as in the end it serves human purposes. But you are really talking
about something else that has to do with essential humanness and
perception. Think about the brain's capacity for recognition of the
human/animal physiognomy -- faces. Looking for faces in technological
data says something more about the function of the brain than the
constituents of electronic signals. Searching for pattern in
randomness has many implications.

Your notion of harvesting the technological imaginary is engaging and
conjures up a new breed of farmers -- new crops, new tools, new food.

CTHEORY: The idea of the processed metaphor reminds me of what you
have called the "prestomorphic" -- which I may have misinterpreted,
but I think may still be worth following-up. It seems that
discussions such as these, at a certain point, begin to reverse on
themselves. The machines are made to hallucinate but their
hallucinations are on purpose and with logic if not reason, yet no
less substantial for their explanation. I want to say that the
concepts become quickly about a logic of failure, except that I don't
know that the concept of failure applies anymore in the system you
have created -- which turns it immediately into something else.

At stake, perhaps, is the logic of pareidolia -- a logic that can
never be self-evident because its very evidence relies on a
transgression of logic. It is an improper hallucination that presents
itself as a hallucination -- instead a hallucination must mistake
itself as real -- making the mistake, rather than the image, the
mechanism of the phenomenon. But this, again, just to confess in
advance that I'm caught in the prestomorphic imagination of these
dialogues -- catching up in retrospect to a conversation we've
already had.

EBP: The pareidolic impulse, particularly in ~Ghosts in the Machine~,
is one that is predicated on a mistake -- an identification of
something as something it is not -- i.e an index of something. This
is not to our minds a hallucination proper but rather some sort of
withheld or withdrawn revelation -- something on the point of being
revealed, but immediately lost, through its very appearance, leaving
only a felt event. The subject as a maker of meaning is compromised
by the role that the subject is assigned. The subject is subjected to
a flow of information that can never settle into any sort of
coherence. The machine is lost in a machinic reverie, abandoned by
the very means of its reverie -- a kind of psychotic break occasioned
not by the interpretative capacities of the viewer, but simply by her
presence or absence.

CTHEORY: But even the psychotic has momentum -- perhaps in this case
the momentum of what you referred to as the "white hole" -- an
intriguing concept. I'm not quite sure what to make of such an idea
-- it is not quite a black-hole in rewind, yet the difference, if I
understand, is temporal rather than directional. In some ways,
perhaps, this is not unlike Walter Benjamin's angel of history, blown
forward forcefully into the future by the wake of the accumulation of
time. Here the wake comes first, followed by the historic
accumulation -- as if to suggest that material history simply tags
along, surfing the waves of momentum it will eventually cause. At
some point before one reaches the future, the past catches up -- the
event horizon is the condition of attraction, but attraction is the
wake in advance -- defining the event horizon itself. I can
understand why you alluded to this as a rapture, but if I understand
correctly it would be a purposefully ambiguous rapture -- one of
which one cannot quite be certain but within which one nevertheless
is immersed?

EBP: The white hole enables some ideas about a constantly receding
event horizon. In this system events are atemporal, but still
spatialized, with no past or future -- but an imagined future past
that reconstitutes itself as the present. Like frames of a film, the
images in ~Ghosts in the Machine~ have disappeared before they are
seen. The images are always receding, never quite disclosed, never
quite seen -- but still persistent. The local becomes a distributed
local -- n-dimensional, alocal and atemporal. Just as there isn't
really a now, just sense that it is neither past nor yet to be, so
there is an equivalent loss of here, just a sense of an impending
there. Now these are synthetics displayed in all too substantial
galleries and spaces, but this is where the work becomes most
interesting for us. The constantly receding event and its connection
to an invisible past, reconstitutes these spaces as n-dimensional, as
rapturous.

CTHEORY: It's almost as if you're suggesting an answer to the
question of whether a tree falling in the forest makes a noise if
there's nobody there to hear it -- in this case the paradoxical
answer is that one does not have to be in a forest to hear a tree
fall. It's not a ~trompe l'oeil~ but a ~trompe logique~ -- perception
that goes beyond telematic or non-local to become hyper-local -- so
specific to context that its context has been internalized in
advance. This is what I take you to mean with the term
"prestomorphic" as well -- part physics part magic, but with
perceptual effects that are immediate enough to demand
acknowledgment, even if their status remains open to question.

EBP: Presto refers not only to the quickness of the metamorphic
process, but also to its sleight of hand. Unseen, unheard, but
present. Imagine a simple shape generated from the rapid oscillation
between a cube and a sphere. Imagine that this happens at random
speeds and at random intervals. At any one moment the shape is caught
between two states -- total cube-ness and total sphericality. But if
the noticed moment is always in the past, as it must be, then the
object no longer occupies any space at all. It exists as a future
presence (really a prescience), but not as a thing. The prestomorphic
is a way to spatialize the irrational. We can imagine a past, a
future past and a future, but not a present. The present, such as it
is, is comprised of moments yet to come or already gone, constituting
a never-now and never-here.

CTHEORY: The idea of the irrational is one we haven't really touched
directly, but is really important to your work. This is perhaps the
place where the question of interface returns as a framing of the
rational or irrational -- from a human perspective these questions
look quite different than from a technological perspective, even if
the actual images we see are identical. I find it fascinating how
your work extends this interpretive difference. You speak at some
length about how the aim is to provide not only an event, but a
context for the viewer and for the machine -- a situation of
unbalanced potentialities that, perhaps, is intended as allegory for
our own acts (or failures) of subjective processing.

EBP: The link with technologically induced states of mind is
increasingly common -- technology is a state of being in which we
partake. It's part of a flow that requires both subject and object in
a continuous looping, stretching, expanding, contracting. As we have
suggested before it's difficult to know exactly where one ends and
other begins -- or even if there are beginnings and endings rather
than just states in motions. When we talk about pareidolia as
something being revealed and at the same immediately lost, one can
see it as an index of uncertainty. This happens at the level of the
image. If we consider painters like Rembrandt -- creating images to
be seen at a distance, which upon closer examination transformed
themselves into material, or Monet's Rheims cathedral series -- when
approached dissolve into globs of paints. Can we say this about
earlier television when the objects of our own perception disappear
in a haze of projected light and pixels? Are not these images
material hallucinations?

It is interesting that you speak of the machine's subjectivity, but
difficult to begin to understand what you mean by the spectacle of
failure -- unless you are suggesting that the noise factor is a
subversion of the machine's function. There has been lots of creative
use of techno failure in the in the 90's -- glitch music for example
-- and more recently a whole host of experiments in authenticity
revolving around ideas of sonic hauntology.

CTHEORY: That's a really interesting comparison that hadn't occurred
to me -- but yes, isn't there something "glitch" to these works of
pattern recognition? Your works are different in that they include an
interrogation of agency and processing -- they are not reducible to
an aesthetic formalism -- but still there is something similar in the
project of rendering "something from nothing" so to speak. Perhaps
the big difference has to do with the connotations of electronic
voice phenomenon (EVP) -- your work raises the possibility that there
is actually something there -- that the machines "see" something in
the darkness that is not only noise, if only because the pattern
recognition software in fact recognizes a pattern. It's almost as if
this whole series of conversations could be summarized into a theory
of consciousness as EVP -- subjectivity as that which translates
noisy data into plausible patterns of recorded image and voice.

EBP: With the search for hallucinations in noise there are many
possibilities for interpretation -- and a subjective component is
always present. Another way of looking at noise is to see it as a
bodily characteristic -- as energy. Also another factor is to be
found in the way the brain operates -- formation and matching --
these are two fundamental actions, two flows that produce meaning,
but it's always a fluid process. What you have said about
potentiality and a new notion of phenomenology is really interesting
-- it seems that what you are talking about is the introduction of
time as a more vital component -- not time as space, but time as
duration -- so you can have probability as well as indeterminacy. But
there is a place for the senses, in terms of sensation -- the
thinking/feeling, or feeling/thinking.

Earlier we talked about "the machine being lost in a machinic reverie
abandoned by the very means of its reverie -- a kind of psychotic
break occasioned not by the interpretative capacities of the viewer,
but simply by her presence or absence... " The way into this is to
think of the machinic reverie as a series of flows between the viewer
and the machine, but the nature of these flows are marked by their
intensities. This ties into the notion of the flows receding. There
is a wonderful sentence in Bergson's _Time and Free Will_: "we shall
see that time, conceived under the form of an unbounded and
homogenous medium is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the
reflective consciousness... "[4] This seems to connect to the white
hole -- the notion of time as a fleeing ghost of space, and the use
of terms like prestomorphic are entirely bound up with spatial
formations. It seems like a version of Zeno's famous paradox where
you are always half-way there, as if to ask the question of what is
the dimension between 0 and 1.

CTHEORY: Well this is probably a very nice note to end on -- the
prestomorphic note of a conversation caught between its catalyst and
possible modes for continuation. A prestomorphic imagination,
perhaps, as that which best represents what might be called an
emergent theory of pareidolic subjectivity growing obliquely -- or
rendered as machinic instantiation -- under the sign of the
Einstein's Brain Project. Thank you both again for what I think has
been a provocative and engaging conversation.

Notes
----------------

[1] Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow, "Body from the Machine: the
spectral flesh," _Proceeding of the Digital Arts and Culture
Conference_, 2009, University of California, Irvine, 2009. Available
online at:http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7hm6h6q2.pdf

[2] Ibid.

[3] Brian Massumi, "The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens,"
_Inflexions_ 1.1 "How is Research-Creation?" (May 2008)
www.inflexions.org

[4] Henri Bergson. _Time and Free Will_, New York: Dover
Publications, 2001, p.99.

----------------

THE EINSTEIN'S BRAIN PROJECT was formed by two artists, Alan Dunning
and Paul Woodrow in 1996, out of a common interest in an expanded
field of art practice that included science and technology. The
science was focused upon the brain and an investigation of
consciousness. Dr. Morley Hollenberg, a pharmacologist and inter
cellular communication expert, joined the collaboration perhaps a
year later, bringing a knowledge of scientific methodology, theory,
and research practices to the collaboration, that resulted in
refining the Project's ideas about the possibilities of art and
science as distinct yet symbiotic modes of inquiry.

The project's work is featured in several recent books,
_Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen_,
(Springer, 2008), _Art and Electronic Media_ (Phaidon, 2009), _Acting
Bodies: Embodying Computing Power. Bodies, Memory and Technology_,
(University Press of America, 2009), _New Realities: Being
Syncretic_, Consciousness Reframed (Springer Wien New York, 2009) and
_Art and Science_ (Thames and Hudson, 2010)

Additional information and samples of past projects can be found at:
http://www.bodydegreezero.org

----------------

Alan Dunning has been working with complex computer supported
installations for the past two decades. He has exhibited widely
including group and solo shows in North and South America, Europe and
the UK and is represented in many collections including the National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He
has received major research awards from the Canada Council, La
Fondation Daniel Langlois, the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, the Association of Commonwealth
Universities, and the Marion Fund. Alan Dunning currently teaches in
the Media Arts and Digital Technologies at the Alberta College of Art
and Design in Calgary, and is an Adjunct Professor in Computing
Science at the University of Calgary.

Paul Woodrow has been involved in a variety of inter-disciplinary and
multi-media activities since the late 1960s, including performance
art, installation, improvised music, painting, and video. He was a
co-founder of W.O.R.K.S., the internationally recognized performance
group and has collaborated with many artists including Iain Baxter
(N.E. Thing Co.), Herve Fischer (The Sociological Art Group of
Paris), Genesis P. Orridge (Coum Transmissions, England), and Clive
Roberstson (W.O.R.K.S., Canada). His more recent work consists of
multi-media installations, using video projection and sound. He has
exhibited extensively since the early seventies, including at the 4th
St. Petersburg Biennale (Russia) where he exhibited a version of the
interactive VR work Einstein's Brain, the Museum of Modern Art in
Stockholm (Sweden) the Tate Gallery (London), as well as in Japan,
Belgium, Spain, France, Puerto Rico, Canada, the United States, and
South America. Professor Woodrow has received numerous awards from
the Canada Council for the Arts, The Social Sciences and Humanities
Council of Canada and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and
currently teaches Art Theory and Studio at the University of Calgary.

Ted Hiebert is a Canadian visual artist and theorist. His artworks
have been shown across Canada in public galleries and artist-run
centres, and in group exhibitions internationally. His theoretical
writings have appeared in, among others, _The Psychoanalytic Review_,
_Technoetic Arts_, _Performance Research_ and _CTheory_, as well as
in catalogues and exhibition monographs. Hiebert is a member of the
Editorial Board of _CTheory_, and an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of
Washington Bothell.http://www.tedhiebert.net

_____________________________________________________________________

*
* CTHEORY is an international peer-reviewed journal of theory,
* technology and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book
* reviews in contemporary discourse are published weekly as
* well as theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the
* mediascape.
*
* Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
*
* Editorial Board: Paul Virilio (Paris), Bruce Sterling (Turin),
* Siegfried Zielinski (Academy of Media Arts, Cologne), Stelarc
* (Nottingham Trent University), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (New
* York City), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco Art Institute),
* Stephen Pfohl (Boston College), Andrew Ross (New York University),
* Timothy Murray (Cornell University), Eugene Thacker (The New
* School), Steve Dixon (Brunel University), Anna Munster (University
* of New South Wales), Warren Magnusson (University of Victoria),
* Paul Hegarty (University College Cork), Joan Hawkins (Indiana
* University), Frances Dyson (University of California Davis), Mary
* Bryson (University of British Columbia), William Bogard (Whitman
* College) Andrew Wernick (Trent University), Maurice Charland
* (Concordia University).
*
* In Memoriam: Jean Baudrillard and Kathy Acker
*
* Editorial Assistant: Aya Walraven
* WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET)
* WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman

_____________________________________________________________________

To view CTHEORY online please visit:
http://www.ctheory.net/

To view CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA online please visit:
http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/

_____________________________________________________________________

* CTHEORY includes:
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* 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory.
*
* 2. Electronic articles on theory, technology and culture.
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*
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*
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* The Editors would like to thank the University of Victoria for
* financial and intellectual support of CTheory. In particular, the
* Editors would like to thank the Dean of Social Sciences, Dr. C.
* Peter Keller, and the members of the Department of Political
* Science.
*
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* copyright, which covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and
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* may be translated, reproduced, photographed or stored on
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* Victoria, BC, Canada, V8W 3P5.
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Friday, 26 November 2010

The Pirate Bay: Countervailing power and the problem of state organized crime
Topic: technology, internet, economics
Presented by Biodun Iginla, News and Tech Analyst for BBC News

=============================================================
d

~Leon Tan~

Introduction
------------

In the short space of a decade, the Internet based circulation of
information in the form of media files has become highly
controversial, giving rise to allegations of piracy and theft by a
host of artists and media firms. This article constructs a case for
online file-sharing or so-called 'media piracy' as a form of
political-economic claims-making involving consumer populations,
professional artists, media firms and governments in ongoing
contention. File-sharing activities and the online social networks
that sustain them are treated as 'repertoires of contention' to use a
concept from Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow. When taken up by users
on a massive social scale, online repertoires of contention enable
the production of what the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith
called countervailing power. They make possible the emergence of
'autonomous zones' or 'strategic sovereigns' that resist lines of
prevailing power in the *absence* of competition, and in the
particular example in question -- Sweden -- in the presence of state
collusion with anti-market forces. The collusion of governments with
oligopolies raises serious problems for citizen-constituencies, and
is discussed as a kind of 'organized crime' related to a wave of
de-democratization. What makes such alliances more troubling is the
fact that file-sharing has not demonstrably 'damaged' the creative
industries as a whole, but appears to have contributed to
world-economic transformations including an increase in creative
production and an expansion and globalization of media markets. To be
clear about the scope of this article, the objective is not to
predict the future or to solve all the problems posed by copyright
and file-sharing, but rather to problematize the concept of piracy
using the example of The Pirate Bay, and to portray the affordances
of virtual repertoires of contention and countervailing power for a
community of small-scale economic actors. In pursuit of this
objective, what is offered is a theoretical framework with which to
think about the political-economy of networked media, and a snapshot
of part of the unfolding history of networked media cultures,
including within it the voices of file-sharers.

File-sharing and Media Piracy
-----------------------------

Online file-sharing is a form of social relation involving the
exchange of digital files, especially but not exclusively media such
as music, movies, games and software. In this article, we are
concerned primarily with 'free' file-sharing of the kind made popular
by peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. Free in this context means that users
are not making direct payments for the uploading and downloading of
files, even if payments are made between advertisers and software
vendors on the basis of user traffic. As a social habit, file-sharing
depends on the Internet's capacity to circulate digital information
cheaply and rapidly without regard for physical distances. Napster
was perhaps one of its first famous incarnations, providing
technology that allowed individuals to easily copy and distribute
music (mp3) files amongst each other, thereby circumventing
pre-existing market pricing and distribution structures entirely.
According to the Pew Internet Project's research, file-sharing is
common to a sizeable and active population of so-called 'freeloaders'
or 'free-riders.' In 2000 for instance, Rainie, Fox and Lenhart
observe, "some 14% of Internet users, about 13 million Americans,
have downloaded free music files on the Internet that they do not own
in other forms." [1] By 2003, the file-sharing community in the US
nearly tripled to 35 million. [2] In 2009, Madden cites
BigChampagne's research in estimating the size of the p2p universe
"at more than 200 million computers with at least one peer-to-peer
application installed." [3] In Sweden, Findahl of the World Internet
Institute observes a steady increase in file-sharing between
1992-2006, and in 2007, finds 14% of the population or roughly 1
million Swedes engaged in file-sharing, noting the presence of "a
group who have quit sharing files, but may resume at some time in the
future." [4] In 2009, Svenska Dagbladet (a Swedish daily newspaper)
reports findings by the International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry (IFPI) that 40% of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 74, or
2.8 million, engage in file-sharing, [5] a figure more or less in
keeping with the growth trajectory observed by Findahl. Rather than
calculating file sharer percentages in various populations,
Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf provide a different measure of the
popularity of file-sharing, observing how "more than 60% of Internet
traffic consists of consumers sharing music, movies, books and
games." [6] Such a figure supports the estimation of a sizeable
population of file-sharers in the hundreds of millions across the
entire online world economy today.

File-sharing may be considered a form of 'economic claims-making'
insofar as it composes exchange relations associated with sets of
means (music, movies, games and software). While the economic claims
made in file-sharing of copyright-expired material, home videos,
unsigned music and other forms of 'user-generated' content may pass
without much conflict, the situation is altogether different where
copyright protected media are concerned. In the sociological
framework of Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, such claims-making
becomes *contentious* at the point when it impinges on others:
"Contention involves making claims that bear on someone else's
interests." [7] When Napster first emerged between 1999 and 2001 it
rapidly attracted the attention of music firms, who perceived their
prevailing economic claims (revenue streams) as being undermined
through the free circulation of copyrighted music. Music firms were
quick to file charges of mass copyright violations against Napster in
a US court using the organizational vehicle of the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA). Napster was shut down in 2001 under
judicial order. This meant little, however, to millions of
file-sharers or 'peers,' who simply migrated to the many
decentralized file-sharing communities that subsequently emerged. [8]

Other test cases followed on the heels of the Napster landmark
ruling, with the RIAA losing in 2003 against two p2p file-sharing
assemblages [9] Morpheus and Grokster when a judge determined that
the software, or in other words, the means, for p2p file-sharing was
itself legal. The RIAA promptly shifted their attention from suing
software firms to suing individual file-sharers. Meanwhile,
innovations emerged allowing file-sharers to encrypt Internet traffic
or making it difficult to track in other ways, offering a degree of
protection from exposure to a nascent community. Almost a decade
later, despite the strident economic claims and contention of media
firms, file-sharing has become more rather than less popular.
Protective tools have also become more sophisticated, with the
Swedish IPredator, [10] for example, providing users with encrypted
tunnels and switching their IP addresses for anonymous ones for a
fee. During this time, lobby organizations representing the interests
of media oligopolies [11] including the IFPI and the Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA) joined the RIAA in expanding copyright
related claims-making into a transnational initiative, successfully
motivating the Swedish government to take action recently against one
of today's most well known file-sharing assemblages, The Pirate Bay
(TPB). [12]

The concept 'media piracy' owes its origins at least partly to the
ongoing contention between media firms and file-sharing populations.
'Piracy' is a term that is actively used by organizations including
the RIAA, MPAA and IFPI to characterize file-sharing involving
copyrighted media as theft. Such a characterization is highly
problematic for numerous reasons. First, as William Patry observes,
"In Dowling v. United States, the United States Supreme Court held
that copyright infringement was not 'stealing' within the meaning of
the National Stolen Property Act." [13] Secondly, as James Boyle
argues, intellectual 'property' claims should not be treated in the
same way as material property claims, given differences such as the
generally non-rival characteristics of software and digital media.
[14] Thirdly, no differentiation tends to be made between personal
and commercial file-sharing, and yet, personal use has in the main
been "lawful by long tradition" according to Jessica Litman. [15]
Indeed Litman correctly observes that while US copyright law fails to
explicitly specify personal use rights, readers, listeners and
viewers have historically enjoyed a host of *copyright liberties*
involving the personal use of content, provided for by the very
architecture of the system. Personal uses, Litman argues, "occupy the
heart of copyright's historic liberties to enjoy copyrighted works."
[16] Fourthly, the claims of financial loss and 'damage' to the
creative (music and motion picture) industries are not only difficult
to quantify but also problematized by an increase in creative
production across multiple formats, and an expansion of markets for
complementary goods and services such as concerts and merchandise.
[17] Lastly, the disproportionate power of media oligopolies in
relation to individual consumers vis-à-vis state (legislative) bodies
has meant the prevailing of their interests in expanding the scope of
intellectual property rights, over those of the public in personal or
so-called 'fair use,' [18] not to mention free speech and privacy.
Far from being universally accepted, claims and accusations of media
piracy and theft instead form the basis for continuing cycles of
contention.

While the claims for and against file-sharing are clearly economic in
nature, concerning dynamics of resource distribution and exchange
relations, they are also *political* insofar as they concern the
pursuit of desired lifestyles, different and new modes of life and
patterns of social expression that problematize existing legislative
regimes and economic distributions. For our purposes, economic claims
become political whenever appeals to government authority are made,
whether direct or indirect. As Charles Tilly explains,

Claim making becomes political when governments -- or more
generally, individuals or organizations that control
concentrated means of coercion -- become parties to the claims,
as claimants, objects of claims, or stake holders... Contention
occurs everywhere, but contentious politics involves
governments, at least as third parties. [19]

As we will see shortly in the case of TPB, claims-making is *both*
political *and* economic, involving the action of the Swedish courts
in what Tilly and Tarrow call the 'certification' [20] or validation
of claims. The certification function typically rests with
governments on account of the control such organizations exert over
coercive means and legislative and judicial privileges (the right to
create and interpret laws).

The Pirate Bay as Virtual Repertoire of Contention
--------------------------------------------------

In their analysis of conversation rituals and dynamics of contention
between citizen populations and governments, Tilly and Tarrow observe
that different political regimes and authority structures afford
different opportunities and risks for the organized expression of
claims and contention. [21] Using the examples of the US and Swedish
world-economies, periodic elections, referendums, boycotts, public
marches and industrial strikes constitute formal and informal
components in what they would call a 'repertoire of contention'. A
repertoire of contention provides the means by which groups of
individuals express claims, frequently in terms of agreement and
disagreement with the authority structures to which they are subject.
Tilly and Tarrow provide extensive accounts of the dynamics of social
organizing and contention in existing world-economies, [22] making it
unnecessary to dwell on these *actual* repertoires of contention.
Instead the focus here is on a *virtual* repertoire of contention
made possible by Internetworked tools and social practices. Virtual
repertoires of contention emerge from the combination of expressive
technologies with global accessibility and massive social uptake,
forming online social networks, virtual publics and markets, enabling
individuals and groups to express collective identities, claims and
contention easily, both within and beyond the authority structures
governing their immediate geopolitical locales.

TPB is one of today's most in/famous file-sharing assemblages, at one
point reaching traffic peaks of "close to 25 million unique visitors
per month." [23] It was established in 2003 by Swedish anti-copyright
organization Piratbyrån (Piracy Bureau), [24] a loosely-knit
collective founded in 2001, motivated by disagreement with prevailing
understandings and regimes of copyright, and opposition to the
industry funded anti-piracy lobby group Svenska Antipiratbyrån
(Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau). [25] As a file-sharing mechanism, TPB
provides a centralized repository of .torrent files used by the
BitTorrent protocol and, until recently, also functioned as a
tracker. It will be useful to explain a little about Bit-torrent at
the outset for those unfamiliar with the technology. BitTorrent is a
p2p (many-to-many) file-sharing protocol optimized for distributing
large files rapidly, whose use depends on a number of components --
torrents, trackers and clients. Sharing a file or group of files
using BitTorrent requires the creation of a small file called a
torrent containing metadata about the file/s to be shared including
the urls of tracker sites and names and hash values of the file/s
described. A tracker is any server that coordinates p2p file-sharing
by identifying the network locations of clients uploading and
downloading files associated with torrents. Trackers may be open like
TPB, where anyone may search for and download torrent files, or
closed, in which case subscription fees and/or recommendations by
peers are required for access. A BitTorrent client -- such as the
software program Vuze [26] -- enables file-sharers to search for and
download torrents and the files they point to from networked peers.
In 2009, TPB implemented magnet links across the site, which unlike
.torrent files, rely on hash values (and not names or locations) to
identify desired content. The advantage of magnet links is that
BitTorrent indexers may save on bandwidth by allowing only the hash
values of .torrent files to be downloaded, with clients subsequently
using these values to locate first the desired torrent, and then the
file it points to, from peers. TPB also began promoting the use of
the DHT (Distributed Hash Table) and PEX (Peer Exchange) systems as
increasingly viable alternatives to centralized trackers. Their main
advantage is to make it unnecessary for file-sharers "to rely on a
single server that stores and distributes torrent files." [27] At the
time of writing TPB still provides .torrent files alongside magnet
links, but has allowed its tracking function to fall into disuse.

Consisting of the means for peers to establish connections regardless
of physical distances, communicate with each other, and share files
hosted ultimately by a globally distributed network, TPB constitutes
a virtual repertoire of contention enabling the expression of
political-economic claims. Whereas actual repertoires of contention
are invariably land-locked, virtual repertoires of contention on the
other hand tend to be *globalizing* in their effect on actual
world-economies, contributing to an "increase in the volume and speed
of flows of capital, goods, information, ideas, people, and forces
connecting actors across countries." [28] In globalizing claims and
contention, virtual repertoires enable redistributions of market
power, offering to populations of small-scale economic actors the
potential to gain a more even footing in relation to 'capitalist' or
'anti-market' organizations exercising concentrated economic power in
actual markets. Whereas isolated individuals rarely possess the
market power to influence terms of exchange relations with large
firms and oligopolies, the cumulative action of swarms [29] of
individuals expressing claims collectively online may be sufficient
to produce what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith calls
'countervailing power'. [30] Countervailing power is a market
mechanism distinct from competition, yet both mechanisms involve the
restraint of concentrated economic power. The sections to follow deal
first with the difference between competition and countervailing
power, next, with contentious relations between file-sharers, TPB,
media firms and the Swedish state, and finally with the problem of
state organized crime and an associated de-democratization.

Competition and Countervailing Power
------------------------------------

Although popularly characterized as 'capitalist' after the end of the
Cold War, the world economy and its component world-economies in fact
consist of a multiplicity of actors, relations and dynamics. The
economic historian Fernand Braudel distinguishes between at least two
kinds of exchange relations, one he calls 'capitalism' and the other
'market economy.' He characterizes the two sets of relations thus:

There are two types of exchange: one is down-to-earth, is based
on competition, and is almost transparent; the other, a higher
form, is sophisticated and domineering. Neither the same
mechanisms nor the same agents govern these two types of
activity, and the capitalist sphere is located in the higher
form. [31]

According to Braudel, the market economy exemplified by town markets
is founded on competition. In a market economy, goods and services
are provided and prices set by processes of more or less free
bargaining. In such collectively owned markets, conventions, rituals,
and rules tend to be known in advance, such that "the always moderate
profits can be roughly calculated beforehand," [32] and buyers and
sellers tend to interact on an "eye to eye and hand to hand" [33]
basis. Market economies are competitive in that the capacity or power
to express economic claims and contention consequentially is
distributed more or less equally across component assemblages; there
are neither significant barriers to entry nor high concentrations of
economic power in any actor.

Capitalism on the other hand, is characterized by the exercise of
concentrated economic power, and exemplified by monopolies and
oligopolies. For Braudel, capitalism is fundamentally
*anti-competitive*, for which reason he calls such assemblages
'anti-markets' to emphasize their radical difference from collective
and competitive market economy dynamics. Braudel considers this form
of exchange relation unequal, pinpointing two mechanisms exploited by
anti-markets:

It is obvious that here we are dealing with unequal exchanges in
which competition -- the basic law of the so-called market
economy -- had little place and in which the dealer had two
trump cards: he had broken off relations between the producer
and the person who eventually received the merchandise (only the
dealer knew the market conditions at both ends of the chain and
hence the profit to be expected); and he had ready cash, which
served as his chief ally. [34]

The two trump cards facilitate the concentration of economic
power, privileging a handful of capitalist assemblages over others in
the capacity to express consequential economic claims and contention.
[35] Where anti-markets are concerned, in place of competition, goods
and services are provided and prices set or 'managed' by *command*.
[36]

As a market mechanism, competition solves the problem of concentrated
economic power through restraint on the same side of the market. In
Galbraith's words, competition involves "the restraint of sellers by
other sellers and of buyers by other buyers." [37] Yet as Galbraith
argues, restraint on concentrated economic power may also emerge from
the opposite side of the market. He calls this concept
'countervailing power', which is explained as follows:

The fact that a seller enjoys a measure of power, and is reaping
a measure of monopoly return as a result, means that there is an
inducement to those firms from whom he buys or those to whom he
sells to develop the power with which they can defend themselves
against exploitation. It means also that there is a reward to
them, in the form of a share of the gains of their opponents'
market power, if they are able to do so. In this way, the
existence of market power creates an incentive to the
organization of another position of power that neutralizes it.
[38]

Using Galbraith's concept, trade unions, consumer activist groups and
even online file-sharing may all be considered forms of
countervailing power, involving the *self-organizing* [39] of other
positions of power to neutralize concentrated power in existing
world-economies, *from the opposite side of the market*.

As a form of countervailing power, trade unions (at least in the US)
arose on the side of workers/employees to counteract harsh and
exploitative labor conditions [40] imposed by owners and managers of
anti-markets. Consumer activist movements such as Wake Up Walmart,
[41] or the older Consumer Federation of California, [42] emerged
from the efforts of disgruntled buyers organizing to neutralize the
anti-social exercise of concentrated power by capitalist sellers. In
the example of TPB, online file-sharing produces a globalized
countervailing power on the side of millions of consumers, whose
claims-making directly challenges existing media pricing and
distribution structures. In each case, the successful exercise of
countervailing power in a world-economy effectively redistributes
market power, producing real transformations in economic actors and
relations. As we will see, file-sharing as countervailing power even
resists the power of the Swedish courts, spawning more overtly
political organizations such as Piratpartiet (The Pirate Party,
Sweden) [43] as well as innovations in media pricing and distribution
such as Spotify and Voddler (discussed later). While the existence
and prevalence of countervailing power means that markets do not
necessarily require direct intervention from governments (to remedy
'failures' due to the absence of competition), serious problems arise
when courts and states become involved in certifying the claims of
media firms, creative producers and consumer populations. The
specific problem in this case concerns a 'democratic' government's
allegiances to a handful of large firms on one hand, and its own
citizen-constituencies on the other. Jessica Litman's account of the
recent history of 'digital copyright' legislation in the US portrays
a massive expansion of rights of a small group of copyright holders
aided by Congress and the law courts, and a consequent erosion of
copyright liberties, that is, the entitlements of the public to
noncommercial enjoyment (reading, listening and viewing) of the works
in question. [44] In these circumstances, one is forced to ask how
the privileging of claims of copyright holders over those of
literally millions of file-sharers squares with the democratic
principle of the rule-of-many?

The Contentious Politics of File-sharing in Sweden
--------------------------------------------------

The Swedish file-sharing site TPB has been involved in legal disputes
for the better part of its existence, largely on account of its
popularity and torrent hosting and tracking activities. While TPB
undoubtedly facilitates the sharing of copyrighted materials, it has
thus far escaped the fate of being shut down by law courts because it
merely hosts and saves torrents and *not* the files to which they
point. As TPB explain on their website, "[o]nly torrent files are
saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal
material are stored by us." [45] This and other declarations by TPB
have, however, failed to deter a largely American copyright-owning
oligopoly from lobbying the Swedish state for support in their
economic claims-making and contention, resulting in a police raid on
TPB in 2006.

In 2006 it transpired that the perseverance of The Pirate Bay
and the fact that Swedish authorities could do little by way of
forcibly closing it down had prompted Americans to lobby the
Swedish government on the ministerial level. According to the
Swedish public service broadcaster SVT (2006), this was the
initial cause for the May 2006 police raid on the site. [46]

While the May raid temporarily disrupted TPB's website, no charges
were filed and the site was back in operation within days. In 2008,
at the instigation of firms including Sony BMG Music, EMI Music,
Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal Music and Warner
Bros., Stockholm District Court Prosecutor Håkan Roswall began formal
legal proceedings against TPB organizers and a backer -- Hans Fredrik
Lennart Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and
Carl Ulf Sture Lundström -- charging them with conspiracy to break
copyright law in Sweden. [47]

In the ensuing trial in 2009, the Stockholm District Court found the
defendants guilty of "assisting in making copyright content
available," issuing a fine and one-year jail sentences. [48] TPB
organizers and Carl Lundström have since submitted appeals, and as of
September 2010, are awaiting a verdict, while in the meantime TPB
continues hosting torrents undeterred. With its decentralized
distribution of components, the BitTorrent protocol enables
relatively powerless individual consumers to self-organize as a
larger scale economic actor with a distinctive (if controversial)
identity and existence. TPB's ability to distribute its own servers
globally further ensures its survival *regardless* of the rulings of
Swedish courts. As TPB co-founder Peter Sunde explains in an
interview with David Kravets,

It's a distributed system. We don't know where the servers are.
We gave them to people we trust and they don't know it's The
Pirate Bay... They then rent locations and space for them
somewhere else. It could be three countries. It could be six
countries. We don't want to know because then you'll have a
problem shutting them down. [49]

In globalizing itself, TPB constitutes a countervailing power of
sufficient force and coherence to resist, neutralize and transform
(to an extent) prevailing concentrations of power in anti-markets
including all the plaintiffs in the trial, and to challenge states
that have come out in support of anti-market forces, notably the US
and Swedish governments.

The specific claims on both sides of prevailing and countervailing
power may be discerned most readily in conversations in which their
component assemblages participate. On the side of media firms,
file-sharing quite simply constitutes copyright infringement and
theft. The over-riding claims are therefore that consumers should
stay within the terms of existing pricing and distribution regimes
dictated largely by the content industries, and that TPB are
willfully causing financial damage.

'The Pirate Bay operation has caused massive financial damage to
rights holders,' said Ludvig Werner, chairman of the Swedish arm
of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
'The profiteers behind The Pirate Bay have no interest in free
speech, and they are not running The Pirate Bay because they
love music and films. They are totally mercenary.' [50]

It is not surprising then that the claims of media firms logically
extend to demands for financial compensation for lost revenues. The
guilty verdict delivered by the Swedish court in 2009 certifies these
claims of financial damage to an extent, particularly in the
imposition of a fine on the defendants. If the claims are not clear
enough, the letter sent in 2007 to Swedish Justice Minister Åsa
Torstensson by heads of trade groups including IFPI CEO John Kennedy
is instructive. It urges "that swift and decisive action is taken in
Sweden against one of the world's biggest engines of Internet
copyright infringement -- The Pirate Bay," describing TPB activities
as "massive piracy of music." [51]

On the side of file-sharers, claims-making and contention is also
very clear and may be found in TPB user forums [52] as well as in TPB
blog posts and their comments. [53] In its 2009 New Year Greetings on
both the homepage and blog, for example, TPB criticizes the collusion
of states and anti-markets, particularly where these have resulted in
incursions against human rights and civil liberties.

Happy new year! The past year has been good to all of us. Next
year won't be as good, is our sad prediction. File-sharing will
not be very affected but our rights as human beings are being
infringed on all the time. New laws are passed all over the
world and especially here in Sweden. We're very sad by this so
we hope that we are proven wrong. Anyhow, happy
1984^H^H^H^H20009! Let's continue to break some new records this
year as well! [54]

While organizations such as the MPAA, RIAA and IFPI may be within
their legal rights [55] to express claims on the side of prevailing
power, it must be recognized that existing legal frameworks
regulating copyright derive from pre-Internet economies, and were for
that matter shaped largely by the content industries. New media
practices and social realities, however, demand a renewal of concepts
and even new legal frameworks, a point taken up by Lawrence Lessig
(among others). [56] For Lessig as for TPB, a clear distinction
should be made between commercial and personal use. Attempting to
apply blanket copyright laws across commercial *and* personal domains
inevitably raises problems of human rights violations.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or UDHR, adopted by the
United Nations General Assembly since 1948, emerges from a
long-running conversation between individuals and groups populating
the world economy at large, which stretches "from the Hammurabi Codes
of ancient Babylon to the mandates of the League of Nations." [57] As
such, it may be considered part and parcel of long-term bargains
struck between governments and populations in the world economy. Of
its articles, four may be singled out for their relevance to our
discussion, Articles 12, 19, 20 and 27:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his
privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his
honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection
of the law against such interference or attacks (Article 12);

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression;
this right includes freedom to hold opinions without
interference and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers (Article
19);

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and
association (Article 20);

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural
life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in
scientific advancement and its benefits (Article 27).

Together, the four articles specify rights to privacy and freedom of
opinion and expression as well as the right to take part in a
community's cultural life. In practical terms, they may be
interpreted to mean that individuals have the right to circulate
information and opinions regardless of media formats and borders, to
gather together to form larger scale assemblages (such as TPB), to
carry out such activities in private (i.e. free from surveillance),
and to share in the benefits of technological developments (such as
the BitTorrent protocol and Internet based repertoires of
contention). It is concerning that to date little critical attention
has been given to the relation of intellectual property legislation
to international and national frameworks for human rights protection.
[58]

It is worth remembering that many consumers even before the Internet
already enjoyed copyright liberties including personal use. Listening
to music with friends and family has for instance gone on for as long
as records, cassettes and CDs have been around. Until recently in the
US, Litman observes, "Congress has consistently viewed copyright as
securing copyright owners' opportunities to exploit works without
invading individuals' liberties to enjoy works." [59] Similarly,
Boyle notes that legal rights granted to copyright holders have
always been limited. As he writes, "[o]ne cannot start from the
presumption that the rights holder has absolute rights over all
possible uses and therefore that any time a citizen makes use of the
work in any way, the rights holder is entitled to get paid or to
claim 'piracy' if he does not get paid." [60] It is perhaps with such
thoughts in mind that Peter Sunde makes the following remarks in an
interview with Thomas Mennecke (2008):

They are abusing the fact that most people do not know their own
rights. They do not respect the people in general so we have no
respect for them. We think that the copyright needs to be
changed to fit the current climate of usage and taken the
distribution platform into respect. The opposite side thinks
that they need to close the Internet down so they won't lose
control. I won't say I have the best answer for how the
copyright should work -- but a creative commons license is
better than what we usually have today. But my personal opinion
(that is not always the opinion of all of us behind the bay) is
that copyright is not needed when it comes to personal use. [61]

Sunde contends that media firms are abusing consumer populations by
violating existing rights (for example, to privacy and participation
in cultural life) and personal use liberties. He supports an
initiative like Creative Commons licensing [62] because it allows for
a clear distinction to be made between free personal use and
restricted commercial use. The 821 comments TPB's New Year blog post
attracted demonstrate the extent to which its claims resonate within
the file-sharing community, with many of the individual comments
functioning as ratifications of TPB's agenda. [63]

In fact, many of the claims expressed in TPB's forums and blogs
articulate a 'politics' of file-sharing that is highly critical of
the anti-market strategies of media firms and the influence they
bring to bear on governments. Consider for instance, the following
two responses to TPB's New Year post:

Even my primary school teacher did some file-sharing in the
1950's. He was reading loud to us from books in the Saturday
classes, without asking the authors. They called it 'enhancing
culture.' I did not lock my ears and I did not feel like
stealing anybody's work... They said that the movie industry
would die when the TV came to our houses. It did not die. They
said the same thing when the video came. The movie industry did
not die. But people's general interest in music, movies and
other cultural stuff has increased a lot with the Internet, and
with file-sharing. The film and music industries gain a lot by
this, they don't lose in the end. It is also more democratic...
Write to your parliament members! I wrote to them all, and I got
around ten answers so far... (Mashingo, Comment 568, TPB Blog)

Best wishes for the New Year for the Pirate Bay and all
file-sharers! As long as we have the desire to, the corporations
and their pocket governments will never prevail. Our will
outweighs theirs a thousandfold. (johnfade, Comment 278, TPB
Blog) [64]

In comment 568, Mashingo makes a similar point to Sunde's regarding
non-commercial sharing, that even in the 1950s, such sharing was
already going on in an educational (non-commercial) context. Mashingo
also counters claims of 'damage' to the creative industries,
observing that the growth of interest in music, movies and culture
has if anything profited the media industries as a whole. Comment 278
presents a succinct portrayal of the prevailing power of media firms
in the expression "corporations and their pocket governments." Both
comment-makers recognize the role of governments in the economic
contention with which they are involved. While Mashingo exhorts other
members to write to parliament, johnfade expresses confidence in the
force of countervailing power actualized in TPB -- "our will
outweighs theirs a thousandfold."

The encounter between file-sharers and anti-market assemblages in the
Swedish court brings into sharp relief the political dimensions of
economic claims-making and contention. While clearly economic, the
claims expressed by both sides are also political because they
involve direct appeals to a government for certification. As Tilly
and Tarrow explain, certification is a mechanism in contentious
politics involving "an external authority's signal of its readiness
to recognize and support the existence and claims of a political
actor." [65] The TPB trial verdict effectively signaled the readiness
of the Swedish government to recognize and ratify at least some of
the claims of media firms and international trade groups. At the same
time, the trial also mobilized Swedish citizens to take part in
coordinated action, with a fledgling Pirate Party -- Piratpartiet --
growing its membership base by 20% within hours of the verdict's
announcement. [66] The verdict produced a groundswell of political
activity largely among young Swedes, giving Piratpartiet enough
members to win a seat in the European Union Parliament elections in
June 2009. TPB and Piratpartiet share many of the same supporters,
and express similar political and economic objectives. The election
of a Piratpartiet MEP (Member of the European Parliament) certifies
to some degree the claims and contention on the side of
countervailing power. What is significant is that such certification
is accomplished by 'short circuiting' the Swedish national
legislative framework in a transnational (EU) forum. Piratpartiet's
status as an official political party has allowed it to afford TPB a
degree of protection in recent times by hosting TPB on its own
servers when a German court temporarily shut down TPB's (German)
Internet service provider. [67] Piratpartiet has also extended the
same protection to Wikileaks, and now hosts its servers as part of a
stated commitment to increasing global transparency and
accountability. [68]

Transformations in the Online World Economy
-------------------------------------------

While the court verdict and the election of a Piratpartiet MEP are
clearly consequential victories for anti-market and file-sharing
assemblages respectively, the changes provoked by file-sharing extend
also into more creative approaches to media pricing and distribution
in the online world economy. Consider for example, the success of
Apple's iTunes business, whose sales (together with Apple's other
music related products) totaled US$832 million for the September 2008
financial quarter. [69] If a key countervailing claim on the part of
consumers concerns the high prices of media and the inflexibility of
distribution methods, Apple's response of dedicating iTunes
completely to digital distribution, enabling sales of single tracks
as well as entire albums and lowering prices appears to have gained a
measure of approval among consumer populations. In Sweden, market
transformations include new models of pricing and distribution for
music and films in the form of Spotify [70] and Voddler. [71] Spotify
is an online music streaming service that provides two tiers of
streaming and sharing access to a growing catalogue of digital music.
The free tier is advertising financed while the premium tier comes at
the cost of a flat-rate subscription fee. Voddler is an online movie
streaming service that offers free (advertising financed) and rental
(pay-per-view) films. Both services are entirely legal as a result of
financial agreements with copyright holders and creative producers.
Both are dedicated to digital distribution, offering media content at
lower prices than traditional retailers, along with free access
subsidized by advertising revenues to a limited membership.

Market transformations are not restricted to the relations between
media firms and consumer populations, but also include artists and
musicians, who have begun re-evaluating their relations to both media
firms (as middle agents) and consumers or fans, with an increasing
number of creative producers striking out independently to sell
direct to audiences. Thus Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails (NIN)
released part one of a four-part album 'Ghosts I-IV' to BitTorrent
sites for free. The text file distributed with the release states:

Now that we're no longer constrained by a record label, we've
decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four
volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent
is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe
in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting
them. [72]

For Ghost I, the band experimented with Creative Commons, designating
the content as free for non-commercial use. NIN's economic claims
diverge from those of prevailing anti-market actors, strategically
aligning itself with p2p file-sharing as a wave of countervailing
power. Reznor is not alone in his commercial experimentation. US band
OK Go left major label EMI in 2010 to form their own enterprise, and
now sell and promote music direct to consumers from their website.
[73] OK Go's departure followed on the heels of a decision by EMI and
Youtube earlier in the year to disable the embedding function for OK
Go music videos in Youtube as a means of copyright control. The
decision proved disastrous, leading instantly to a drop of 90% in
views of OK Go's 'viral' hit video 'Here It Goes Again.' As band
member Damian Kulash Jr. remarks, "Curbing the viral spread of videos
isn't benefiting the company's bottom line, or the music it's there
to support." [74]

If media firms have been vociferous in denouncing file-sharing,
artists and musicians themselves appear far less concerned about the
circulation of their works online. According to Madden's report for
the Pew Internet Project,

Artists and musicians on all points of the spectrum from
superstars to starving singers have embraced the Internet as a
tool to improve how they make, market, and sell their creative
works. They use the Internet to gain inspiration, build
community with fans and fellow artists, and pursue new
commercial activity.

Artists and musicians believe that unauthorized peer-to-peer
file-sharing of copyrighted works should be illegal. However,
the vast majority do not see online file-sharing as a big threat
to creative industries. Across the board, artists and musicians
are more likely to say that the Internet has made it possible
for them to make more money from their art than they are to say
it has made it harder to protect their work from piracy or
unlawful use. [75]

While many creative producers consider the sharing of their works
illegal, it is evident that most see this as a minor price to pay for
the benefits of the Internet and its new artistic and commercial
opportunities. The fact that a growing number of bands today are
*choosing* to release Creative Commons licensed music specifically
permitting noncommercial use, for example through the global music
licensing firm Beatpick, [76] suggests that at least some creative
producers are developing more nuanced understandings of copyright
distinguishing between commercial and noncommercial use. Here their
claims coincide with those expressed by file-sharers regarding
copyright liberties. What is more important is that the exercise of
countervailing power appears to have stimulated economic change and
growth that creative producers are "pursuing new commercial activity"
alongside attentive firms such as Apple, Spotify and Voddler, and
innovations in licensing such as Creative Commons. In other words,
the political-economic claims-making of populations of small-scale
consumers turns out to be highly consequential.

Regarding the claims of media oligopolies that file-sharing is
financially damaging to the creative industries, research from
Tanaka, [77] Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, [78] Andersen and Frenz [79]
and Smith and Telang [80] fails to find any relation between
file-sharing and changes in sales. On the contrary, it appears that
creative production has actually increased, and that the markets for
music and film have expanded to include complementary products and
services. According to Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, "[s]ince 2000, the
annual release of new music albums has more than doubled, and
worldwide feature film production is up by more than 30% since 2003."
[81] In the same study, they also find that "income from the sale of
complements can more than compensate artists for any harm that
file-sharing might do to their primary activity," [82] making it
imperative to consider media markets in the full complexity of
products and services, and not in terms of a single product market
such as CD or DVD sales. The example of TPB and file-sharing
demonstrates the effectiveness of countervailing power as a mechanism
counterbalancing concentrations of market power and stimulating
economic change. What is remarkable about the countervailing power
actualized in TPB is its evolution into a viable political party;
that the pirate assemblage swept into the European Parliament with
significant political support. Pirate political parties have also
emerged in numerous other world-economies including Australia,
Canada, Argentina, UK, France, Spain, Austria, Finland, Denmark,
Belgium, and the Netherlands, suggesting that the desire for change
in prevailing political and economic structures and relations
involving media and copyright is widespread.

State Organized Crime and the Copyright Racket
----------------------------------------------

If protection rackets represent organized crime at its
smoothest, then war risking and state making -- quintessential
protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy -- qualify
as our largest examples of organized crime.

-- Charles Tilly [83]

Escalating attempts by national governments to regulate and constrain
the 'free' sharing of files online raise numerous problems. Firstly,
such tendencies run into conflicts with international frameworks such
as the UDHR and the International Covenant on Economic Social and
Cultural Rights (ICESCR) as well as related constitutional
protections, at least in the US and Sweden, contravening rights to
privacy, free circulation of opinions and expressions, and
participation in cultural life. Secondly, the question emerges as to
the proper role of a democratic government in certifying the
prevailing claims of a handful of corporate actors *against* the
claims of millions of file-sharing citizens. Since file-sharing has
not demonstrably discouraged the creation of new works, nor led to
significant damage to the creative industries, but on the contrary
stimulated increased creative production and an expansion of markets,
it would seem that the claims of loss and damage from oligopolies
represented by the likes of the RIAA, MPAA and IFPI are largely
without foundation. Patry, in fact, dismisses such claims outright,
arguing that "[t]he Copyright Wars must be understood as archetypal
responses of businesses that are inherently non-innovative and that
rely on the innovation of others to succeed." [84] Besides, as
Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf point out, the institution of copyright
protection "was conceived not as a welfare program for authors but to
encourage the creation of new works" and thus to "raise social
welfare." [85] In other words, copyright protection does not exist as
a mechanism for the unchecked profit-making or profiteering of
creative producers or their oligopolistic representatives, but rather
as a stimulus for the overall welfare or benefit of a society. [86]

In a way, the Swedish government siding with the claims of a largely
American oligopoly is not surprising. Sweden is, after all, a 'client
state' of the US in terms of the global protection or 'security'
services offered by the American government. [87] In the case of
online file-sharing, it appears that both Swedish and American
governments have recently taken on media firms as 'clients,' the
former at the behest of the latter. By certifying the claims and
contention of media firms in the Stockholm District Court, and
earlier instigating a police raid on TPB at the request of "American
authorities," [88] the Swedish state clearly functions to *protect
its clients* by eliminating/neutralizing enemies, who in this case,
happen to be its own citizens and constituencies. For its citizens,
the price for the protection of the Swedish government is conformism
with the copyright status quo. Such protection is withdrawn in the
case of TPB organizers, and potentially all file-sharers, and
replaced with violence and the threat of violence, including physical
violence in the form of police raids, confiscations of servers and
incarceration, as well as 'immaterial' violence in the violation of
interests and desires. Protection rackets such as this have a long
history, and may quite reasonably be considered a kind of 'organized
crime.' At least, this is Charles Tilly's contention in a 1985
article entitled "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime."
[89]

Tilly's analysis of Europe's extended political history shows state
making itself to be analogous to organized crime, particularly in its
reliance on the use or threat of force. As he writes, "coercive
exploitation played a large part in the creation of the European
states." [90] The *copyright racket* in this case exists "to the
extent that the threats against which a given government protects its
citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities,"
[91] and benefits an already powerful media oligopoly's
profitability. Even though this protection racket is considerably
more complex than Tilly's historical cases (because of its globalized
nature), its reliance on coercive exploitation remains central to its
success. Given the common legal status of corporations as
individuals, often with similar rights and responsibilities as
individual citizens, it is disquieting that corporate individuals are
capable of exerting a disproportionate force in their appeals to
governments for certification of claims and contention. While the
rights of corporate individuals are rigorously upheld, their
*responsibilities* appear to have been entirely overlooked or
forgotten. If individual citizens may be prosecuted for human rights
violations, should not a state also hold corporate individuals
responsible for such violations when they, for example, infringe on
privacy rights by tracking file-sharers, or when the RIAA erodes the
integrity of personal and public spaces by suing file sharers for
what amounts to their exercising of personal use liberties and
freedoms of expression and assembly? Should it not be a duty of any
democratic state to uphold the rights of its publics, the copyright
liberties of citizens, as well as their rights to privacy, freedom of
opinion and expression and participation in a community's cultural
life?

Tilly also points out, however, that popular resistance in the long
run (in Europe) has been effective in securing formal constraints on
the exercise of state power: "When ordinary people resisted
vigorously, authorities made concessions: guarantees of rights,
representative institutions, courts of appeal." [92] This suggests an
important role for the vigorous resistance produced by TPB and allied
assemblages such as Piratpartiet; such forms of popular resistance
are a means by which concessions are extracted and new relational
terms are negotiated in relation to anti-market actors and states. As
we have seen, a key advantage offered by Internetworked repertoires
of contention to file-sharers (and to other contentious groups)
consists in their globalization of political-economic claims-making.
Such repertoires of contention make possible the emergence of
'autonomous zones,' [93] 'strategic sovereigns' [94] whose
distributions exceed geopolitical borders, and whose desires refuse
the collusion of governments with capitalist actors in the world
economy. If the example of contentious politics in Sweden is anything
to go by, the rise of strategic sovereigns suggests that online world
economies are likely to experience increasing institutional crises
and transnational tensions. While autonomous or sovereign assemblages
are clearly deterritorializing for states, in many cases eroding
their official identities, they also make room for the voices and
faces of other political and economic actors, including networks of
small-scale entities organizing to make consequential claims in
relation to governments and anti-markets.

Using Tilly's democracy theory, [95] the collusion of states with
corporations against the interests of citizens and constituencies may
in fact be characterized in terms of *de-democratization*. For Tilly,
democratic political organization depends on four intermeshing
components: *breadth, equality, protection and mutually binding
consultation*. Thus a world-economy is democratic "to the degree that
political relations between the state and its citizens feature broad,
equal, protected and mutually binding consultation." [96] In this
framework, breadth refers to the extent to which the multiple
constituencies of a world-economy are included or excluded from
political life. Equality refers to the extent to which a broad range
of individuals and constituencies are afforded the rights and
responsibilities of a world-economy. Protection refers to the
existence of concrete measures safeguarding the integrity of personal
and collective territories in both private and public spaces.
Finally, mutually binding consultation refers to the consequentiality
of the expressions of political claims and contention by a
world-economy's citizens and constituencies. Together the four
components combine to produce world-economies with different 'degrees
of democracy,' with a high degree corresponding to the presence of
all four components and a low degree corresponding to the absence or
erosion of one or more of the four components. *Democratization*
involves social processes that increase a regime's degree of
democracy, whereas *de-democratization* involves social processes
that decrease a regime's degree of democracy.

In the contentious politics of file-sharing portrayed so far, the
collusion of the Swedish and US governments with an American media
oligopoly is de-democratizing because it decreases equality and
erodes protection. Apartheid South Africa and the pre-civil rights US
were unequal (and therefore undemocratic) because their respective
governments accorded the claims-making of one constituency greater
importance than that of another on the basis of race. Similarly in
the case of file-sharing, governments have consistently given far
greater weight to the interests and claims of a small group of media
firms (which for all intents and purposes are to be considered as
'individuals') than to the interests and claims of millions of
citizens, thus significantly decreasing equality in the American and
Swedish world-economies. As for protection, both the Swedish and US
governments are parties to the UDHR, and for that matter have a host
of civil protections built into their constitutions (e.g. the Bill of
Rights in the US). Sweden additionally is party to the European
Convention on Human Rights. In ignoring such protections won by
populations through multiple cycles of contention over the long
duration, both governments place into jeopardy the integrity of
personal and public territories. They also contribute to the
de-democratization of Sweden and the US. What is ultimately at stake
in any wave of de-democratization is a reduction in the capacity or
power of citizens and constituencies to express collective claims and
contention consequentially, most notably in actual social spaces or
publics. Frequently, de-democratization also damages public
perception of a state's legitimacy. It is in such circumstances that
virtual repertoires of contention have proven useful in enabling
individuals to over-ride de-democratizing trends in their pursuit of
desired ends.

In all likelihood, copyright battles will persist as issues of
political-economic contention in the foreseeable future. It is
probable too that the current Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
(ACTA) negotiations, more or less confined to a select group of
governments and their agencies, will intensify copyright contention
across the online world economy. ACTA negotiations began in 2007,
initially involving the US, the EU, Switzerland and Japan, and
subsequently expanding to include Australia, the Republic of Korea,
New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab
Emirates and Canada, in developing an international intellectual
property enforcement system. [97] Ostensibly concerned with the
counterfeiting of physical goods, ACTA "will have a far broader
scope, and... will deal with new tools targeting 'Internet
distribution and information technology,'" [98] meaning that it will
also cover digital goods. As it is, ACTA negotiations have already
come under fire from privacy and civil liberties organizations for
excluding the public (and for that matter, the governments and
publics of developing countries). A number of countries (South Korea,
France and Taiwan) have already introduced legislation requiring
Internet service providers (ISPs) to trace, monitor, report and
disconnect users for file-sharing. [99] Whatever the outcomes, *the
objective of this article is not to predict the future or to solve
all the problems involved in the file-sharing of copyrighted media,
but rather to problematize the concept of piracy, and to portray the
affordances of virtual repertoires of contention and countervailing
power for a specific community of small-scale economic actors*. The
theoretical framework provided in the preceding pages offers a way to
think about the political-economy of networked media in terms of the
specific claims and contention of different assemblages as they
relate to the concentration and diffusion of power in online
world-economies.

If world-economies are genuinely interested in raising social welfare
while stimulating the creation of new works, [100] it would seem
useful to deal with the problem of state organized crime and its
associated de-democratization, and to take up the creative task of
jurisprudence [101] by inventing explicit specifications for personal
and fair use rights and interpreting the provisions of international
frameworks to clearly establish the scope of human rights in relation
to national and international intellectual property laws. In the case
of file-sharing, this would entail creating jurisprudences where it
will no longer be possible for copyright holders to invade the
privacy of individuals or constrain their capacities to participate
fully in cultural life. Concerning the last point, Lea Shaver and
Caterina Sganga observe that while some scholars have recently
started advocating for the protection of individual freedoms to the
creation and sharing of cultural works, few have actually located the
arguments in terms of international human rights. [102] Interpreting
and inventing the rights granted by international frameworks such as
the UDHR and ICESCR is critical as such interpretations "will have a
strong impact on the future development of legal norms," including
those concerning the scope and limitation of intellectual property
rights. [103] It would also be useful for world-economies to consider
case by case, the judicious support of (or at least non-intervention
in) the mechanism of countervailing power. Countervailing power may
well turn out to be more effective than the favored route of
anti-trust legislation in neutralizing anti-competitive and
anti-social concentrations of market power. In the rapidly unfolding
history of file-sharing, it has thus far proven both equal to the
task, and productive of market changes and expansions.

Notes
-------------------

[1] Lee Rainie, Susannah Fox, and Amanda Lenhart, "13 million
Americans 'freeload' music on the Internet; 1 billion free music
files now sit on Napster users' computers," _Pew Internet & American
Life Project_ (2000).

[2] Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart, "Music Downloading, File-Sharing
and Copyright," _Pew Internet & American Life Project_ (2003): 1.

[3] Mary Madden, "The state of music online: Ten years after
Napster," _Pew Internet & American Life Project_ (2009): 9.

[4] Olle Findahl, "The Internet in Sweden," _World Internet
Institute_ (2008).

[5] "Tre miljoner i Sverige fildelar illegalt," _Svenska Dagbladet_,
October 12, 2009,
http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/it/tre-miljoner-i-sverige-fildelar-
illegalt_3637965.svd

[6] Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, "File-Sharing and
Copyright" (paper presented at the Vienna Music Business Research
Days Conference, Vienna, Austria, June 9-10, 2010).

[7] Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, _Contentious Politics_ (Boulder,
Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 4.

[8] Madden and Lenhart, 2.

[9] This article uses Manuel DeLanda's concept of assemblages as open
social wholes existing in nested sets spanning various levels of
spatio-temporal scale. Manuel DeLanda, _A New Philosophy of Society:
Assemblage theory and social complexity_ (London: Continuum, 2006).

[10] https://www.ipredator.se/

[11] Oligopolies are an organizational form in which a market or
industry is dominated by a small number of sellers. They are
characterized by the tendency to use "managed prices, routinized
labor, hierarchical structure, (and) vertical integration." Manuel
DeLanda, "1000 Years of War: Interview with Manuel DeLanda,"
_CTheory_ (2003), http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=383.

[12] Jonas Andersson, "For the Good of the Net: The Pirate Bay as a
strategic sovereign," Culture Machine 10 (2009): 74-5.

[13] William Patry, _Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars_ (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 92-3.

[14] "When someone takes your car, they have the car and you do not.
When, because of some new technology, someone is able to get access
to the MP3 file of your new song, they have the file and so do you."
James Boyle, _The Public Domain: Enclosing the commons of the mind_
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 63.

[15] Jessica Litman, "Lawful personal use," _Texas Law Review_, 85
(2007): 1911.

[16] Ibid, 1908.

[17] Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf.

[18] Jessica Litman, "Real copyright reform," _Iowa Law Review_, 96
(2010).

[19] Charles Tilly, _Stories, Identities, and Political Change_
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 12.

[20] Tilly and Tarrow.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] "The Pirate Bay enters list of 100 most popular websites,"
~Torrentfreak Blog~, posted May 18, 2008,
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-100-popular-080518/

[24] http://www.piratbyran.org/

[25] http://www.antipiratbyran.se/

[26] http://www.vuze.com/

[27] The Pirate Bay, "World's most resilient tracker," ~The Pirate
Bay Blog~, posted November 17, 2009, http://thepiratebay.org/blog/175

[28] Tilly and Tarrow, 216.

[29] The concept of swarms derives from biology and entomology, and
has been usefully discussed by Galloway and Thacker in relation to
contemporary networks. For them, swarming is a social logic by means
of which local interactions produce complex collective organizations
that are simultaneously "amorphous and coordinated." Alexander R.
Galloway and Eugene Thacker, _The Exploit: A theory of networks_
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 67-8.

See also Eugene Thacker "Networks, Swarms, and Multitudes," Part One
and Two, _CTheory_ http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=422

[30] John Kenneth Galbraith, _American Capitalism: The concept of
countervailing power_ (White Plains, New York: M.E. Sharpe
Incorporated, 1980).

[31] Fernand Braudel, _Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and
Capitalism_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 62.

[32] Ibid, 50.

[33] Ibid, 51.

[34] Ibid, 53.

[35] The two trump cards enabled capitalist actors to move beyond
national boundaries and to globalize themselves well in advance of
the Internetworked globalization of world-economies. As Braudel
explains, "[a]t an early date, from the very beginning, they went
beyond 'national' boundaries and were in touch with merchants in
foreign commercial centers. These men knew a thousand ways of rigging
the odds in their favor: the manipulation of credit and the
profitable game of good money for bad... Who could doubt that these
capitalists had monopolies at their disposal or that they simply had
the power needed to eliminate competition nine times out of ten?"
Ibid, 57.

[36] Manuel DeLanda, "1000 Years of War."

[37] Galbraith, 110.

[38] Ibid, 111-2.

[39] Galbraith himself uses the expression "self-generating force."
Ibid, 13.

[40] Of these extreme conditions, Galbraith observes, "not often has
the power of one man over another been used more callously than in
the American labor market after the rise of the large corporation."
Ibid, 114.

[41] http://wakeupwalmart.com/

[42] http://www.consumercal.org/

[43] http://www.piratpartiet.se/

[44] Litman, "Lawful personal use."

[45] "About," The Pirate Bay, http://thepiratebay.org/about

[46] Andersson, 74-5.

[47] Kammaråklagare Håkan Roswall, "Ansökan om stämning, Ärende
109-155-06," _Åklagarmyndigheten_ (2008).

[48] Caroline Hindmarsch, "Mål nr T7540-09 och T11712-09,"
_Stockholms Tingsrätt Avdelning 5_ (2009).

[49] David Kravets, "Pirate Bay says it can't be sunk, servers
scattered worldwide," ~Wired Blog~, posted February 1, 2008,
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/the-pirate-bay.html.

[50] Eric Pfanner, "Swedes charge 4 in case involving copyright
infringement of music and films," ~International Herald Tribune~,
January 31, 2008,
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/31/business/pirate.php.

[51] John Kennedy, Alison Wenham, Jonas Modig, Ana Maria Cabanellas,
Kjell-Ake Hamren, Helen Smith and Kim Magnusson, "Pirate Bay should
have no place in Sweden or the European Union," letter to the Swedish
Minister for Communications, November 7, 2007,
http://www3.piratpartiet.se/PirateBay-1.pdf.

[52] Supr Bay, http://forum.suprbay.org/

[53] ~The Pirate Bay Blog~, http://thepiratebay.org/blog

[54] "Happy New Year!" ~The Pirate Bay Blog~, posted December 31,
2008, http://thepiratebay.org/blog/142/.

[55] Patry takes the view that the copyright piracy campaign has
little legitimacy, especially given long-standing provisions for
non-commercial use. He goes so far as to argue that the problems of
digital copyright should be attributed not to new technologies or
users but rather to the failure of the content industries to focus on
meeting the desires of consumers. Patry, 198-9.

[56] Lawrence Lessig, _Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the
hybrid economy_ (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008).

[57] "History," ~Universal Declaration of Human Rights~,
http://www.udhr.org/history/default.htm.

[58] An exception to this is the work of Boyle, which argues for
example, that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violates
First Amendment rights (part of the US Bill of Rights): "when, with
respect to any work, it gives me an intellectual property right to
prohibit copying and distribution of an expressive work sold in the
marketplace and an additional legal power to opt out of the
limitations contained in Section 107 over that work." Boyle, 106.
Boyle's emphasis however, is restricted to a national rights
framework. Another notable exception with an international emphasis
is a recent article by Lea Shaver and Caterina Sganga, which argues
that the right to participate in cultural life granted by the
International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (to
which 160 countries are party) "should be understood in terms of the
ability to access, enjoy, engage, and extend upon a common cultural
inheritance" and furthermore, "that realizing this right will require
significant reforms in international property law." Lea Shaver and
Caterina Sganga, "The right to take part in cultural life: On
copyright and human rights," _Wisconsin International Law Journal_,
27 (2009): 637.

[59] Litman, "Lawful personal use," (2007): 1907.

[60] Boyle, 66.

[61] Thomas Mennecke and Peter Sunde, "The Pirate Bay interview,"
_Slyck News_, January 16, 2008,
http://www.slyck.com/story1638_The_Pirate_Bay_Interview

[62] Creative Commons is a project initiated by Lawrence Lessig,
providing free licenses that allow content creators to grant various
permissions and specify conditions to others to use their works. The
advantage of Creative Commons is that it allows content creators to
be very precise about the kind of use (commercial or noncommercial)
allowed and attribution required. It is nevertheless still an
intervention *within* the copyright framework, whereas it may be the
case that the framework itself requires a serious overhaul, as Litman
suggests. Litman, "Real copyright reform."

[63] Admittedly, 821 comments is a relatively small number given that
TPB users number in the millions. It is, however, a large number if
one considers that many other blog posts attracted comments in the
tens and not hundreds. Additionally, ratifications of TPB's agenda
are of course not limited to comments, but are also evidenced by the
continuation of p2p file sharing by users.

[64] "Happy New Year!" ~The Pirate Bay Blog~.

[65] Tilly and Tarrow, 215.

[66] "Pirate Party membership surges following Pirate Bay verdict,"
~Torrentfreak Blog~, posted April 17, 2009,
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-membership-surges-following-
pirate-bay-verdict-090417/.

[67] Nate Anderson, "Pirate Party hosting Pirate Bay in pro-P2P
political gesture," _ArsTechnica_, posted May, 2010,
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/pirate-party-hosting-
pirate-bay-in-pro-p2p-political-gesture.ars.

[68] "Pirate Party strikes hosting deal with Wikileaks,"
~Torrentfreak~, posted August 17, 2010,
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-strikes-hosting-deal-with-
wikileaks-100817/.

[69] Danny King, "Apple iTunes sales drive Q4 profit," _Video
Business_ 28, no. 43 (2008): 6.

[70] http://www.spotify.com/se/

[71] http://www.voddler.com/

[72] Josh Catone, "Nine Inch Nails releases album via bit-torrent,"
_ReadWriteWeb_, posted March 3, 2008,
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/
nine_inch_nails_releases_album_on_bittorrent.php.

[73] "Onwards and Upwards," ~OKGo.net~, posted March 10, 2010,
http://www.okgo.net/2010/03/10/onwards-and-upwards/.

[74] Damian Kulash, "Whosetube?" _New York Times Op-Ed_, February 19,
2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/opinion/20kulash.html.

[75] Mary Madden, "Artists, Musicians and the Internet," _Pew
Internet & American Life Project_ (2004): ii.

[76] http://www.beatpick.com/

[77] Tatsuo Tanaka, "Does File-sharing Reduce CD sales?: A Case of
Japan," (paper presented at the Conference on IT Innovation, Tokyo,
Japan, December 13-14, 2004).

[78] Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, "The Effect of
File-sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis," _Journal of
Political Economy_ 115, no. 1 (2007): 1-42.

[79] Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz, "The Impact of Music
Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for
Industry Canada," _Industry Canada_ (2007).

[80] Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang, "Competing With Free: The
Impact of Movie Broadcasts on DVD Sales and Internet Piracy," _MIS
Quarterly_ 33, no. 2 (2009): 321-338.

[81] Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, "File-Sharing and Copyright."

[82] Ibid.

[83] Charles Tilly, "War making and state making as organized crime,"
in _Bringing the State Back In_, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich
Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 169.

[84] Patry, 198.

[85] Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, "File-Sharing and Copyright."

[86] Patry points out that in the US, the constitutional basis of
copyright is "rooted in the objective of promoting learning." Patry,
61. Boyle puts it very clearly when he writes, "Copyright is not an
end in itself. It has a goal: to promote the progress of cultural and
scientific creativity." Boyle, 137-8.

[87] According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the Yalta Accord was "an
agreement on the status quo in which the Soviet Union controlled
about one third of the world and the United States the rest," formed
in 1945 at a meeting between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.
Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Eagle has Crash Landed," _Foreign Policy_
131 (2002): 62. The dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in
American hegemonic succession, meaning that many of the terms of
international relations, including the ongoing wars against
'terrorism,' drugs and copyright infringement, have largely been set
or heavily influenced by US interests in recent decades. States such
as Sweden are 'clients' of military superpowers such as the US
insofar as they depend to some extent on the US for the supposed
maintenance of global 'security.'

[88] "USA's regering bakom sajtstängning," _Sveriges Television_,
June 1, 2006,
http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=22620&a=602079&lid=puff_401860&
lpos=rubrik.

[89] Tilly, "War making and state making as organized crime."

[90] Ibid, 169.

[91] Ibid, 171.

[92] Ibid, 183.

[93] Hakim Bey, _T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological
Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism_ (New York: Autonomedia, 1985).

[94] Andersson.

[95] Charles Tilly, _Democracy_, (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).

[96] Ibid, 13-14.

[97] "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement," _Electronic Frontier
Foundation_, http://www.eff.org/issues/acta.

[98] Ibid.

[99] Gwen Hinze, "Preliminary analysis of the officially released
ACTA text," ~Electronic Frontier Foundation Deeplinks Blog~, posted
April 22, 2010,
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/eff-analysis-officially-released
-acta-text.

[100] While the existing copyright system certainly did and does
produce new work, it still remains that, historically, copyright was
never as expansive in scope or duration as in the present time. The
problem today is that copyright 'expansions' come at significant
costs for the public, and may well hinder rather than foster
innovation and stifle thriving Internet based participatory cultures.
This at least is the basis for James Boyle's arguments against the
enclosure of the digital public domain. Boyle.

[101] For the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, jurisprudence involves the
'creation' of rights, and is associated with the commitments of
'being on the left.' Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, "L'Abécédaire
de Gilles Deleuze," directed by Pierre-André Boutang (Paris: Vidéo
Editions Montparnasse, 1996), video.

[102] Shaver and Sganga, 638.

[103] Ibid, 639.

----------------

Dr. Leon Tan is an art historian specializing in social theory,
aesthetics and the political economy of networked art and media, as
well as a psychotherapist with an online private practice. He
lectured in art history and psychotherapy in New Zealand before
relocating to Sweden in 2009.

_____

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