Issue 1, 2015: Pirates and Privateers
This issue of Krisis revolves around two figures, that of the pirate and the privateer. It explores their relevance to a critical understanding of the gobalized present. Defying any simple opposition, the relationship between them is simultaneously one of extreme proximity, in terms of practice, and great distance, in terms of their relation to sovereignty and the law. This results in an ambiguity that matches the economic networks in which they operate, then and now. For the pirate and privateer make their reappearance in the cracks opened up by nation states permanently recuperating from the centrifugal and deterritorializing forces of capital. From media pirates turned hacktivists to neo-privateers mooring their vessels in tax havens and SEZs, each contribution approaches engages these figures from a different angle: that of Agamben’s theory of sovereignty, Corporate Social Responsibility, anonymity and parametric politics, and many more.
Biography
Daniel de Zeeuw is a PhD-candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam). He is also co-editor of Krisis: Journal for contemporary philosophy and affiliated researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures. His research explores the politics and aesthetics of contemporary digital culture, art and activism.
Jonathan Paul Marshall has played online since 1996 when he began the project that became Living on Cybermind: Categories, Communication and Control (Peter Lang 2007) and the Cybermind Gender Project (Transforming cultures E-Journal Special Issue 2008). He works and has worked at the University of Technology Sydney in a variety of positions. He and Francesca da Rimini are also among the co-authors of Disorder and the Disinformation Society forthcoming from Routledge.
Francesca da Rimini is an artist, writer and pirarch. She co-authored A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century with cyberfeminist art group VNS Matrix. Her online avatar GashGirl explored gender identity and collaborative creativity at LambdaMOO. Early internet art projects dollspace (web labyrinth revenge on patriarchy) and Los Días y Las Noches de Los Muertos (multi-screen re-rendering of the Zapatista critique of neoliberalism), were followed by academic research on the digital commons and online activism. She and Jonathan Marshall have co-authored various papers on property and file-sharing.
Oscar Coppieters is a young researcher who is interested in queries of power, rationalization and social transformation. He has a background in philosophy and development studies.
Sonja Schillings is a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) in Germany. She has recently defended her dissertation entitled Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence (GSNAS/John-F.-Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin). Recent publications include work on discursive containment in legal constructions of piracy, and the concept of the state of nature in contemporary Anglo-American fiction.
Liesbeth Schoonheim is a PhD-student at RIPPLE, the research group in political philosophy at the University of Leuven (Belgium). Her research focuses on political subjectivity in the work of Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort, and is funded by (FWO) – Research Foundation Flanders.
maxigas is a PhD candidate at the Open University of Catalonia, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute and researcher at the Metatron Research Unit. He co-edited issue 5 of The Journal of Peer Production on the topic of ‘Shared Machine Shops’. He is the author of several articles on hacklabs and hackerspaces. He can be reached at maxigas@anargeek.net and uses the OpenPGP key FA00812913E92617C614 0901787963BC287ED166. More information at http://research.metatron.ai/
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds and the politics of public information. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.