In order to grasp the Utopian character of the Internet, we must begin to change our understanding not of the Internet but of Utopia. As Fredric Jameson deploys the concept in Archaeologies of the Future, Utopia becomes meta-utopia, an impulse that drives the creation of a plurality of Utopian islands, all constructed according to different visions of social order and social progress. This understanding of the Internet as meta-utopia, a toolkit for the manufacture of new social formations, will help place the Internet in a lineage that extends to the last great meta-Utopia, the sea. The sea has recently begun to be understood, in literary and cultural criticism, as a space of radical social re-figuration and mutation, a crucial laboratory for that crisis that goes by the name of modernity, to borrow Cesare Casarinos terminology (1). I propose, therefore, to expound upon the Utopian nature of online life by borrowing a revolutionary figure from this previous networked space of early capitalism: namely the Pirate. From a brief summary of Fredric Jamesons model of Utopia, I wish to look at the early pirate utopias of the 18th century and what they can teach us about Jamesons Utopia. In conclusion, I would like to explore Swedens Pirate Bay (and the free culture movement that swirls around it) as an example of the contemporary uptake of the pirate myth and the usage of piracy as a Utopian strategy. Ultimately, I seek to insert a third term into Jamesons vocabulary of Utopian Ideology and Utopian Science. The Internet and the sea can both be thought of as a Utopian Field, a space or space-like techno-economic system that affords the possibility of Utopian experimentation. This concept of the Utopian Field, as we shall see, foregrounds the importance of tools in the construction of Utopia and highlights the importance of both the sea and the Internet in the contemporary imagination.
Fredric Jamesons usage of the term Utopia and its applications to real-world, ongoing Internet practice is tied to an understanding of Utopia outside of spatial language. This does not mean to follow Henri Lefebvre and rebuke critics who use concepts of space to reference the ethereal constructions of cyberspace. Instead, I mean to suggest that Utopia, in the Jamesonian sense, is not the same thing as the utopian community or the utopian space. Jamesons understanding of Utopia, rather, is not unlike the Lacanian Real: a kernel resisting symbolic integration .. a leftover which persists and cannot be reduced to a universal play of illusory mirroring (iek 3;47). The Real, in Lacan, is that fantastic object which can never be fully absorbed into thought and continues to persist, necessitating continuing pursuit. This kernel is fundamental to desire and dreams of its possession structure our actions in the world (iek 46). Without further digressing into Lacan, it should be stated clearly that Jameson constructs Utopia, throughout his work, as another hard kernel which does not actually exist but forever shapes hopes and dreams. For Jameson, Utopia is not tied to any specific ideology or place and, instead, exists solely as a desire.
Having said that, we must further qualify the usage of Utopia here. In recent works, most notably Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson has begun to make the important distinction between Utopian Ideology and Utopian Science, following Marx and Engels own distinction between ideology and science. For Jameson, Utopian Ideology becomes an embodied political program, an intentional community, or some other real-world praxis that occurs within the concrete confines of space and is not merely a desire. While Jamesons life-long commitment to Marxism clearly illustrates a strong favoring of Utopian Ideologies, he is quick to point out, throughout his body of work, that Utopia is not specifically about political struggle. An exclamation following a reading of Thomas More is most telling on this point: enough has been said to suggest that it is not only political passion that is involved here, and that the Utopians were not only driven by indignation at social injustice or compassion for the poor (Jameson, Archaeologies 42). He then goes on to discuss the other obsessions, often with gadgets and gizmos, that permeate early Utopian plans and novels. In this way, Utopia can be seen to transcend the ideological and begin to resemble a large, open field of play. Towards this sense of play (and a real, spatial field) is where Jameson moves in the complicated and strange final chapter of Archaeologies of the Future.
Part of the strangeness of this seafaring chapter must be attributed to the state of contemporary politics. Given that this landscape is now more polyvocal, distributed, and interested in affinity between small units rather than large-scale Party politics, Jameson asks what future can exist for Leftist praxis and Utopia itself. Given the failure of the Party, Jamesons own vision of Utopia seems drawn to:
a certain anarchism which does not so much involve a seizure and destruction of power? as the exploration of zones and enclaves beyond its reach. (Archaeologies, 213).
Jamesons chasing of Utopia, for much of his scholarly career, seems to have finally led him away form Marxist political ideology and revolution as such. While he is equally wary of the anarchist vision of enclaves beyond state power, the problem he sees with revolution is rightly observed: with power so widely dispersed and political ideologies so divergent (even within Marxism itself), how can the possibility of a single new social order ever be achieved?
Understanding Utopia as not the representation of Utopia, but rather the conflict of all possible Utopias, and the arguments about the nature and desirability of Utopia as such, Jameson foregrounds the figure of the island as central to the Utopian vision he cannot seem to resist giving readers at the end of this last chapter (216). Similar to his removal of Utopia from a language of space or place, he decenters island from our geographical understanding and focuses on the self-contained ideological experimentation afforded by a sea-faring and port-based economy. For Jameson, then, the sea-based economics of the classical Mediterranean suggests a model for geopolitics under globalization that transcends the need for delinking or increased eco-tourism. His interest in semi-autonomous islands, in which unique ideological experiments can be conducted without the dangerous of totalization and repression (thanks to the free movement afforded by global capital), can be made more clear by another, earlier example of the island that has fascinated Utopian thinkers in recent years.
The pirate utopia is a concept that has been explored by a number of different Utopian thinkers, notably Charles Lamborn Wilson, William S. Burroughs, and Hakim Bey and is largely drawn from the dubious stories presented in Daniel Defoes A General History of the Pyrates. In several different stories, but most notably his account of Captain Mission, Defoe chronicles how several pirates, offended by the tyranny of their captains, overthrew injustice and established a more egalitarian form of life aboard ship. While this is Utopian in itself, Defoe goes on to show how Mission specifically creates a community on Madagascar organized around Enlightenment principles and committed to equality and universal suffrage. These communities, some of which may have actually existed, have come to be called pirate utopias in the discourse and serve as an example of Jamesons Utopian island: a space of relatively increased freedom in which the nature of social and economic life can be re-coded.
If this description of the Utopian island sounds like Foucaults concept of heterotopia, I would point out that Foucault, as well, is obsessed with the figure of the pirate, concluding Of Other Places (the essay that articulates the social character of heterotopia) with the singular remark that in societies without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates (Foucault 24). Foucault seems to encapsulate much of the Wests fascination with the pirate in that single sentence: pirates, unlike police, are a dangerous force, to be sure, but one that promises freedom rather than control. This understanding of Foucaults usage of piracy is affirmed by the other elements in the list, namely the difference between espionage and adventure (one need only think of D.A. Millers The Novel and the Police to understand the repressive aspects of espionage as a literary genre that seeks to obsessively catalog information that is already known in order to maintain a complete, disciplinary control over the social). This concept of adventure, of unlimited movement, and of untold wonders underscores both Foucaults and the Wests understanding of piracy. What, then, to make of the pirate?
The pirates who operated on the high seas during the later part of the 18th century continue to linger with us as a culture, one merely need look at a multiplex. While stories of buried treasure, walking the plank, and plundering the Spanish Main are clearly cool, the continued fascination of several hundred years of Western Civilization with piracy seems to suggest something a little more compelling than merely the tropes of piracy. In fact, a number of historians and thinkers on the Left, not just Foucault, have summoned pirates, at various times, to describe figures of cultural resistance, men who cast off the rules and regulations of a given order to seek a better life on their own terms: piracy is a powerful representational figure of resistance and Utopia. As Linebaugh and Rediker show in The Many-Headed Hydra:
The early-eighteenth century pirate ship was a world turned upside down, made so by articles of agreement that established the rules and customs of the pirates social order Pirates distributed justice, elected officials, divided loot equally, and established a different discipline. They limited the authority of the captain, resisted many of the practices of the capitalist merchant shipping industry, and maintained a multicultural, multiracial, multinational social order. They sought to prove that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy (162).
These and other histories articulate pirates as a powerful figure for Utopia given their ability to articulate an alternative social system, even if it is limited to their ships and incredibly temporary, as many pirates were executed for their disruption.
In this way, we can begin to see the sea as an early precursor to the Internet in its ability to facilitate Utopian experimentation. While I term the sea a Utopian Field, I want to suggest that rather than highlighting the spatial characteristic of the sea, I wish to use the concept of field to highlight the way the sea (and all Utopian Fields) can function as blank canvases for re-figuring the social. One of the problems with the sea as a Utopian field, however, was a question of access. Even with the valorized portraits of revolution at sea painted by Leftist scholars like Peter Lamborn Wilson (in his excellent Pirate Utopias) and especially Linebaugh and Rediker, the simple fact of the matter is that ships were not widely available to the majority of people. In this way, one of the chief problems with Utopian desires under earlier moments of mercantile capitalism was a problem of access. There may have been no shortage of Utopian dreamers during the age of piracy, but there was a barrier surrounding access to the Utopian Field of the sea. Chasing pirates into contemporary cultural discourse, though, I would like to propose a more fertile Utopian Field.
John Logies book on rhetorical combat in the Peer-to-Peer filesharing debates marks a good starting point towards an understanding of the contemporary valences of the term pirate. In the book, Logie explores different terms that have been applied to peer-to-peer technologies in their less legal guises. In a chapter entitled Peer-to-Peer Technologies as Piracy, Logie traces the recent rhetorical history of the term pirate within copyright discourse in America. For Logie, however, the pirate is a wholly negative term. He sees the usage of piracy within the debate as a means of insinuating violence and anti-social theft of property on the part of both legitimate and illegitimate copyright reformers. However, he also draws upon the more deep-seated and romanticized notion of the pirate throughout the text. As he writes, the harm caused by physical piracy seems minor, hardly even worth of the piracy analogy. No cutlasses are swung. No one is sent plunging towards Davy Joness locker (Logie 76). We see, here, the classic image of the pirate evoked to describe the absurdity of the copyright cartels (my shorthand for the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA), but Logie finds that due to the violence of the iconic pirate, this analogy fails to stand up to scrutiny.
The problem with Logies insightful analysis, though, is that it only gets at half of the dialectic tension that surrounds the public imaginary that is piracy. The pirate represents both the threat of irrational and random violence and the limitless freedom of movement afforded by the Utopian Field of the sea. While I would say that, for the most part, Logie is blind to this tension, the second positive term in this dialectical relationship does rupture the fabric of his text in one curious moment. Describing the urban bootlegger, selling pirated movies on street corners, he writes: In the U.S. outlaw activities have a demonstrable appeal. A variation of the same anti-authoritarian impulse that drives hackers, rockers, and rappers manifests itself in the grey markets of the American metropolis (Logie 74). This anti-authoritarian impulse that Logie identifies is Utopia, as such, in a nascent and non-ideological form.
Is there more, though, to this contemporary pirate discourse than sticking it to The Man? I think so, and I think we can find the answer in a consideration of the Swedish Piratbyrn, which is an active, advocacy organization and think-tank that operates various interests in the face of the copyright cartels and their international operations. The most notorious project run by this group has to be the Bit Torrent tracker created in November 2003 called The Pirate Bay. Legal under Swedish law, this central hub for much of the copyrighted material moving throughout the Internet has still managed to draw the ire of the international copyright cartels. Bit Torrent is a distributed filesharing service that is coordinated through a central server called a tracker. While the tracker does not contain any copyrighted material whatsoever, through a system of hashing algorithms and exchange protocols, the tracker connects people who have pieces of files with people who need pieces of file. Under the interpretation of Swedish law put forth by the operators of Pirate Bay (who broke away from Piratbyrn), this is not a violation of copyright (in fact, until recently, it wasnt in the US, either). That, did not stop the pressures of global capital, however, on May 31, 2006, the site’s servers were raided by Swedish police, taking it offline until June 3, when it came online with new hosting in the Netherlands (The Pirate Bay). Despite having broken no laws in Sweden, the Pirate Bay, and their former parent organization, Piratbyrn, were shut down when Swedish police radied and seized their computers. Of course, within a month, The Pirate Bay was back online and operational.
The most striking feature of all this is how Piratbyrn and The Pirate Bay have openly and knowingly embraced the image of the pirate. Piratbyrn is careful to never dispute that what they are doing is illegal: instead, they argue, the laws exist to serve corporate interests over and above the needs of creative production. This is not an uncommon argument. What is uncommon is how willing the members of the Swedish anti-copyright community are to embrace the negative valences of the label of pirate. In Piratbyrns work, one begins to see a conception of the positive aspects of the pirate that Logie missed in his reading of pirate in the P2P debates. As with Jamesons Mediterranean, the group constructs the Internet as a zone of radical otherness and contact. This quote comes from a speech given by Rasmus Fleischer and Palle Torsson that could be thought of as the groups manifesto:
”The copyright industry today likes to present the problem as if internet were just a way for so-called consumers to get so-called content But we must never fall in that trap, and can avoid it by refusing to talk about content altogether.
As clever entrepreneurs of course do understand, Internet business is not about selling information, it is about selling the possibility to interact. In addition to file-sharing, people use their broadband connections to so many kinds of production, circulation and communication” (Torsson & Fleischer).
This concept of circulation and communication seems important, but more important than even this is Torsson and Fleischers summoning of the idea of the entrepreneur. This concept is something I would like to use to move into the final phase of this discussion. This idea of contact is of huge importance to the Utopian vision suggested by both Jameson and Piratbyrn, despite their rather different ideologies. In stressing the importance of offering (for free or for profit) the ability to connect, Piratbyrns vision of the Internet seems to resemble Jamesonss concept of the Utopian island, in that these connections coupled with the limitless movement of the Internet afford users to sail around the network, experiencing different ideas and social formations, without fully participating unless they wish. This talk of limitless movement and the freedom to sample new modes of being seems a lot like the original rosy-colored visions of the Internet that said it would change the world. We see that the Internet is tantalizingly Utopian after all.
Having made that assertion, it would perhaps be wise to take stock of what has just occurred. In the end, the Utopian Field, this valorized space that exists in the imaginary world and in the concrete realm of the day-to-day, serves to facilitate Utopian Ideology and Utopian Science by being malleable, resisting totalization, and seeming to be infinite. All of the things the original Utopian dreamers said about life online have been found to come to pass in a paper that promised a more level-headed and nuanced reading of Utopia and the Internet.
Have you been had?
In fact, no: while the early generation of Internet Utopians, writing in Wired during the dot com economic run-up promised that these things will happen. I am promising no such thing. The Internet cannot be said to support any specific ideology, unless we want to somehow state that it supports all ideologies at the same time, even those that do not yet exist. The Internet, as a medium, cannot be thought of as being neutral, but what I want to get at is the idea that the Internet does not encode an ideology, breaking from the many people who (even to this day) continue to talk about computing and Internet activity as priming us for a rebirth in this or that ideology (Marxism and Liberal Democracy seem to be the two favorites). The only interest such specific ideologies hold for me is that there are a host of scholars arguing for a host of different ideologies and all claiming that theirs is the one facilitated by the Internet.
Instead what I have been trying to construct here is a necessary component of Utopia outside of ideology and experimentation. While both of these actions occur within the minds of individual Utopian thinkers, my concept of the Utopian Field is the toolsets and spatial metaphors that provide grist for the mill of Utopia, in all its ideological forms. I want to be clear: the Utopian Field is not a Utopia, as, say B.F. Skinners Walden 2 was a real community. Instead, the Utopian Field is a space with an open architecture in which people can actively construct Utopian visions and pursue the desire called Utopia. Exploring the figure of the pirate yields a romanticization of the sea that yields the possibility of utopias. Similarly, the Internet is such a field. The reason, however, that I feel we should be excited about Utopia online is the greater ease with which people are able to move into the Utopian Field and start dreaming.