chapter
Introduction
Unruly Currents
This 5th iteration of the bulletin has been created during the days leading up to the H&D Summer Camp 2024 "Unruly Currents & Everyday Piracy". Throughout the course of weeks we will set up a temporary H&D village for the 2nd time, together with 30 co-inhabitants at 'Het Wilde Weg', a campsite in Sint-Oedenrode, the Netherlands. Here, we will look for ways of slipping through the confinements of oppressive regimes of BIG TECH and the mainstream. We will rejoin collective energies and drift away from the prevalent notions of "ownership", "property", "newness" and "innovation," to slidetowards a temporary autonomous zone defined by "reclaiming", "reusing", "redistributing", "copying", "studying" and "transformation."
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In The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia (2022) postcolonial thinker and historian Achille Mbembe wonders whether it is possible to turn instruments of calculation and power into instruments of liberation. He argues that more-than-human knowledge of how to pass from one world, or one form to another, is a question that most ancient African myths and ancestral knowledge has tried to address by inventing and using objects such as masks lithurgical materials or throwing sticks (Mbembe, 9.). The power such techniques have is to sustain life and increase energetic and restorative potential rather than exploitative potential that has become paramount in the global North. With this definition of power Mbembe proposes paradoxical ethics of disappropriation – in contrast to appropriation and conquest – that aims to multiply reserves of life (Mbembe, 123.). 2
How to approach concepts such as disappropriation and sabotage as forms of resistance as much as solidarity?
During the organisation of the camp, we have been inspired by this notion of disappropriation and the related social and political attitude of piracy. We will explore the intergenerational imaginaries around piracy as a verb. Defiant as punks, resilient and inventive as hacktivists, witty as tricksters, everyday piracy will orient us in navigating against the tide of the mainstream and subvert dominant digital and political paradigms.
We see this temporary autonomous zone of the summer camp as a preparation, for implementing other forms of co-existence across differences. It's not a fiction but a framework for everyday practice of kin-making, self-realisation and peer-to-peer education. The summer camp is a collective experience that creates formats for alternative pedagogies and grounds for new communities to blossom.
In the Swiss activist publishing project Nous Sommes Partout (We Are Everywhere)3, a text signed by El. invites to engage in everyday piracy through a list of simple actions anyone could take. For this publication, we have put together contributions reflecting on practices of everyday piracy from a theorethical and practical angle -- ranging from hacking time to repurposing single use lithium cells of neon colored vapes littering the streets of London, alongside a review and reflection of H&D's smol (or not so smol) renewed website. We furthermore revive and extend the invitation of of Nous Sommes Partout by republishing their text everyday piracy and propose to add to the list:
"The TAZ [temporary autonomous zone] is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen."1
Suspending pressures of efficiency and productivity we imagine and foster other space-times that are marked by refusal and will disperse before becoming static and finite. We hope for the camp to become a fold, a crack in time and a space to experiment with alternative forms of co-living and regenerative forms of collective organisation. Much like autonomous squats, anti-capitalist climate care protest, autonomous tech cooperatives and spontaneous illegal raves, we imagine this year's summer camp as an island of insurrection that sticks out in a sea of techno-obedience.In The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia (2022) postcolonial thinker and historian Achille Mbembe wonders whether it is possible to turn instruments of calculation and power into instruments of liberation. He argues that more-than-human knowledge of how to pass from one world, or one form to another, is a question that most ancient African myths and ancestral knowledge has tried to address by inventing and using objects such as masks lithurgical materials or throwing sticks (Mbembe, 9.). The power such techniques have is to sustain life and increase energetic and restorative potential rather than exploitative potential that has become paramount in the global North. With this definition of power Mbembe proposes paradoxical ethics of disappropriation – in contrast to appropriation and conquest – that aims to multiply reserves of life (Mbembe, 123.). 2
How to approach concepts such as disappropriation and sabotage as forms of resistance as much as solidarity?
During the organisation of the camp, we have been inspired by this notion of disappropriation and the related social and political attitude of piracy. We will explore the intergenerational imaginaries around piracy as a verb. Defiant as punks, resilient and inventive as hacktivists, witty as tricksters, everyday piracy will orient us in navigating against the tide of the mainstream and subvert dominant digital and political paradigms.
We see this temporary autonomous zone of the summer camp as a preparation, for implementing other forms of co-existence across differences. It's not a fiction but a framework for everyday practice of kin-making, self-realisation and peer-to-peer education. The summer camp is a collective experience that creates formats for alternative pedagogies and grounds for new communities to blossom.
In the Swiss activist publishing project Nous Sommes Partout (We Are Everywhere)3, a text signed by El. invites to engage in everyday piracy through a list of simple actions anyone could take. For this publication, we have put together contributions reflecting on practices of everyday piracy from a theorethical and practical angle -- ranging from hacking time to repurposing single use lithium cells of neon colored vapes littering the streets of London, alongside a review and reflection of H&D's smol (or not so smol) renewed website. We furthermore revive and extend the invitation of of Nous Sommes Partout by republishing their text everyday piracy and propose to add to the list:
- ...exploring free libre open source tools and attitudes,
- ...divesting from proprietary tools and paradims,
- ...organising horizontally, prioritizing the use of libre fonts made by womxn,
- ...documenting our acitivities to be able to disseminate our collective knowledges across different communities of practice and across different geographies,
- ...working towards accessible spaces, creating safe(r) spaces for sharing knowledge....
- Quote from Hakim Bay's TAZ (1984), https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism#toc45
- Achille Mbembe, The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia (2022)
- https://www.noussommespartout.org/