News/Research

Abigail De Kosnik and Piracy as the Future of Culture

06 Nov, 2019

Abigail De Kosnik and Piracy as the Future of Culture

You're going to want to read BCNM Director Abigail De Kosnik's latest article 'Piracy and the Future of Culture: Speculating about Media Preservation after Collapse' published by the journal Third Text!

Check out the abstract:

Current conditions of global climate change, fossil fuel exhaustion, economic precarity, and political unrest may be indicators that modern industrialised society is on the verge of Collapse. What will happen to digital and digitised media – files of images, text, films, television series, audio recordings, video games, and so on – in the event of Collapse? The author argues that individuals who exchange such files online via peer-to-peer protocols, who are deemed ‘pirates’ by the culture industries, are in fact amateur archivists whose personal caches of digital media will be the most likely to survive catastrophic change. Indeed, catastrophic change will not be catastrophic for all parties: Collapse may put an end to capitalism, which optimises for the rapid obsolescence of cultural commodities and combats the unpaid exchange of goods in myriad ways, thereby preventing official archives and libraries from implementing strategies for the legal preservation of digital culture.

Read the article here!