Under the Paving Stones, the Beach! – Editor's Note

THE STARTING POINT IS ALWAYS THE HARDEST POINT. First, you need to muster the courage. Then you need to commit to the act. Later, you have to figure out who will be interested enough to want to publish your work. It sounds simple when put like this, but many writers know this is not the case. It’s sometimes not enough to be passionate, or to be talented.

When I first started writing, it was in fits and starts. Time stolen in between jobs; idle moments spent ruminating on lines; lunch breaks feverishly noting down scenes and observations on a piece of scrap paper or in my phone. Of course, I had written before that, in zines and blogs mostly to no-one. They were in plain view, yet hidden. Eventually I wanted more than to write to myself and to my friends.

And how? It was only through the publications and organisations who were committed to publishing writing by people they hadn’t heard of (and who didn’t necessarily come to writing via conventional pathways), and who were interested to help nurture this same writing. Certainly, writing — particularly early writing — is rarely ‘perfect’, but it is only through working with mentors and editors that we are encouraged to continue polishing a piece of writing until it shines. And we keep building upon it: more opportunities eventually present themselves, which instils confidence and a stronger understanding of what exactly it is we want to say and explore. When there is interest from others in ways both large and small, writers are able to hone their craft, in the hopes of reaching towards a certain sense of proficiency (however loosely that is defined). It is only through this act of communion, with other readers and writers, that essays, short stories, screenplays, poems, and other hybrid works, take on a certain life of their own, for them to be able to move and inspire others — be they people searching for a window to the self, or those wanting to learn; good writing hardly ever exists in the vacuum of one person’s mind.

I named this anthology Under the Paving Stones, the Beach as a hat-tip to my favourite saying from the Situationist International movement. The Situationists were a loose group of artists, intellectuals and activists in 1960s France who were interested in changing the status quo at the time. The slogan came to prominence during the 1968 student demonstrations, expressing the desire that beneath the city, which had been hardened and paved by stone, there was the freedom of the beach. It’s a metaphor that points to
hope: that if we bother uncovering what’s beneath the surface, then we will find what it is that we are looking for.

In this anthology, with writing selected from the Centre for Stories’ Writing Change, Writing Inclusion program, a similar thread of uncovering emerges: in it readers will find poetry, a screenplay, short fiction and creative non-fiction. While there is no one theme, what binds these pieces together is a sense of curiosity and care, each one animated by a passion for writing individual truths that arise from memory, imagination and experience. This is a collection of work that is as playful as it is sombre, as writers reach inside themselves to uncover what it is they’re interested in expressing: pieces flit between joy, sorrow, longing, absurdity, and the desire for psychic freedoms, belonging, closure, love . . . Much like the Situationists, we know from history that change is something that is built upon, little acts of resistance and spontaneity that create a larger whole. Under the paving stones, the beach!

Speed Tests

(This essay first appeared in The Lifted Brow #44: Digital Intimacies)

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Piracy is the most successful form of film distribution. —Werner Herzog

Imitation is the sincerest form of rebellion. —Shanzhai proverb

Where do you want to go today? —Microsoft

Within moments of joining Swedish thinkthank Piratbyrån, anakata had formed a clear vision for the group. BitTorrent, a communication protocol, had been designed in the United States two years prior, and interest in its peer-to-peer (P2P) distribution capabilities was rising. Unlike more rudimentary P2P services, it has the ability to transmit large files. As a result, when he floated the idea of building a BitTorrent tracker, some of the more vocal members expressed their enthusiasm; the group was already hosting humour sites, image-hosting portals… why not another website? This was especially crucial following the rise of copyright lobby group Antipiratbyrån, whose activities were rooted in spreading anti-piracy propaganda: that “intellectual property” was a good, that jobs were being stolen, that piracy was killing creativity. But as ever, Piratbyrån’s primary purpose was to promote the sharing of information.

“I was really interested in the technology,” anakata later said. “And I had a spare computer in an office in Mexico where I was working at the time. I ran out to get some extra memory, then we installed a BitTorrent software and started to experiment.”

That was the easy part. On 10 August 2003, The Pirate Bay was born. Word of its existence travelled quickly, and in the space of a few months anakata’s server was buckling under the pressure. It didn’t have the bandwidth to host that much traffic. Uncertain, he called fellow Piratbyrån member and friend TiAMO back in Sweden, hoping for some kind of alternative—otherwise the site would have to be shut down, and they were only just getting started. Already, he was getting messages of gratitude¹ from unknowns around Sweden praising him for his ingenuity and daredevilry. A kid in Uppsala was especially pleased about their free copy of Call of Duty. A woman from Malmö was sending him love notes. Him! Just another dweeb obsessed with computers. But all of a sudden, he felt popular.

Luckily, TiAMO had a Pentium III 1 GHz laptop lying around. It had a spectacular 256MB of RAM, which made it an obvious contender. No further thought needed to be given: The Pirate Bay was going full speed ahead. TiAMO added in an updated tracker.²

The popularity of the site exceeded the collective’s expectations, with usage expanding not just throughout Northern Europe, but worldwide. Although the rest of Piratbyrån had, for reasons unclear, distanced themselves from the project merely a year after it was launched, the tracker was coordinating a million peers and over 60,000 torrent files. The duo powered ahead, creating their own internet service provider to house it. In particular, they placed an emphasis on the ISP being a safe space³ to host any kind of content, “no questions asked”. By December 2004, over 80 per cent of The Pirate Bay’s users came from other parts of the world. To keep up with downloads of Jay Chou’s «七里香» and Nollywood drama film The Mayors, as well as (of course) Shrek 2 and The Passion of the Christ, the team did a complete site overhaul, and The Pirate Bay was available in several languages by July 2005. In an interview with Adbusters, anakata and TiAMO outlined the artistic vision for the site: “TPB is not just a website. TPB is not just a file-sharing network. TPB is not just a movement. TPB is also art. TPB is a performance. It’s a long-running art project. Very long.” They were raising money to organise a bus to drive themselves from Sweden to Bolzano, Italy, so that they could participate in an event called Manifesta, a roving biennial exhibition of contemporary art. Their plan was to spread the good word of what was now starting to be referred to as “The Bay” to festival attendees (usually made up of a motley crew of well-heeled art buyers, activists, art school kids and institutional backers alike), then leave the bus there.⁴

By the end of 2005, The Pirate Bay was tracking 2,500,000 peers to the site. But the increased visibility meant that they were no longer underground—the authorities, in Sweden and the United States in particular, were keeping close tabs. The Motion Picture Association of America accused them of “assisting in duplicating copyrighted content”. TiAMO responded to their cease-and-desist email: haha c’mon.

Other letters started arriving, and each one received a mocking response in return, each member taking turns to send back something equally rude or passive-aggressive. To Dreamworks, someone wrote: “It is of the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and you should please go sodomise yourself with retractable batons.” On a drunken walk home one night, anakata kept sensing footsteps behind him as he stumbled from the local pub, as he took a roundabout route due to his inebriated disorientation, as he fell next to a tree to take a piss. ABCK IT PU. A quick text to TiAMO, who read the message as code. He did so accordingly, assuming anakata had received an insider tip-off. Two weeks later, the site experienced three days of downtime as Stockholm police raided a data centre, then confiscated all their servers.

Around that time, anakata wrote in his diary:

Things are coming hard and fast. Since that night at the bar, people have been following my tracks with every turn. It doesn’t feel so much like a joke anymore, or even an experiment. I’m proud of what we have done and the people we have reached. WE ARE A PHENOMENON! But I don’t know what else will happen…

Sweden had already been receiving pressure from the United States government to press charges. Many of The Pirate Bay’s team from their Piratbyrån days were completely cutting ties with the project, leaving anakata, TiAMO and another Piratbyrån member, brokep, to deal with the fallout.

The backup proved to be prescient, and the site sprang back completely unscathed. The only new addition was an updated logo featuring their now-legendary pirate ship firing cannonballs at the Hollywood sign. At this point, The Pirate Bay had an estimated 22 million users. The trio would keep receiving emails expressing support and disdain in equal measure. Years later, brokep told press that he never thought they’d be convicted.

But again, like anakata’s predictions, lawsuits would come in, relentless: the authorities were hell-bent on putting an end to the community that the BitTorrent site had amassed both painstakingly and seemingly out of thin air. There were no retractable batons in sight, only a torrent of court notices that was increasing by the day. (It was also revealed that Carl Lundström, a Swedish businessman with connections to far-right groups, had been funding the project in the background; tabloids started referring to him as “The Pirate Bay’s neo-Nazi sugar daddy.”) The trio remained cavalier⁵ through it all—the site stayed online; even more supporters emerged. On Vimeo, TiAMO uploaded a time-lapse video showing how quickly files were being shared on the platform, in real time⁶—users with Russian, Thai and Italian IP addresses were seeding porn, e-books, movies, academic papers and music as much as they were downloading them. The charges may as well have been free publicity.

By now, especially as the February 2009 court date loomed, it seemed as if the entire world was watching them: governments, fans, copycats and detractors alike. It didn’t matter if people wanted them to leave behind a legacy or go down like a sinking ship—the entire debacle was spectacle in itself. Online, op-eds speculated that it was all a ruse, a publicity stunt for a reality TV show in the making. Offline, seats to the trial at a Stockholm district court were being sold up to $90 a day.⁷

When the date of the trial eventually arrived, the trio had already sold The Pirate Bay off to an alleged “non-profit” organisation in the Seychelles.⁸ This was after an unsuccessful bid at buying independent sovereign micro-nation Sealand, which would have been the ideal undisputed haven for their servers. Supporters turned up outside the courts waving black skull-and-crossbones flags, while others dressed in elaborate steampunk costumes served “creative cookies”—in the shape of the copyleft symbol—to the crowds. On day two of the trial, brokep continued to dismiss the allegations as “bizarre”, comparing their treatment to that of Daniel in the 1984 film The Karate Kid: “In the beginning there are these bullies, that bully Johnny… And then he gets beaten up and that’s where we’re at.” After that, seeds and leeches for the movie reached an all-time high of 20,000.

The trial took a total of six days to conclude. Their verdict? $3.5 million in fines and damages, with anakata, TiAMO and brokep all sentenced to a year each in jail.⁹ Lundström got off scot-free. At a press conference afterwards, TiAMO was adamant that they would not pay; instead, he wrote on a piece of paper in thick black marker: I OWE U 31,000,000 SEK. “That’s as close as you’re going to get,” he declared.

As of this writing—sixteen years since the 128 MB computer hummed noisily in anakata’s Mexican office—The Pirate Bay is still online.¹⁰ Its files now exist in various clouds, off some code that’s been wrapped up and put online for anyone to copy and install on their servers, run by anonymous moderators in unknown, scattered locations. Up to thirty proxy sites¹¹ exist, should one need to bypass internet service providers. Like a body blockade, there is no one node. Whack a mole and another one grows.

March 2004, Singapore—

I’m sitting in front of a fat desktop PC, my grinning face thrown brightly into contrast by the white fluorescent light above. The Compaq screen further amplifies this, turning my face into a blurry white spot lit up by the flash of the disposable camera. I’ve successfully downloaded Limewire, and the photo exists to document this moment.

I was crowing something about the wide variety of Winamp skins; all that range seemed useless to me in a world of only Kazaa, where the number of seeders was dwindling, likely due to the creators trying to convert users into paying customers. Napster had been forced to shut down four years prior, and left in its wake was a growing worry that it was irreplaceable. Gary, a customer-turned-acquaintance, and a full-fledged adult in his late twenties, tells me¹² that history is cyclical, that from the ashes of the dead will arise something similar. Reworked, perhaps, but always a new iteration, a copy of a copy of a copy. The first thing I decide to download is the song “Freak on a Leash” by Korn. I’d recently discovered music that wasn’t readily heard on the airwaves—what Gary calls “noisy” music. He goes to church every Sunday, then comes to the cybercafe to play World of Warcraft. The reason why I pay any attention to him is that he loans me his account when he’s elsewhere. My druid is nearly level 70, but I haven’t paid a single cent.

On the cybercafe’s public network, speed tests run high, and stay consistent. Under the weight of the fifty-odd Alienware PCs all possibly running at the same time, the broadband connection serves to undergird the grid. If a connection drops out, it’s immediately audible in the form of a curse. Lives are at stake. It helps that we’re in Singapore, a country which has literally won the global internet speed race. The nation-state also holds the rank for hosting the world’s largest game of musical chairs.¹³

My shift typically runs for twelve hours, six days a week. Between going on WoW raids and languidly starting DoTA games with customers to keep them there, I have various activities running in the background. Forum chats. Unfinished blog posts. Entire albums leeched then seeded. The adage goes: take only what you need, then share. I feel like Robin Hood. Or the Pied Piper, depending on how you’re looking at it. Newly high off my findings, I start another Blogspot specifically to archive obscure nu-metal, songs painstakingly found then compiled into a .zip file complete with album artwork. These are all facilitated by single YouSendIt and Megaupload links, each one logged into a separate page that doubles as an index. Occasionally, there’s a lyric sheet, put together with “The Heretic Anthem” pumping in the background—If you’re 555, then I’m 666! What’s it like to be a heretic?

absolute noob here. how safe are keygens? never ran one before

as safe as not wearing a condom…

… haha but seriously test it on a second machine first

how to tell the diff between real and fakes?

depends, run it in [REDACTED], use an antivirus first

out of 200 times I used them there was only a worm once or twice, easy to delete but gotta be careful cos they will damage files while deleting

set sail my friend

thanks, I’ll be back if I need more help

pleasure! good luck

“This book is impossible to read. The file is corrupted and all kinds of strange characters obscure words. One of the gems is ‘feces’ for ‘faces’.” —Amazon book review for a pirated copy of 1984

When cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han coined the term “hyperspace”, he was simply observing the contemporary collapse of cyberspace, the axes of globalisation and the acceleration of digital networks converging like cascading windows gone rogue. It is, according to him, a “completely hybrid and promiscuous space” where “everything is intermingled and networked with everything else, a space where cultural and territorial markers have been deleted, a space marked by a lack of distance”. In his book Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, he ruminates on how the Chinese cultural phenomenon of shanzhai—essentially, “fakes,” but more widely understood as a kind of bootlegging—takes on the character of hyperspace to envision more possibilities. Initially a term used to describe cellphone knock-offs with names like Nokir, iPncne and Samsing, it’s now grown to occupy the popular imagination to mean any kind of cultural product that’s adaptable and “fully exploits the situation’s potential”.

The world of shanzhai has no limits. If something can be copied, then it will be. There are shanzhai Harry Potter books, a shanzhai Nobel Prize, shanzhai politicians, shanzhai celebrities, shanzhai electric cars.¹⁴ And just because they’re forgeries, it doesn’t mean that the result is inferior—in fact, most of the time the copy is superior and even more slick. At its core, shanzhai doesn’t only bring about creativity of the highest order, it also serves to shift positions of economic power, toppling monopolies. When Adidas becomes Dasida, or when a shanzhai mobile phone is installed with a function that can identify counterfeit currency, “a truly Dadaist game is being played”. Shanzhai is subversion through closeness, a form of trolling that arises out of familiarity, not the product of a lone genius but an affective endeavour by a collective rhizome. Like fan fiction, dominant narratives are taken and re-appropriated. For example, in Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, Harry defeats his adversary Yandomort on the sacred mountain of Taishan together with his friends Long and Xing.

In Indonesia, shanzhai manifests itself in different ways, but its motivations are the same. The story that immediately comes to mind is of how the North American grindcore band Napalm Death became widely known almost overnight, providing a backbone for the creation of an Indonesian heavy metal underground that has progressed to now involve various sub-genres. Some Indonesian noise music incorporates dangdut and gamelan. Or, like experimental electronic outfit Gabber Modus Operandi, mashes together punk, metal, gabber and kecak to engineer a rogue futurism. The band’s singer, Ican Harem, also runs a fashion label made out of entirely upcycled clothes—imagine a Monster Energy dri-fit tee artfully cut up and conjoined with a KISS long-sleeve shirt to form an entirely new garment. When asked, he says their activities are a reaction that has come from “digging through our identity as millennial Indonesians in transition to digital culture”. All of this can arguably be traced back to KG-1060891, that first bootleg cassette of Napalm Death’s Harmony Corruption, a number that many local metalheads can recite by heart.

The idea of “intellectual property” is a curious relic of the western world, a world that despite its outdated notions still ends up thriving—this position of wanting to own things is precisely what’s resulted in colonialism reigning in the first place. But it wasn’t until 1967 that the WIPO Convention (formally the Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organisation) treaty was passed, with article 2(viii) defining intellectual property to include literature, art, scientific discoveries, performances, broadcasts, “protection against unfair competition” and finally, “all other rights resulting from intellectual property activity in the industrial, scientific, literary or artistic fields”. When intellectual property is given polemical and rhetorical value, it’s easy to cement wealth and power by asserting arbitrary “rights” that see ownership as morally defensible; anything else becomes theft.

The Pirate Bay took it a step further when they launched ‘Physibles’ in 2012, an arm designed for sharing 3D printables (“data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical”). While this is a technology that is still in its earlier days, files for Bulbasaur planters, violins and bicycles abound, should one have the know-how and wherewithal to find and build them. Like the community of marauders the BitTorrent website had gathered from scratch, Physibles was yet another indicator that there was no end point to the sharing of information when not kept guarded behind draconian laws. There is zero obligation to seed after leeching, yet most do—otherwise no files would exist in the first place. In other words, “it’s like internet karma that works” (Reddit) or the warm glow/cold prickle theory that has shown that a large fraction of people voluntarily contribute to public goods even if the incentive to free-load is strong (economists). When the mindset that rigidly surrounds intellectual property is given up altogether, it becomes clear that knowledge and creative works are actually non-rivalrous and non-depletable, a lovely wellspring that doesn’t stop giving.

As Byung-Chul Han writes, “shanzhai is decreation”. If middlemen—and consequently, layers of power—are eliminated, the idealised version of Do-It-Yourself emerges. No more shipping huge amounts of products around the world.¹⁵ No more shipping the broken products back. No more sweatshop labour. Perhaps a pipe dream, but shanzhai allows for the possibility of dreaming.

June 2007, Bangkok, Thailand—

The first time I went overseas was a celebratory event. For reasons unrelated to this essay, I hadn’t been on a plane until then, and two gal pals I got to know from the DIY-punk underground asked if I wanted to come along on a trip to Thailand—a neighbouring country in Southeast Asia, a two-and-a-half hour flight from Singapore.

Going through the motions of getting my shit together wasn’t totally arduous. Passports at the time cost $50 a pop, and budget airlines were newly booming, advertising slogans such as “Now Everyone Can Fly”. To some extent, it was true: I had often heard of people who would “just go” to Hanoi or Bali for a weekend jaunt, as if borders were arbitrary.

For certain groups, borders were certainly not impenetrable. I'd dream of becoming one of these people, the world atlas no longer a huge, unfamiliar fiction but an unlimited expanse that was open to conquest. A weekend off from the cybercafe, two hundred bucks in my pocket, a 5kg backpack and away I went. The plane journey was uneventful, and if I hadn’t stayed awake the whole time trying to sense a metaphysical shift I’d have woken up in a place which operated on a slightly different timezone and where people used a different script to write in.

In any case, as I got used to magically appearing in a place that wasn’t the country I was born and raised in, the luxury of travel was emboldening. It helped that each of my Singapore dollars was equal to twenty-three baht, we were crashing with friends we had met on the internet, and that locals looked at our faces and saw the glamour that the Lion City signified. We slept in an upstairs room of our friend June’s family home, ensconced in the warm embrace of the scorching Thai heat and the international punk network. Drinking iced teas till the sun came up on our first night, we didn’t want to waste any time: we talked about CrimethInc. books, veganism, and the possibility of train-hopping in Southeast Asia. The subculture always proselytised “no borders” and in our minds we wanted to smash them. At the time, we weren’t aware that our purported radicalism was shaped by North American hegemony; the rulebook was completely theirs. But we didn’t think there were any rules.

June also loved the films of Wim Wenders. I had not heard of the director before, my movie knowledge limited to what was usually on TV, which I was gradually drifting away from. I hated my emotionally abusive, overworked parents, and consequently abhorred their television habits. This was propped up further by my fervent belief in punk, which espoused that television would rot your brain from the inside out. In Bangkok, I wore my screenprinted KILL YOUR TV t-shirt with pride. But I hadn’t watched any arthouse films because I didn’t know what they were.

June snickered when she quizzed us and none of us had heard of Jean-Luc Godard or Ingmar Bergman. I resented her for knowing more than me. We rode on a tuk-tuk to a suburban locale on our last night to arrive at a market marked by makeshift tentage, vendors selling their wares on the ground laid with cardboard. Most of the DVDs were porn, but we had turned up in arthouse wonderland. Every third stall had a bootleg copy of Dogville, each one modified according to the seller’s whim: Nicole Kidman’s mug photocopied in a lurid cyan, the title in various fonts. I saw the word “DOG” again and again until it made no sense.

“You have to watch this one. And this.” Shoved into my hands were Godard’s Alphaville, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God and Wenders’ Alice in the Cities. Doors were opening, but they were also closing in on me.¹⁶ Still, I had stepped into a new room.

“Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one’s value as an image.”—Hito Steyerl

Around 2007, Google launched a digital fingerprinting system to easily identify and manage copyrighted content on YouTube. Videos uploaded to the platform are compared against audio and video files registered with this system by content owners—its aim was to look for matches that were possibly floating around on the site without permission and block them (or in some cases, at the owner’s discretion, monetise them). To circumvent this, pirate Tony Lee began to create videos that featured a cat watching an old JVC television set. This TV screen could be playing Moulin Rouge or episodes of Sesame Street, unbeknownst to the system. While probably useless to cinephiles seeking a watchable copy of a rare film, the proliferation of these videos was confusing to the system. The video could be a copy of a popular movie, but the system only saw a cat watching TV.

Similarly, pirated Kodi boxes play on this ethos, of which there are over a million in the world to date. A free, open-source media player software that allows users to view most online streaming media, its unlocked nature has enabled the existence of “fully-loaded” boxes that come with third-party add-ons that help with accessing so-called copyrighted content. There are so many of these modified boxes floating around that some people have unwittingly associated them with the company. And while Amazon has pulled the box off its store and Google has removed the word “Kodi” from autocomplete search queries, customised Kodis abound unrestricted. As my friend Troy__Polloi and I look for yet another Kodi workaround, we see words flashing on a hundred Reddit threads: “Sucked in N*tfl*x and St*n!”

In South Korea, less is even more as external devices are made completely unnecessary. Much like the Megauploads and Rapidshares of yore, a substantial part of online piracy takes place via “webhards”, a type of local file sharing site that is uniquely disguised to look like a typical log-in page from the outside. After paying a small fee to receive a password, its insides open up to reveal unlimited content. Everything is for sale and nothing is licensed. Each member is allowed to have up to 1 TB of storage. On a webhard, an .avi of Old Boy could be the 900th copy, yet its quality is still crystal clear.

When I was searching for a copy of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, it was in a similar way. Log on to the now-seldom used mIRC software, find a chat room, and e-books whiz around like coked-up maniacs looking for something to do. In this case, they were looking for someone to read them. Elsewhere, GitHub domains are filled with manga; other sites with academic books and papers typically locked behind expensive paywalls. The only time I was able to access On Being Human as Praxis was through a complete stranger.

Many reports say that piracy is on the decline as young people take to convenience and streaming giants dominate and redefine mainstream possibilities of media. Yet other studies say that it is increasing, with television the most sought-after content, followed by music and film. Who is telling the truth? The pirate ship appears to be sinking, but the seas are only getting wider, and its holes are leaking shit.

In a 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists”, a young Bill Gates wrote a bitter message to the programmers he thought were stealing Microsoft software: “What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?” He then signed off the short letter with his home address, imploring all those who had not paid for his software to “pay up”. This attitude, published in the then-influential Homebrew Computer Club newsletter, spurred many Silicon Valley elites to adopt this position, driving many hackers underground and resulting in the world of piracy as we know it today.

Funnily enough, this was the precursor to Silicon Valley’s reputation as the very place where the “sharing economy” began. Coined to refer to a slew of start-ups which provided people with services that involved renting or lending goods that others already owned, it offered the idea of an utopia where everyone came together to be selfless about their possessions. All good, except that these activities were mediated by companies which acted as middlemen as they connected strangers on the basis of a fee, propped up by the lure of “convenience”. The writer and businessman Alvin Toffler predicted this in his 1970 book Future Shock: “We recruit customers to become our allies and in effect, co-producers.”

The idea of a “commons” is simultaneously a religious edict and anathema to Silicon Valley—after all Uber was a retooling of carpooling websites (and arguably, hitchhiking), Airbnb via Couchsurfing, food delivery apps from despatch riders originally hired by individual restaurants, Airtasker/Postmates from classifieds. Co-working spaces may as well be a rip-off of libraries, and paid email newsletters of… well, emails and blogs. Better still, there is an “Airbnb for campsites”, and you can even rent someone’s bed for an afternoon nap.¹⁷ A popular falsehood hawked by the start-ups themselves is that the sharing economy would decrease income inequality, as ideas of ownership and class become less stratified as more people “share”. The language of decentralisation is rife in many of these companies’ mission statements. But as writer Rob Horning noted in a 2014 panel, it’s more accurately “a reflection of capitalism’s need to find new profit opportunities in aspects of social life once shielded from the market, in leisure time once withdrawn from waged labour… market relations are the only social relations.” Much like the neoliberal restructuring of media production that began around the eighties (at least in the western world), the reality of a 21st-century uncommodified self is equivalent to the heightened obscurity of experimental and essayistic cinema today. If an image is non-commerical, it almost goes without saying that it will gradually disappear.

When the self is commodified through the guise of “work”, the notion of ownership only increases; every aspect of my self is worth a dollar sum—whether I’m teaching, learning, creating, destructing. Where advice used to be shared readily on listservs and message boards that foregrounded communities of care, it’s now common to see many people starting entire consultancies offering the very same thing, but in exchange for payment. I used to charge $2.50 for a photocopied zine; yet now sensing an opportunity in the catchphrase “labour is not free” I’ve upped my prices to as much as $8, preventing the very people I want to address from buying it in the process. Of course, while neoliberalism and privatisation are to blame for these behaviours—particularly as the concept of culture becomes a commodity, and as young people find it harder and harder to stay employed or find jobs in their respective fields even after years of education—the possibilities around what could be monetised within such a culture are difficult to shake off.

Within Toffler’s “prosumer” culture, the opportunity for buying something ends where the possibility of selling begins, each choice whirlpooling in a large vortex of desire. In the sharing economy, the fantasy is that everyone emerges a winner, when all the while, we’re competing in a race where the only thing that is changing are the rules.

two years ago I snorted my last hydro. I can’t share this on facebook or anywhere else, but I’m here to say I made it out. keep going

yes keep it up! your post gives me motivation to continue. i’m on day 59

how long did it take you to stop craving?

by 6 months i was pretty solid but was still occasionally craving it after a year

proud of you, keep it up

In December 2018, new music from Beyoncé and SZA dropped out of nowhere on Spotify and Apple Music. There was no preceding anticipation. Released under the names “Queen Carter” and “Sister Solana” respectively, it seemed initially like a sneaky, unpublicised Easter egg to drum up hype. But the songs sounded unpolished, and some die-hard fans recognised the Beyoncé ones from old recording sessions. As news of this circulated, it soon became apparent that the tracks had been illegally uploaded. Three months later, a fake Rihanna album followed suit. Titled Angel and distributed under the moniker “Fenty Fantasia” on iTunes, with tracks like “Counterfeit” and “Bitch I’m Special”, fewer people cottoned on to it than they did the Beyoncé and SZA fakes—it climbed up to #67 on the iTunes worldwide album charts before being detected and removed from the platform. When asked by a fan via DM on Instagram (“What’s with this mess Rih? Get their ass to jail ASAP”) she merely shrugged, “Shit’s crazy.”

In a bid to game the notoriously-vetted music streaming app, which leans on a purported “free-for-all” music library that then sells its information about its users, pirates are not only using the above tactics to cash in, but to stretch the limits of how far hoaxes can run before they’re exposed. For example, funk band Vulfpeck put out an entirely silent album called Sleepify in 2014, asking fans to play the roughly five-minute album on loop while they slept. They were hoping to use the money earned to go on tour. Fans complied, and the gambit went on for $20,000 in royalties until Spotify took the album down. The band never saw their money.

Perhaps Vulfpeck would have done better to not have made their scam known in the first place. After all, John Cage’s similarly silent 4:33 continues to stream on Spotify unrestricted.¹⁸ In a cleverer twist, an unidentified Bulgarian collective earned a cool million from the same platform by uploading several third-party playlists of their own songs, creating a flurry of fake accounts to boost their play counts. Unlike Vulfpeck, they reaped the cash rewards.

Jenny Odell writes in How To Do Nothing that our “margins of refusal” are shrinking as corporate monopolies become less apparent and thus more omnipresent and insidious. If it seems more convenient to watch a film on a video-on-demand service than it is to acquire a virtual private network (VPN), then why would I go the extra mile? If being more informed about algorithmic power involves taking the time to get past technical jargon and then promptly quitting certain services that play into this power—sometimes even having to build an entirely new social network in its wake—why would I risk losing everything just to start over? In a world that increasingly gives precedence to the atomisation of selves, intimacy increasingly hinges on corporate terms—when the channels of connection are controlled and profitable, the threat of isolation looms over the landscape, silently watching.

“pondering how to get up, so you download a pirate copy instead”—@botaleptic

half the sockets don’t work, so you download a pirate copy instead—@botaleptic

a copy of the most remarkable things I ever saw—@botaleptic

a copy of minima moralia—@botaleptic

…in the antagonistic society, the relationship of the generations is also one of competition, behind which stands naked violence.—Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia

The next day I go back to being completely anonymous. I put on a light grey T-shirt, blue jeans, a maroon jumper, no makeup, my hair tightly combed and tied in a loose ponytail. A coffee on the stove, no ice, unsweetened, no milk. I pour out a small bowl of rolled oats, then add in a few splashes of tap water. Munch munch munch then wash it down with more water. I turn on my laptop, feeling moderately optimistic; didn’t Sun Tzu say something about controversy being the last resort of the talentless? Or was it “all warfare is based on deception”?

A flurry of deactivated accounts: each one a chore to navigate, each one repeatedly throwing me through hoops as they ask, repeatedly: ARE YOU SURE? I scratch an itch on my neck, pause to look at the clock above me. My pal Sam—Handwich6969 on another window is egging me on. Cut off the nodes, it takes some getting used to but I promise you’ll stop feeling it. Asceticism. But I want the glory of my name attached to me instead of purely an upvote. I’ve been seeing a rare copy of A Lathe of Heaven for days and yet no one knows it’s me, a unique individual with sourcing capabilities unlike anyone else. The copy on YouTube is inferior.

The lure of total communion snakes around me like a boa constrictor about to get fresh. I open and close my laptop multiple times. I don’t stop leeching, log off my chat with Sam. Each move I make I’m striking a deal with the devil. ●

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¹ I’m just assuming. There are no records of this, or most of the facts in this piece.

² A BitTorrent tracker is a special type of server which keeps track of where copies of files exist on peer machines. It also sorts out the files which are available upon client request and helps coordinate efficient transmission and reassembly of the copied file, providing network performance statistics.

³ This is where it gets murky. What constitutes a “safe space” (and consequently, “freedom of speech”) when maintained at the expense of others? The ISP has been criticised for hosting paedophilic websites as well as a French far-right blog.

⁴ The confluence of art, institutional backing and the lust for power becomes more apparent when projects that begin with good intentions rise out from the underground. In an attempt to convert the ignorant to certain causes, it can start to look like religious fervour. I don’t know what The Pirate Bay did with the bus, but I’m imagining this to be a prank they would play to drum up more hype.

⁵ For all their purported left-wing ideals, it sure didn’t seem to bother them where the money was coming from! Some reports have accused them of keeping up a “non-profit” façade, and Lundström himself was reported to say, “There’s around 30,000 to 40,000 SEK flowing in per month. The cost of internet lines, server hosting etc is less, so they are doing well financially.”

⁶ There are no records of this either. However, it was around this time that global attention on them was at its peak.

⁷ You’d think I made this up again, but no!

⁸ During the trial, The Pirate Bay’s lawyer confirmed that anakata, TiAMO and brokep no longer held ownership of the site. But there was no evidence that the site had been sold at all either: no contract, no bank transfer, nothing. In 2009, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN traced it to anakata, and brokep took to his blog to declare a forgery, then proceeded to press criminal charges against head of BREIN Tim Kuik.

⁹ The trio continued to appeal the case, alleging bias on the part of the judge. The case dragged on till 21 May 2010, where the Svea Court of Appeal decided not to change the orders on anakata, TiAMO or brokep. They pressed on for another two years, but the Supreme Court of Sweden refused to hear another appeal and upheld their original sentences. A few months later, anakata was arrested in Phnom Penh (where he’d fled, and where he’d had an international warrant placed on him after not serving his sentence). He would continue to crack jokes on Twitter while in jail. The others were arrested in their respective hide-outs not long after. Since their release, they’ve all remained fairly low-key, insisting they no longer have any connection with The Pirate Bay.

¹⁰ There have been a few more crackdowns by authorities on the site, including a shutdown in December 2014, with brokep responding in a blog post that he was happy to see it happen, as he felt that his successors “had done nothing to improve the site” and that the site was “ugly” and “full of bugs”.

¹¹ It’s worth noting here that The Pirate Bay has inspired the existence of other torrent sites, outside of these proxies.

¹² One of my first experiences with mansplaining, except I didn’t have a word for it yet.

¹³ Other accolades include: World’s Best Airport, Most People Applying False Eyelashes, Largest Reunion of People Born At The Same Hospital, Most People Wearing Balloon Hats (of which Tony Abbott was a part of), among others. No shit!

¹⁴ Another example of shanzhai is a phone advertisement for a Blockberry phone with an image of Barack Obama as its “spokesman”.

¹⁵ In an ideal world of shanzhai, hyperlocal markets would spring up around the world of their own accord, much like in China.

¹⁶ I would stop watching TV altogether, filling my life with films that didn’t necessarily make sense to me, especially because I blindly jumped into them without much foundational understanding of the genre. Now, I have large gaps in my knowledge when it comes to television, with little to add in terms of art films either, apart from the needless yet smug “I have watched it”. As I secretly binge on missed Seinfeld episodes and Die Hard (amongst other classics), I also try and steer clear of conversations surrounding screen-based media altogether. I’m not being an edgelord; I truly regret this.

¹⁷ See: the Globe app. Meanwhile, homelessness is on the rise.

¹⁸ Art, but make it legit!

I-S-O-S

Drawn and quartered

We’re in Stage 3. Or at least that’s what the politician on the screen is saying. This means that public gatherings are limited to a maximum of two people from the same household. Weddings are limited to ten, and funerals to five. Dinner parties with people outside of your household now come with a $1600 fine. People are confused. “Does it mean I can’t leave the house at all? What if I’ve had no interaction with anyone so far and have to check in on my mother? “

Panicked comments keep rolling by. Suddenly, the void is witnessing a wider expanse. The spread of information is swift and tedious. Just the other day the city’s most popular beach was filled with bodies until it was forcibly closed. We’re babies, after all; having to be nudged into the right direction, moralised to a decision and paternalised with the threat of belt lashings before anyone will even listen. The virus is either in the air we breathe or I don’t give a fuck.

I go on my daily walk and peer into shuttered shops, hoping I don’t see anyone inside (hoping I don’t see the owner dangling from the ceiling). A new housemate moved in the other weekend. The old one left because he feared he could no longer afford the rent, being a Chilean international student. People move in and out of the house while they move out, settle in. I shake the hand of my new housemate’s mover. What do I do—tell them to “stay the fuck home”? I wash my hands vigorously afterwards.

Work is still business as usual. People are either desperately needing or not needing home cleaning services more than ever. Is it an essential or non-essential service? Two kindly clients tell me to stop coming, offer to continue paying me so I can stay home as much as possible, but the majority cancel with no recourse. The remaining few leave disposable gloves around the house and stay out of my sight, hoping I finish up as quickly as I can. They are skittish from something: perhaps guilt, perhaps fear, perhaps from a lack of social interaction. I scroll through Twitter while I clean, a pesky habit. A headline comes into view: A Dilemma For Some: Should I Still Hire My Cleaner?

Money seems to both shine with an added value and be completely valueless. It depends on who you’re hearing from, however. I fantasise about a rent strike, send an email to my landlord to ask about my options. But it can also mean I’ll end up with a $4200 debt afterwards. Other people are crowdfunding for expenses. The most visible win. Should I begin to peg my writing to the zeitgeist? I’m glad I don’t have any dependants. The government announces a roll-out of wage relief for those who can prove that they have become unemployed in this time of crisis. In a bizarre turn of events, a friend will make more money than her boss, who is also her friend. Meanwhile, there are more delivery couriers on the streets than ever. Some nights they are all you see.

It’s bleak, but I’m not sad. There’s a sense of freedom in finality. My brain feels the clearest it has for a long time. I don’t have any assets, I have no savings. If shit hits the fan I’ll just be one amongst billions, some kind of unnameable statistic on a graph. On my more optimistic days, I think that “the meek will conquer the earth” or something, some kind of worker uprising. Online, I see friends mourning the loss of their routines. People on Instagram challenging each other to push-ups. Others rabidly posting their “game faces” in case society forgets that they were ever relevant in a time of social isolation. Like chain mail (or germs), they spread.

STAY HOME becomes a mantra parroted by government officials, celebrities and micro-influencers alike. I know one who is still going out; instead their social media pops up on Instagram regularly scolding me to stay home. Should I tell on them? But I don’t know what others are doing if they don’t document it. Road signs scream a marquee: STAY HOME YOU MUST STAY HOME but who is looking?

Someone tweets: maybe the virus is humans. Another person types: the virus is capitalism. People are simultaneously guilty about their privileges yet hoarding them more than ever. Others indicate that they are giving, giving, giving. A torrent of affect floods my screen, data repositories of collective grief. In The Wall, about a woman who finds herself the last human being on earth, Marlen Haushofer writes, “I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion.”

Aspiring for virality

In the free market there are no winners

Lately, I’m trying to—amongst others—bring about a blog renaissance, But this is undoubtedly the second post in my newly-resurrected blog instigated by the prevailing mood of the end times. Maybe I can ask myself a question like: why don’t I blog during regular times? A dishonest answer would be: I’m out there “hustling”, making every minute correlate to a visible essence of productivity, so these minutes can generate dollars. And blogs don’t generally fall within this purview.

A more honest response? It’s because the marketplace of ideas has shrunk the possibilities around blogging. Short sharp bursts (i.e. the bird program) are fine; there are 24 hours in a day and people need to be validated and entertained. And when a thought can be sold as an op-ed, why bother with blogging for no return? Instead, there’s a Patreon button somewhere on the page.

In these accelerationist times, it’s difficult to wax lyrical about the “old internet” and not have it warp into a vehicle for nostalgia. And as someone who has been riding the online wave since its early days, it’s only too tempting to come across as a protectionistic aging fuck. “Oh, THEY stole what used to be MY catnip????”, etc. You can still spend hours in the Wiki hole, and Reddit does streamline the gratifying aspect of anonymous forums despite its centralisation. Where else would I be able to debate the correct amount of microdose, delve into the history of Uzbekistan or discuss Succession with a demented fervour, away from the prying eyes of known others? And then there is the trove of independent games, and the repository of counter-cultural and sometimes obscure texts, a delight to anyone who enjoys learning.

So it’s not like the current internet is bad. Outside of the Big Four, there are still hundreds of enjoyable alternatives. But it’s undeniable that what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” has devoured a particular iteration of freedom, ensnaring many within the feedback loop of themselves. Byung-Chul Han echoes this in Psychopolitics: “the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimisation.” Cue the manic monetisation of hobbies and lurid para-political posturing. Han again: “Capital generates needs of its own; mistakenly, we perceive these needs as if they belonged to us.”

When thought processes are framed as pitches that long for virality (pun completely intended), blogs occupy a worthless space—languishing as soon as they’re born. Unless you’re a paid newsletter. After all, I’m about to chuck this link on my Twitter.

Half-hearted jokes aside, these things are wont to warrant the question: what came first, blogs or its co-optation? Under the logic of capitalism, the latter is inevitable. One person’s joy is another’s business opportunity; income brings joy, et al. The self-as-a-work-of-art is now inextricable from its hoped-for value, particularly as calls for “transparency” result in voluntary self-exposure, resulting in more data to be mined. I started this blog because I found the metrics involved in platforms like Tinyletter and Substack too crippling, known numbers and names an impediment to expressing myself unencumbered—perhaps a byproduct of how I came to be online in the first place, but I’d much rather spit it out to the ether. There are still people on the other side, of course, but at least I can delude myself, like how some musicians can only perform in sunglasses.

I guess what I’m trying to ask is: is it possible to conduct yourself online without profit or virality in mind? Post a selfie or a thought for the absolute sake of it? Of course. It’s easy to fall into the arms of corruption when it’s all you’ve known; everything else seems suspect. It’s easy to proselytise your politics or desire validation. We’re not robots, after all.

The interiority of others is still fascinating. Maybe I’m trying to protect myself from shame.

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Recommendations for these times:

• The Criterion Channel and Crunchy Roll both have a 2-week free trial. Go nuts.

• “Tips For The Depressed” – George Scialabba

• The Lathe of Heaven (1971), adapted from Ursula Le Guin’s book of the same name

• On the same tangent, a new documentary about Ursula’s life and work, The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (comment with your email address for a direct link)

• The Public Domain Review

• Create your own crossword, then message them to friends and ask them to do the same
  
  
  
  

20/20 vision

Hurtling towards the end times

There’s this line in George Trow’s “Within The Context of No Context” that I always come back to: “What was powerful grew more powerful in ways that could be easily measured, grew less powerful in every way that could not be measured.” And as the decade crashes towards its end, I’m finding myself gravitating back to the essay. It’s a peculiar source of comfort, how a (very nearly) 40-year-old text can bring about a sense of closure⁠—like looking into one’s family history to uncover previously unexplained parts of the self, these little pieces of the past act as an oracle upon insights bubbling beneath. Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed.

What’s changed? I’m one of those “xennials” who saw my most formative years of adulthood during this decade, one of those sort-of digital natives who saw the internet change from multiple anonymised, decentralised spaces into one that seeks to consolidate power in only a few spaces, demanding “accountability” as a form of surveillance. In this time, Twitter transformed from a “microblog” (I was mostly talking to myself) into a “hellsite”; the on-demand economy took shape across the world; radical politics atrophied into mere slogans; “introversion” turned into a boastful assertion that ironically existed alongside online sociality; context collapse became normalised; cynicism led the race while sincerity trailed behind. We can blame it on the rise of neoliberalism, the era of the personal brand, the conflation of work and leisure, the fetishisation of burn-out… the list goes on, and yet the penchant for envy and aversion to shame has remained the same.

It’s only natural: when there is an acute sense of freaky disorder, nostalgia is never far behind. Accordingly, I’ve noticed many wistful yearnings for the “old internet”, a time of MySpace, messageboards, Livejournal and the like. This is often paired with resolutions for less: less social media, less technology, a return to nature, implorations to “live in the moment”. They imply a feeling of powerlessness: perhaps by divesting power from the institutions which seek to monitor and sell our selves back to us, we can finally break free from our mortal coils. But does creating these binaries result in less desire? What do people want?

That said, I’m also one of those people whose existence would not⁠ coalesce into the one now if not for the internet. Many things I know now, I learnt online (I didn’t go to university); it was through the internet that I understood the meaning of friendship (I had a socially isolated childhood and adolescence); I met my current partner through the internet (I organised tours for random DIY-punk bands in my 20s); I built a writing career through the internet (most of my work can only be found online). There are other less relevant threads which I won’t belabour, but what remains pertinent is how inextricably intertwined I am to this intangible connection that is, at the same time, solidified through connection. It’s hardly exceptional⁠—many children of the internet can attest to this, but it’s a reluctant admission. I don’t wear this on my sleeve.

To me, the conversation surrounding the “old internet” seems to be about reframing boredom and decreasing anxiety. Reclaiming wonder. For all the times my short-term memory has forgotten an event I didn’t bother to document as a digital image, I’ve had other people’s business literally at my fingertips. For all the times I’ve winced at the erroneous use of “literally” on social media, I’ve witnessed people do unprecedented things with the tools now available. For all the times I’ve lamented “nerd” culture online, I’ve excused myself to the bathroom to look up a reference I didn’t understand but didn’t dare admit (but now you know). For all the times I feel surveilled 24/7—both by myself and others—I’ve come across a world which I’d never had the opportunity to step in otherwise. What do people want?

I suppose this is my decade ender. Another thing I often revisit is Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, birthed out of the Situationist movement. The entire book is a bleak joy, and continues to be more relevant as society moves towards what Byung Chul-han terms “psychopolitics”. It is indeed true that the clutches of production are more visible and insidious than ever before, but who’s to say that it is impossible to recalibrate its means? And in what I foresee to be a decade of the aesthetics of the aesthetic, here’s a final bit of nostalgia: under the paving stones, the beach!