How To Be A Pirate In The 21st Century

This is the abstract for my keynote lecture at 20 Years of File Sharing - What is Next?: Third Futures of Media Conference, Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University, Suzhou, China, 8-10 November 2019.

Over the last 20 years I have helped to develop over 15 grassroots, bottom-up projects for the production of free resources, technical infrastructure and the commons. They include: Culture Machine, a journal of critical and cultural theory that was launched in 1999 – the same year Napster started; Open Humanities Press, an international publishing collective; and the Radical Open Access Collective, a community of non-profit presses, journals and other entities formed in 2015 and now consisting of over 60 members. 

In this lecture I will discuss the politics underpinning these initiatives together with some of the associated concepts and practices, including pirate philosophy, radical open access and anti-bourgeois theory. In the process I will explain why, as academics and researchers, we should be interested in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing: as an object of study; but also as activity we should become involved with ourselves more and more in the future. The likes of Napster, Gnutella, MegaUpload, the Pirate Bay and BitTorrent will all be featured. Particular emphasis, however, will be placed on pirate file-sharing libraries such as Aaaaarg.org, UbuWeb, Monoskop, Public Library: Memory of the World, Libgen and Sci-Hub.