Formations

formationsno.1 | nov. 2014

formations, no. 1

contents

1. introduction

2. interview with Suneel Jethanilocative media, alternative mapping,self-tracking & discipline

13. interview with Ramon Lobatoshadow economies, piracy, digital ghost towns & creative labour

Michael Burns

Written for MDA30007 Media/Literature Project BSupported by Swinposium

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Introduction

Formations is the outcome of my work in undertaking the Media/Literature Project B subject at Swinburne University. The aim of this publication is to talk through the ideas of people working within media studies here at Swinburne; to explore the motivations and personal experiences that inform theory and research; and to look at the ways in which academic work relates to media production more broadly.

This issue includes two interviews. The first with Suneel Jethani deals with some of the issues that come out of develop-ments in mobile, location aware media technologies and the uses to which they are being put. Perhaps a central topic in this interview is to look at a mediated body in space. This body is spoken of in several ways: by looking at how map-ping and alternative mapping projects ar-ticulate politics through representations of space; of emplacing bodies in space through media as a way to visualise re-lations and subjective understandings of those relations; and of the politics ex-pressed through the promises and poten-tials of self-tracking and sensory devices.

The second interview within this issue is with Ramon Lobato and discusses the central role of distribution and circula-tion of media texts in demand, reception and production. More specifically, Ra-mon’s work focuses on informal and pi-rate media economies and here piracy is discussed as a mainstream practice, look-ing at its relationship with legal channels, and how media platforms shape access, taste and value. Then we discuss no-tions around immaterial labour through the example of freelance writing and look at how social and cultural currencies op-erate to complicate structural, economic perspectives. Finally, we return to piracy and cyberlockers to speak of the often ephemeral and brittle nature of digital archives. I hope these interviews are as interesting and enjoyable to read as they were to do.

- Michael Burns

Cover art:Julian Spiller

Thanks:Swinposium - Swinburne student journal of philosophy, Anna Doyle

interview with Suneel Jethani 2

Interview with Suneel JethaniPhD candidate and lecturerMedia and communications programSchool of culture and communicationUniversity of Melbourne

I. Background & Motivations/Locative Media/Listening to the Body/Mapping, Visibility & Politics

As a starting point, would you like to pro-vide something of an introduction about what you do, and how you came to work in this area?

So I started my academic life as an un-dergrad studying genetics, and came to realise fairly early that I wasn’t an elegant scientist at all and I didn’t enjoy being in the lab so much. But what I did really enjoy about it was the theoretical side of things and reading about the process of science. So to keep sane through my un-dergrad I started taking a lot of the history and philosophy of science courses. I took the maximum number of arts you could do as a science graduate and that naturally led to an interest in writing, or at least an offsetting of the very rational ‘go into the lab and replicate stuff’ mode of learning to something a bit freer. The concept of writing to me was always an interesting one and one I enjoyed and was good at,

but I sort of came at it through the frame of someone who wanted to work in the biological sciences, and that was just how I was conditioned from school. I got to a point where I didn’t want to do honours and didn’t want be in a lab coat – I didn’t want to do all that type of stuff and when you’re a science graduate without a great prospect to work in a lab and do a PhD and do that sort of stuff there’s not many career options. There is basically phar-maceutical repping or device repping, which is something I didn’t want to do, but I fell into academic publishing and science publishing in particular. I guess that exposed me to people who were aca-demics and editors and people who were doing that. So I was around that envi-ronment then I think at some point I got bored, went back to uni, did a masters in communication just to lever the science communication aspect of it, and started to think seriously about a PhD.

Where the interest with the stuff I do I think started when I started to look at me-dia convergence, and what is important to note about that is because I was someone coming from industry a lot of what I was reading and learning about in people like Henry Jenkins – you know really basic kind of stuff – to me really rang true in terms of these were the types of things my organisation and me as a decision maker within the media production environment and the media industry needs to be think-ing about. And this is the era of open ac-cess publishing and digitisation of back files and all that type of stuff. So to me the sort of stuff I was learning about at uni was just, like, holy shit this opening up of

all these amazing ideas, and just through that: through doing well at uni and being enabled to be confident with my writing and it just got to the point where I knew that that’s what I wanted to do. So then I began the slow process of transitioning out of industry into the academy.

In terms of the actual interest in technolo-gies that I’m looking at now, obviously I come to it from science technology stud-ies background, so media studies and sci-ence technology studies. I like to think of myself as a science technologies guy who’s just in media, I don’t sort of see myself as a media scholar in a traditional sense but that’s the sort of theory I’m in-terested in.

In your article Mediating the body one of the quotes here is: “As one of the many streams in the study of ‘new’, ‘net-worked’, ‘social’ or ‘locative’ media self-tracking engages specifically with issues of relationship between bodily awareness – of position, physiology and other states of being – and the politics of everyday life”1 . I guess to me that kind of sums up the common themes running through your articles were, in this relationship be-tween bodily awareness, spatial position-ing and politics. I was wondering what in those areas do you find interesting, what brought you to those and what you’re try-ing to tease out of it?

I think the main sort of trajectory of those ideas which – when you say it like that – sounds really worked out and I’m kind of 1. Jethani, S, Mediating the body: technology, politics and epistemologies of self. [Draft], p. 3.

impressed that that’s what you read into the work and that’s what you’d pull from it, because it sounds like such a worked out idea when framed like that and it has a very broken trajectory in some ways. So the first instantiation of some these ideas came by looking at locative media in a very sort of traditional sense of what locative media means: in location aware media. I was reading the work of people like Rich-ard Rogers who looked at news discourse and issues based discourse, and he has (or had) this tool called Issue Crawler2 which basically scrapped the web and spatial-ised data to look at if discourses around particular issues – say that’s the occur-rence of HIV in Baltic states, for instance, or environmental issues in India around certain cities – if the discourse itself was mapping onto the locations where those events were actually unfolding. And of-tentimes you see that discourse happens in places other than where the events are unfolding on the ground. So why is there a disconnect between those things and is there a politics within that disconnect? And then does technology offer you a way to kind of put those issues back into a local context? Can you put bodies on maps? This was around the time that we were starting to get things like Google maps – as something starting to become a thing that is being used in devices and something that developers are becoming interested in. So then you start to see the idea of using technology to emplace the body, to put the body back onto the map and put the body back into a location: to say ‘I count, I’m here’.

2. see: govcom.org

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I just happened to come across an art-work in Berlin – an installation that was about mapping and one of the papers I sent you talks a little about that – and what was involved in this particular map was using hacked mobile phones to map electromagnetic radiation around the city – something you can’t see – and that hap-pened in the city of Bangalore in India. I got interested in looking at alternative forms of mapping in the Indian context in particular because Indian cities have within them a certain set of features that make them interesting sites, so rapid tech-nologisation, for instance. Many of the cities have gone from having televisions to having very dense internet infrastruc-tures in only the space of ten or fifteen years. They’re not like cities like Tokyo that have this long trajectory of mediati-sation. So looking at mapping projects and looking at mapping in an alternative sense - so mapping of populations that live along train lines, for instance - and putting those bodies onto maps, emplac-ing those bodies as an act of counter-vio-lence or an act of political resistance was something that I came quite interested in and fascinated with. That led obviously to a reading of Lefebvre, and an enthusi-astic reading of Lefebvre like most people who do locative media.

There is a part in Lefebvre that talks of this notion of a code of codes, you know, is there this sort of master code? And Lefebvre always talks about how to think about space and its production and how we enact it and so on, that we can’t ever forget the body. In Rhythmanalysis, the last of his books he talks about this idea of

listening to the body, so then I thought a foregrounded critique of media; of media that is body and location that foregrounds the body itself, the body as a biological entity that is in tune with an environment that is becoming mediatised, can that be done? At that point we start to see sensor technologies and self-quantification and those things enter, as a nature progressive of location aware media, and that’s where I sort of went ‘ok, that’s where this sort of theory sits, I can articulate this theory through these set of practices’ and that’s a hard thing to do: to articulate theory through a distinct set of practices that you can engage with as a media scholar.

So that, again, leads me to looking at self-quantification technologies, wearable sensor devices and so on through the lens of this theory of the body and emplace-ment, but also through materialist theory in media – so people like Jussi Parrika who looks at this from an archaeological perspective. Not archaeological in only a Foucauldian sense, but archaeological quite literally. I started thinking about so what are the technological antecedents to a Fitbit? And what are the technologi-cal antecedents to devices that measure your emotion and blood pressure and all those sort of things? I’m looking at all sorts of things in my thesis and in some of the work that is flowing out of my thesis where I’m looking at mood rings, the ther-mochromic mood rings and I’m looking at hospital bracelets – just the little plastic bracelets that had people’s vitals and ID on them – and those kinds of things, and looking at these wearable sensor technol-ogies in a much broader trajectory of the

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mediatisation or representation in various forms of media of bodily states, of identity and bodily states. Then, at what happens when those kinds of technologies flow out of very private settings; to log one’s life in a diary or taking one’s vital statistics and keeping those in a very private sense to the sort of performative networked idea of measuring the self and how that flows onto regimes of control running parallel with things like the rise of audits in the workplace and the normalisation of self-surveillance. So there is this very knotted set of theoretical ideas, and the quantified self and self-tracking is a very conveni-ent and contemporary way to actually un-tangle it and make sense of some of these ideas (which all go back to the body).

Within your article on alternative map-ping in Bangalore3 the projects you cov-ered talked about ways of including what was marginalised or made invisible by traditional mapping techniques. I was trying to think about ways mapping works not only at the level of making things vis-ible or invisible, or I guess what I was trying to get at was that with a map that doesn’t include homeless or illegal set-tlements and this sort of stuff is, in many ways, a very accurate and apt depiction of the space of capital. I was trying to think beyond just questions of what is and isn’t included to how alternative mapping could articulate a different sense of poli-tics, not just as trying to incorporate the invisible into capital.

Yeah, and it sort of shows just through 3. Jethani, S, Can Digital Mapping Re-politicize Urban Mediation in the Indian Context?

that idea if we reverse the logic and say ok rather than making the invisible vis-ible, let’s look at the forces that automate invisibility and that’s I think something of what you’re saying in some ways as well. How does that articulate a representa-tion of an alternative spatial or temporal schema – how do they show us certain things about capital – and in that sense it is a slight move away from: are we just representing the invisible? It is an inter-esting political move (and counter-politi-cal move) to be able to visualise capital’s forces, and some examples of how that is being done is to perhaps look at what are some of the most stressful places in the city. And I often get asked ‘what are the applications of fitness tracking and those sorts of things outside of achieve-ment culture or neo-liberal ideologies of health and fitness?’ and imagine what un-derstanding the most stressful places in a city might be, or being able to map cer-tain ways of feeling or thinking, or physi-ological responses to space. And you can see that perhaps there are more stressful places in the city like being in traffic or morning commutes or 3am on a Friday or whatever that might be, and just by think-ing about those things and being forced to reflect on why those things might hap-pen we see certain things about capital and about how we cope with life and cope with the city, and all those things are bound up in capitalist movement of sub-jects through time and through space.

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II. Locative Art/Psychogeography/Media Archaeology/Art & Obsolescence

I wanted to talk about an article you co-wrote with Dale Leorke on mapping and locative art4. Within that you cover a few alternative mapping and locative art projects and you note how they are mostly based on the ideas of the Situationist International. To be honest, I’ve never really understood what psychogeography is in a sense. I know what it is theoretically, but I don’t really understand what it is to do it, really.

Yeah, I’m not sure if the Situationists understood what that meant either, other than something like going out on a sort of intellectualised form of a bender. We sort of wonder how much actual engagement there was with locality when these guys went out and did this stuff; did they actu-ally engage with people in the places they were travelling through or was it very like self-indulgent and closed in some ways? And that’s a sort of critique of the Situ-ationists that many people make. But in terms of psychogeography, the way I try to make sense of it is through the different levels of how the Situationists might try to diagramatised (if that’s even a process) their praxis, their practice. Psychogeog-raphy in some ways is tapping into the pliable or malleable nature of space and how it can be reversed, and of what those elements are and the recognition of what those elements might be. They have this 4. Jethani, S & Leorke, D 2013, ‘Ideology, obsolescence and preservation in digital mapping and locative art’, International Communication Gazette, vol. 75, nos 5-6, pp. 484-501.

map of Paris they made called The Naked City where they cut little pieces out a map and changed the orientation around and drew arrows between the segments of the map, and they called them ‘psychogeo-graphical turntables’ where the analogy in French is with the railroad turntables used to turn train carriages around. To me, that’s the best articulation I’ve seen of what that might mean: it’s the idea of ambiences and spatial cues and motifs and aspects of space being able to be re-versed, and a recognition of what those things are is sort of a psychogeographic mapping of space. To me, that’s also the relationship between the Situationists and someone like Lefebvre, who looked at rhythm and this idea of being able to listen to one’s reaction to space and listen to the body in space, and maybe that’s the psycho aspect of psychogeography. It’s a good question as with all Situationist concepts, they’re all a bit ambiguous and open to interpretation, and perhaps under-theorised in some ways.

There was a group who tried to create a psychogeographic mobile app, and I found it to be incredibly useless as you’d spend the entire time on the phone.

They shut it down, didn’t they?

I think there’s a few different ones.

They shut it down because it violated Apple’s location service terms and con-ditions. This was an app called the Situ-ationist app which did similar things, where you’d put a location pin in and it

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would tell you to go hug a stranger or something like that.

Yes, the one I had was called Drift and it had that sort of shit where it was ‘walk to the nearest tree and turn around three times and walk backwards’ or whatever, and you would just spend the whole time looking at the screen.

Exactly, which is exactly what the Situ-ationists would go against.

But thinking about alternative or sub-jective mapping, I read this article look-ing spatial relations within indie music scenes. Basically the author just asked a series of people to draw a map of their in-volvement in that scene, like of the places that were significant for them. They were all highly diverse and had nothing to do with spatial location in terms of distance or like the sort of things you’d see in the Melways.

Yeah, and it’s funny, just as you’re say-ing that I’m wondering about what hap-pens when you de-emphasise the geo in geography and, in some ways, maybe the Situationists were sort of thinking of geography in very pure spatial terms as opposed to geography in a literal sense. And what you’re saying there about, you know, ‘draw a map of these relations’ and maybe that’s what geography means, as maybe geography that can be interpreted as relativity as opposed to geography in a geo-emphasised sense. The idea here is of showing a process, representing pro-cesses of interpretation and of someone’s

subjective understanding of relations – maybe that’s what the geography could be taken as.

Also after reading that article5 , I went and borrowed Parikka’s What is Media Archaeology? So I’ve not read much of it, but I guess I was interested in how you felt these ideas around media archaeol-ogy increase an understanding of locative art projects and practices after the event of the projects themselves? What does it mean to incorporate a media archaeology perspective into these discussions?

I guess what we were motivated by when we were thinking about those issues for that article was the actual afterlives of the projects and the dependencies the projects have on off-the-shelf technologies. So about what happens when those technolo-gies become obsolete or when accounts and documentation of those projects be-come obsolete – when people stop paying for a url or domain hosting and the web-sites go down, or when accounts of the projects are on redundant formats or me-dia, or when apps become outdated and don’t get updated for the latest platform. We were looking at it purely through obsolescence and the methodology and principles of media archaeology help you do that because every iteration of a tech-nology is ideologically loaded, and you can see that reflected not only in the sense of art practices but in the sense of the rela-tionship between art and technology. One of the transitions – and it’s in that paper and I don’t know if we articulated it as forcefully as we could have – but there’s 5. Ibid.

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a transition away if look at earlier forms of media art, which were very DIY were often people were hiring developers and people to build systems and technologies, and we see a shift away from that. We see a shift to people using off-the-shelf tech-nologies and participation requires that; it requires people to be able to use the things they have to download an app or use their mobile phone. This goes back to earlier experimentation where you’d use your old Nokia to dial in and play a game of pong on the side of some building in Berlin or whatever it might be. That reli-ance is something that the methodology of media archaeology really helps us un-derstand: around how does art interface with technology through its structures, through its funding and through its ob-jectives to involve people, and how does it rationalise that to a form of producing hardware and producing tools that might work outside the cycles of obsolescence. So anything that involves using an iP-hone has a certain shelf life, anything that involves different media formats; like even the Bangalore project that I’ve been writing about for a couple of years now if you go back to that website half of the links are broken and I can very rarely actually demonstrate any of the audio or video that is embedded into that map be-cause the links are broken or something doesn’t work or a flash player is outdated. We start to see these things decay and we found that really interesting, and that was the real motivation behind that article which came out of a couple of throwaway comments that both of us made in various talks. We just started to think about those ideas and bring them together, which was

very much the coming together of two ob-servations around the ideology of media art projects and technological obsoles-cence, and Parrika is a nice place to use to bring those ideas together.

III. Self-Tracking/Bodies without Organs/‘Code/Body’/Productivity/Ideology/Discipline

To talk about self-tracking, in Self-track-ing and emancipatory self-knowledge6 you refer to self-tracking through the idea of the Body without Organs. It took me a long time to get my head around it, be-cause I think I was reading it the wrong way to begin with. I was reading you talking about the Body without Organs as this emancipatory body, and I was read-ing it too literally.

It’s funny, to be honest, I think the story behind this paper is interesting in that I wanted to do something Deleuzian be-cause Deleuze is a key figure in my work. But then Deleuzian concepts are the most abused concepts in philosophy; they’re not easy to get your head around. When I first started thinking about this I was thinking about the idea of these devices sort of making certain sensory capacities disappear or actually standing in for cer-tain sensory capacities. And I thought: let me look at Deleuze again, at this idea of the Body without Organs – which I’ve 6. Jethani, S 2014, ‘Self-tracking and emanci-patory self-knowledge: What can a code/body (without.organs) do?’, Conference on Deleuze’s Cultural Encounters with the New Humanities.

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never really understood myself – and I thought this was something of a good op-portunity to play with this idea and see what happens. There was a Deleuze con-ference in Hong Kong and that’s where that paper comes from. I thought what better way to do it than go out in front of Deleuzians and see what happens. And I sort of just did it and prefaced it with: what I’m looking for here is potential av-enues of how this might be misinterpret-ed. That was kind of a good experience – a risky one but a good one – in that the reading that some people made of that pa-per was sort of similar: that literal idea of the Body without Organs being a kind of free thing, like a literal body without or-gans but that’s not what Deleuze intended at all. It is more about the Body without Organs as a body without control, so the emancipatory body is not a BwO in that sense; it’s a body with organs. But it is a slippery concept, and one open to a lot of interpretation but also a lot of abuse. So I’ve been careful about how I’ve used Deleuze in that sense.

What I see the idea as being is the incor-poration of devices that stand in for the senses just automates this kind of control and, in some ways, Deleuze would al-ways say that the body needs to undergo or move through certain regimes of con-trol to actually understand its domination and all that sort of stuff, and that’s the heavy direction that that paper is trying to go. I think the next conversation to have is about that and about how that automa-tion of discipline shuts down the potential of an emancipatory body, and how that continues and intensifies something that

has been progressively happening well and truly before technologies of sensory capacity right up to ideas of cognition of the body and of understanding of the body through medical units and understanding the body through a set of physiological performance limits.

In terms of how I ended up reading that article was how the Body without Organs in its appearance in Anti-Oedipus7, it is basically a story of the Lacanian mirror stage in some ways. So if you kind of read what the promises of these self-tracking devices are, you can sort of see how the mirror stage plays out in some ways. So you view your image through these de-vices and have mastery over this image, and you have something of a mind-body duality where you have mastery, but that is always misrecognised.

Yes, and it just comes through a prism of pure ideology, be that ideology of evidence based medicine or the ideology of neo-liberal lifestyle marketing. And you’re right, it’s a really good way to put it. But, then again, the Body without Organs appears in various texts and can mean completely different things almost. But I do like that interpretation.

That’s how I ended up reading it, but what you’re looking for isn’t just to say it’s pure misrecognised control over the body, where you’re just taking this image and pretending it’s your organs or whatnot. But you also speak of how through self-7. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F 2009, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Penguin, New York.

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tracking and the ways in which you con-nect to these devices precipitates bodily changes, that there isn’t just this divorce between body and image, and looking at how that could actually play out in ways that are emancipatory.

Yeah, the naming convention in that pa-per is very deliberate in the sense of that didactic coupling of code to this idea of the Body without Organs, and what can it actually do then? Does this idea of code – meaning codes of enclosure in a general sense and not just code in a digital media sense, but codes of enclosure that come to us through anatomical understandings of the body or physiological understandings which are then technologised – then what do those couplings do? So I don’t see it as a duality but more about couplings that are scripted or hardwired into how we understand the relationship of the body to the world, or of the body to ideas of productivity or of success and health and limits and thresholds. When you think about it, at base, it’s of the body in its rela-tionship to others. That’s why in Deborah Lupton – who is another theorist working in this area from a slightly different per-spective – that where I say code/body, she says body/self, and I think for those very visual naming conventions in some ways by putting a slash there, you’re saying a lot more than simply putting a slash there.

I’ve paraphrased a quote from you – and I might be misreading you in some ways – but with this idea of the somatic and extrasomatic as interoperable, and you write: “the politics of the body…relies on a conception of body…that does not

take into account a body that is assisted in the pursuit of knowing itself”8. I didn’t quite understand with these theories of the body, how they don’t take that into ac-count?

To look at it from the somatic-extrasomat-ic divide first. So if we think about the somatic in the sense of the enclosed body, of the body as an enclosure of biological systems, the body silences certain things quite naturally like you learn to silence pain through endurance and training, and you learn to silence certain sensations and so on. If we think of optimising the body and discourses of optimisation of the body often involve a revealing. Again, the making visible of the invisible. So learning to regulate your breathing, for instance, or learning to recognise pain when you’re training and these types of things all involve this idea of reopening things that the somatic body just through conditioning – through self-conditioning or conditioning in other ways – learns to silence. You don’t often think about how many times you blink or how many times you breathe until you have to do it for some reason, like when you mediate you learn to regulate your breathing and you’re being made conscious of those things. There is a difference when tech-nology is involved in that process and that’s the idea of the extrasomatic organ of the body, of an extrasomatic sensory surface for the body – be that the cam-era in your phone or the flashlight in your phone that’s shining through your finger-tip to take your pulse or the camera that is using its resolution capacity to meas-8. Jethani, S, Mediating the body, pp. 10-11.

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ure very small changes in colour in your face to then algorithmically relate that to how much your heart is beating, for in-stance. That’s the extrasomatic aspect of it, it is external to the body in the sense that it doesn’t accurate mediate what is happening in the body like a stethoscope might, but does that through algorithms. It is extrasomatic in that sense, in that it is not only in a physical sense where it is outside the body and is touching the body through the skin or some other surface, but it is extrasomatic in the sense that it is not a direct mediation but simulated me-diation that has a whole bunch of math-ematical principles underneath it – so it is extrasomatic in both those senses, and you can simplify it right down and call it unnatural, but ‘natural’ is not a word we can use, so it is just ‘extra’.

One thing you speak a lot about is of self-tracking and how that relates ideology and questions of productivity. I was won-dering if you could talk more about that?

That goes back to something I said earlier about auditing. We sort of normalise that, we use counting and tracking to make bet-ter decisions or to be aware of certain be-haviours. Counting the number of glasses of water you have in a day or counting the number of cigarettes if you’re trying to cut down, and these methods of quan-tification are kind of all bound up in an ideology that if we know ourselves better then we can make better decisions for our-selves. I really question the emancipatory dimension of that kind of knowledge, like how much of that knowledge is actual freedom and how much of it is just au-

tomating regimes of control? And we’ve had a long conditioning of these things; these things take time to take shape and become socially acceptable. A lot of things needed to happen before we got to the moment where self-tracking could happen. Auditing is one of them, and logging for various reasons like keeping a nutrition diary or whatever that might be. Then if you think about where this might go, Medibank Private, for instance, recently were given away Fitbits if you joined before the end of the financial year or December 31st this year or whatever. And that’s all very nice of Medibank Pri-vate and that’s a great marketing strategy, but if we look at that with a little bit of critical distance and maybe a bit of cyni-cism then why would insurance compa-nies really be interested in self-tracking in some ways? And an alternative interpre-tation of that move might be that this is a very slight move towards normalising self-tracking within the context of health insurance, because in the future devices like this will be used to calculate premi-ums. You do away with the need for med-ical checks and so on, and its more about, perhaps, things like ‘go wear a Fitbit for a month, go wear a tracking device for a month and log your data into an algorithm and that will work out what your premi-um should be, and maybe we’ll give you a discount if you have a very good rest-ing heart rate’. So it is a normalisation of tracking and it happens in many aspects of self-management, as in: manage this yourself. This happens right down to fill in your own payslips or manage your own bank account and all those sorts of things. And I wonder about the automation of

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these things and how they are normalised, and workplaces are good for that: audit-ing and so on. Or applications that help you track certain things about your body like ergonomics, to sit up straight. Even things like those productivity timers like the famed pomodoro technique of work-ing in 25 minute bursts and all that type of stuff. Is it emancipatory knowledge or is it a long trajectory of normalisation – that sounds horribly Foucauldian, right? – of the long trajectory in the normalisa-tion of discipline. But you can’t kind of laugh at that stuff because in many ways whether it’s a deliberate move by insur-ers or a subconscious one, the end result is the same: it does normalise wearing a thing that measures your heart rate. So it is a remarkably bizarre marketing strat-egy in some ways, but also a remarkable clever one and I wonder if the marketing managers that signed off on that move at Medibank to give away Fitbits thought about this as a consideration or concern. I wonder if they know what they’re actu-ally doing and what role they’re playing in what things might come after it.

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Interview with Ramon LobatoARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow & LecturerSchool of Arts, Social Sciences and HumanitiesSwinburne Institute for Social ResearchDepartment of Media and Communication

I. Background & Motivations/Shadow Economies/Pirate Audiences/Media Strategies & Internal Conflicts

As a starting point, would you like to pro-vide an overview and background infor-mation on what your research is, on your research around informal economies, how you came to study these areas, and the motivations that lead this work?

What got me interested in researching media industries was being a passionate media lover and consumer. So I was a really big music buff and a film buff and I’ve always loved all different art and me-dia forms, and they’ve brought me a lot of pleasure. So I guess all the research I’ve done has stemmed from that, and so, over time, I got interesting in thinking not just about the kind of meanings and pleasures of those texts, but also about how we ac-cess them. This was partly because I just felt there was less research around those certain issues of circulation and distribu-

tion, and so I was kind of looking for a new topic for my PhD so I ended up set-tling on that area. But also I wanted to know a bit more about the industry and policy side of things because I realised I didn’t know all that much about them. So I just wanted to do something a little different, and then I got really fascinated with all those issues and that became my kind of main research project from then onwards – around distribution and circu-lation. But I’m always motivated by the idea that those ideas matter because me-dia matters to people and that questions of economy, industry, regulation and so forth are only interesting insofar as they shape the kind of media worlds we can have access to, and shape our imagina-tions and our cultural identities.

Would you like to talk about the field of research you’re situated in, where you are located within that and what some of the problems that area is working through?

I guess I am working within a few areas. On the one hand, in film studies, which is a really diverse field and there’s still a lot of energy within film studies on questions of representation and mean-ing; there’s increasingly lots of inter-est in debates about national, global and transnational cinemas; there’s still a lot of work around gender, identity, class, and so forth. So there is still a lot happening. My area within that is around film indus-try research, and again within that you have one arm that is about instrumental research, that is, around how to build film industries, and then there is another arm that is more critical research about the re-

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lationship between industry and economy and representation; and that is the area I find myself interested in.

With your book Shadow Economies of Cinema1 and a few other texts you’ve written that talk about informal systems of film circulation (including pirate net-works), you talk about how these aspects of circulation, distribution and reception have been somewhat sidelined; where they are considered not marginal, but exterior to the industry itself. I think in terms of how people access films, these aspects are not really marginal but some-what central, now especially. Why do you think they have been positioned in this way and what does it mean to incorpo-rate them into an understanding of media industries?

When I starting doing the research for that book, I felt that there was a bit of a gap in film studies around piracy and around the ways in which most people, well, a lot of people all over the world actually access movies. I felt that at a personal level, the kind of ways scholars were talking about distribution and circulation didn’t really match up with the ways I watched mov-ies, and in travelling and visiting other countries there were whole different sys-tems of circulation such as pirate markets, such as low-cost video sales systems, and all other kinds of things that I just didn’t see any research on and I just felt there was a lot of interesting things that just weren’t being captured. I guess that was

1. Lobato, R 2012, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

the impetus to do it. But I guess since having written that book, there’s been in just the past couple of years a lot more interesting research coming out; a lot of good research on torrents, on stream-ing and on piracy – on DVD piracy and digital piracy – that is addressing those kinds of issues now. So I think it’s great that there’s more of a conversation start-ing around those, because as you say it is really kind of mainstream, it’s not a marginal thing anymore. I mean piracy has never really been a marginal thing because it has always been such a huge part of all media markets really and cer-tainly for film, and so it’s only esoteric from the point of view of scholarship, but for most consumers it isn’t. So it is just a task of matching up the analysis with the practices and I think people always move first and research follows, so we are still a little behind but the gap is narrowing. I think that for film studies, the internet isn’t its natural home, that it is more at home in the realm of the complete text, the author, genre and things like that; and perhaps a lot of film scholars felt a little uncomfortable with internet things. Yet I think that is changing very fast, with new generations of film scholars coming through.

With some things I’ve read on pirate net-works, I’ve often found them inflected with a degree of anthropology in a sense, which is fair enough in many ways. I guess where people were saying ‘let’s not look at Hollywood distribution models, let’s look at how films circulate in Nige-ria’ perhaps. Or I suppose when talking about internet piracy, there was some-

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thing of a need to produce a community out of it, of having to write in a pirate community. And what I like about your approach was how it brought piracy back to questions of production, of it being a process of labour, of the development of markets; there was this economic dimen-sion that was separate to, I suppose, the sociology, or, not separate, but it wasn’t looking at experiences of community, it was looking at these experiences and of labour and markets and how capital flows through as well.

In Constructing the pirate audience2 you write: “P2P users often have little in com-mon beyond their engagement with a dis-tributive technology of dubious legality. The audience formation this technology produces is therefore a difficult object of analysis”. I was wondering if you could extend on this idea of a pirate audience, on what that means and on the difficulties in articulating that audience are?

Yeah, you’ve kind of put your finger on what interested me about it because I think often piracy is either fetishised posi-tively or negatively. 90 per cent of the discussion is still at that stage, and hasn’t moved beyond that. So a lot of research on, say, file sharing, half of it is about romanticising the file sharing commu-nity while the other half is about crime, immorality and so on. And that doesn’t really get us very far. In some ways if, as you say, piracy is a mainstream thing then it needs to be treated as such, rather

2. Lobato, R 2011, Constructing the pirate audi-ence: on popular copyright critique, freeculture, and cyber-libertarianism [Draft].

than as something that is automatically freighted with a whole lot of values that most users don’t necessarily share. So I guess I was trying to find a language to do that, because we don’t really talk about a TV audience, or there was a moment where we talked about the TV audience as a homogenous thing, but we certainly don’t do that because we’re all TV audi-ences, right? In the same way that we are all readers and internet users, and within that you have certain identities and layers of meaning and certain points where au-diences come together into more specific audience communities, but overall it is more about people using an infrastructure rather than people self-identifying.

Piracy is that same, really, and you have a lot of diversity within that category. So you have economic pirates who just don’t like paying or who can’t afford to pay (which is a different thing), but perhaps in Australia it is more about not liking pay-ing as we are a wealthy country, but kids without money or people on low incomes, there is a certain amount of I guess you’d call low income piracy going on. So there are the economic factors, and then you do have people ideologically committed to freedom of information and considered arguments against intellectual property. We’ve actually done some research on this too, and most piracy isn’t political like that.

I’ll tell you about the research we did on the ideological aspects. So with our col-leagues here at the World Internet Project, which is a big survey of a thousand in-ternet users that they do every two years,

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we asked people about file sharing and then we asked them about their attitudes towards internet freedom, privacy and a whole range of other issues; and we didn’t really find much of a difference between file sharers and legal consumers in that respect, whereas I think in some other parts of the world – especially in north-ern Europe – there is a much stronger connection between piracy and politics, and that’s where you have pirate parties emerging and all that kind of stuff. So that’s the third group – political pirates or whatever– and then you also have conve-nience pirates for whom it’s about ‘how can I get it as quickly as possible?’ And then there are people who do it because the range of stuff isn’t available through legal channels. So you have these differ-ences in motivations, and often you have these different motivations within the one person too – and these change over time. So basically the idea that there is a kind of community committed to file sharing and that every pirate is part of that community is just silly.

I guess in terms of the relationship prac-tices of piracy and distribution through pirate networks and the impact on legal distribution, I was trying to think about press coverage of Australians as one of the most heavy users of torrents – particu-larly in relation to the Game of Thrones series for instance – and how difficult it would now be to screen it on free to air television now, given the series is already several seasons in. I was interested in how that changes business models for free to air and other legitimate channels?

I think media companies are more savvy about these things than they let on, and a lot of media strategy is now about mak-ing choices between the kinds of pay-ments you can get from cable compa-nies, from free to air broadcasts, and so on, and comparing that with what you might get through digital channels alone or certain kinds of release structures that might make things more or less available; and then making decisions based on all those factors about what the best release model for a particular text is. So Game of Thrones is a really interesting example because the supply was so artificially con-strained in Australia, but HBO did that in full knowledge that they’d get a very siz-able sum from Foxtel that would make it worth their while. So I don’t think HBO is too annoyed about the whole situa-tion, and even one of its executives said as much (Jeffery Bewkes in an interview recently), but that kind of leaves Foxtel in tricky situation. But then again Foxtel also made a conscious choice that in se-curing the rights to a really popular show where there is huge demand for it, they know full well that not everybody is go-ing to sign up for a Foxtel package and they are going to lose a lot of that mar-ket to piracy and they’ve made their own choice that the trade-off is worth it. So everyone goes into this with their eyes wide open and it is very much an issue of demand and markets; it’s a cultural issue as well, but rarely an issue of morality. I think that making everything instantly accessible to everyone is something of an ideal and one that is really hard to do while retaining healthy revenue streams, especially in the US where cable TV are

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the major buyers for content and pay re-ally significant fees so you can’t just dis-mantle that structure.

The same with theatrical releases and the windows between theatrical and DVD re-lease are still significant, and while they are getting smaller they’re not going to go away as the industry is still very much based on that in terms of revenue streams, if not in terms of the kinds of consum-ers preferences. It is a period of transi-tion, and media executives are doing their best in a difficult environment, and they understand these things very well even if they have to keep up a public rhetoric about piracy that is probably at odds with what they are saying behind closed doors.

I have been reading about the history of Blockbuster and Netflix recently. Block-buster went bankrupt a few years ago and was sold for basically nothing. It was de-laying bringing out a streaming product for as long as possible, and at a certain point in the early 2000s it started devel-oping one very quickly as it saw Netflix doing really, really well, and it belatedly started putting a lot of investment into that. But it had this huge internal conflict between satisfying its stores (with their revenue decreasing rapidly and every-one seeing where that was heading) and building a streaming alternative, because the streaming platform was just going to cannibalise the stores. Its whole business was about the stores, so it wasn’t so much that it didn’t see the writing on the walls, it was just that it structurally couldn’t re-spond to that at all. I think the current situation is similar to that as these com-

panies aren’t stupid or dinosaurs, but they are very conflicted in terms of the kind of stakeholders within those organisations. These are the conflicts that some of their digital only competitors don’t have; so Google and everyone else don’t have cin-ema chains that they need to keep happy. These are the kinds of firms really grow-ing in the new environment. These things are always fights between stakeholders and various kinds of elites really, and I’m fascinated by these complexities, of the power struggles within media industries and how that ultimately flows through to what we experience as audiences.

I was thinking about where you speak of “film distribution… not as a zero-sum game of revenue capture” and of distri-bution “not as the orderly movement of texts through a sequence of channels but as multi-directional trajectories across formal and informal media markets”3. I think that was something you’ve said previously about how when you read the statistics on the amounts of revenue lost to piracy, it always includes the amounts lost to markets that wouldn’t have been distributed to anyway.

Yes.

And so it was interesting that relation-ship between industry association press releases and what you’re saying is the

3. Lobato, R 2012, ‘A sideways view of the film economy in an age of digital piracy’, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, <http://www.necsus-ejms.org/a-sideways-view-of-the-film-economy-in-an-age-of-digital-piracy-by-ramon-lobato/>.

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internal discourses where that trade-off is being made is terms of ‘if we restrict access, we’re going to lose this certain amount of audience, but we know quite well that’s perfectly ok.’

Yes, and that doesn’t mean they will say that publicly, but that’s very much the calculations going on. And some ex-ecutives, to their credit, are quite candid about those things, while some are just really hamstrung by factors beyond their control, and by how their organisation is structured too. Meanwhile, some of the new digital giants are hamstrung in dif-ferent ways actually and the more con-tent deals they do with Hollywood and the closer they get to that world the more sensitive they are to their problems. So we’re seeing the thickening of market segmentation in video delivery with geo-blocking and that type of thing, which is a completely artificial invention in a digital context and is quite intrusive and a lot of unnecessary red tape, but are there be-cause of the ways licenses are structured. YouTube and online subscription services have to go along with all that, and they are all learning from one another as they go at the moment.

II. Creative Labour/Freelance Writing/Value & Exploitation/Social & Cultural Currencies

With the article on working as a music writer you co-wrote with Lawson Fletch-er4, it reads as a little bit of a critique of theories around immaterial labour, where the dominant concerns are around struc-tural issues of economic exploitation, and you write along the lines of: ‘no, there’s something a bit more to it, there’s other aspects of value that are being produced which aren’t strictly related to economics in this sense’. And I think there is this dual characteristic to labour insofar as, on one hand, there can be something affirming or positive in labour, while on the other that labour is always exploited. What I liked in that article was the foregrounding of the more subjective or ephemeral values which are central to this context, as you write: “These fields operate on the basis of distinct social and cultural curren-cies that otherwise remain hidden when viewed from an overly structural perspec-tive” so that “ongoing studies of creative labour may need to consider the highly specific notions of value at work within small-scale creative worlds”5.

It seems like a big issue within media stud-ies as I think most people in that feel it as something affecting their working life, as someone working within the field of cre-ative, immaterial or affective labour. I 4. Fletcher, L & Lobato, R 2013, ‘Living and Labouring as a Music Writer’, Cultural Studies Re-view, vol. 19, no. 1, <http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/2588/3447>.5. Ibid, p. 170.

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guess I was interesting in talking about these sorts of social and cultural curren-cies that are somewhat lost where it is just an issue of people working for free.

I think the whole creative labour debate and its focus on exploitation and self-exploitation in cultural industries is really important and inspiring in many ways, and has drawn our attention to a lot of problems, especially within media indus-tries that were ignored for a long time: in-ternships, willingly working for free and so on and so forth. But I think that the critique of immaterial labour has reached a point now where it’s becoming a bit of a shallow slogan in some ways too, and a lot of that discourse has come out of the US and UK, and also in a different way from Europe and the precariat move-ments there. In the US and UK, you’re coming from out of a context where you have much larger media industries than in Australia and so there’s a much larger professional workforce so there is a stron-ger imperative to maintain professional standards and good quality workplaces, etc. In Australia, the issue is more about there’s a lot more people that want to get in to those industries and actually from the perspective of those marginally employed and underemployed aspirational workers some of the protections that the creative labour debate holds dear are actually kind of impediments to their participation in those fields. So I think the realities are just really different from country to coun-try, and I think imposing this exploitation argument in Australia is a bit iffy, but I’m still trying to think that through.

The obvious question here is if people know they’re not getting paid to do this stuff, and that isn’t great, then why do it? And one aspect is that they really enjoy it, that it gives them pleasure, but also where you start looking at subjective perspec-tives, that it may produce some value for them that isn’t only pleasure, but career-building in a sense. There’s a notion that if I work for free at a reputable place that it might actually lead to paid work, which I otherwise wouldn’t get. So there are economic motives here, and people don’t just go in blindly, and that is sometimes lost in the structural perspective in that it looks at the (non-)wage at the point of production but not at how that wage ar-ticulates itself over time. That is not to justify those practices, but that it isn’t the case of blind dupe workers.

That’s right, and I think part of what the creative labour debate has been trying to do is build stronger links between our understanding of creative industries and our understanding of other industries by showing there is connections between low wage work on this side and low wage work on the other side. However, the risk with that is that it can make very risky generalisations between, say, cleaning work versus writing work, where most people who are writers are people who have chosen that – and I include myself in that category – and willingly chosen everything that goes along with that and often have other options, but want to fol-low their passions. You can’t really say the same for cleaning or factory work, and in some ways by putting those two things together you’re asking low wage

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blue-collar works to fight the battles of middle class creatives, and that can be re-ally problematic.

The idea of having choices in many ways articulates a class position.

Exactly. And we found that in the study we did of music writers where most of them are tertiary educated, do have quite a lot of other options – not necessarily from affluent backgrounds, but normally relatively comfortable positions – and also more men than women, which says something about the culture of writing and the kinds of entrepreneurialism of a lot of writers. I think representing cre-atives and aspiring creatives as victims, as the new underclass doesn’t really do much justice to the real underclasses in Australian society. But you have to be sensitive of these types of critiques, to not undervalue a lot of the really valuable work that creative labour debate is doing; and it is doing really important work, es-pecially around internships.

I don’t think it really matters as there are varying degrees of affluence within exploitation, and they all exist within something common, like along a scale or something like that.

Yeah, that’s right, and I guess all eco-nomic activity is cultural and all work has a cultural dimension, and that can be higher or lower depending on the case you’re looking at. I think that the coun-ter-balance of recent years has been to try to think through the cultural sphere in

economic terms alone, but if you do that totally then you lose the whole cultural dimension to it. You lose the questions of value, meaning and pleasure that explain why a lot people want to be writers amidst the terrible conditions of writing as a pro-fession or want to study journalism even when journalism is dying, or want to do all kinds of irrational things. So it is good to keep the economic and the cultural in productive tension when we’re thinking through all that stuff.

We did some research for a new book that will be published next year about freelance writing and freelancer websites – like oDesk and those major freelancer websites – looking at the kinds of writing and translation work that gets published on there, and who does those jobs. As you’d expect, people are constantly advertising things like ‘translate this 20 page techni-cal manual into Spanish’ or whatever, or ‘condense it into one page’, and often the people bidding for these very lowly pay-ing jobs are from very low income coun-tries but who have excellent English skills or what have you. Those kind of employ-ment practices are the worst type because they’re predatory, they’re all about the race to the bottom, but, at the same time, there’s a lot of skilled writers in low wage countries who are very happy to do this work and not necessarily thinking about ‘am I driving down conditions for first-world creatives?’ and it would be irre-sponsible of us to say they should think about that. So I think the cultural labour debates are very much always conducted in a national frame, whereas increasingly cultural industries and outsourcing prac-

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tices are within a global environment, and we haven’t really figured out the kind of critique that can cover this. It is still real-ly about protecting the people in Bristol, Birmingham and Los Angeles, and not re-ally about protecting the people who want to be cultural workers in Bangladesh. I don’t think we’re anywhere near figuring out how to do that. It is contradictory, because on the one hand you want to de-cry those predatory freelancer practices, but on the other hand you don’t want to dismiss the intelligence and rationality of people who do that work.

III. Eclectic Research/The Long Tail/Cyberlockers/Brittle Archives & Digital Ghost Towns

I was interested in talking about how you went about researching Shadow Econo-mies of Cinema.

Yeah sure, so researching pirate and in-formal distribution can be really hard, so when I was doing that research I had to use a mix of different sources. A lot of trade papers, industry reports and so on, but also interviews with consumers, with market vendors. Basically as many insights as I could get onto the problem – including both oral and written sources, official sources, unofficial accounts and stories, whispers and rumours and gossip. Everything that helps filling out a picture is helpful. It is good to be eclectic in your sources with that type of research I think.

How many B-grade films do you have to watch before you feel you can write on it with some authority?

Oh, hundreds and hundreds, but that’s one of my passions.

Some of your discussion around straight to video releases as being a space of sur-plus audio visual production was quite interesting6. You speak of how distribu-tion is constitutive of demand and recep-tion, and you raise this as a critique of the idea of the long tail, where if everyone has this unfettered catalogue of stuff they can watch, they will start choosing more valuable obscured gems7. Yet most of this obscured stuff is just shit. I was thinking about an article on contemporary music which argues that pop is tending to be more self-reflexive now, while high or ex-perimental music seems now to be valo-rising pop sounds more and more; they write:

Whatever the web’s many sins, it is still at least mostly neutral when it comes to content. The result is a kind of equiva-lence in terms of accessibility between the popular and the not-so-popular. One result of this equivalence has been a massive increase in the accessibility of independent culture. Even Spotify doesn’t care whether you listen to Katy Perry or Keith Fullerton Whitman, so long as you’re not on BitTorrent or iTunes. And the result is that it’s become increasingly easy in recent years to sim-ply switch off: quite literally to tune pop

6. Shadow Economies of Cinema, p. 36.7. Ibid, pp. 35-36.

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out.

However, the paradoxical result of this new pop/non-pop parallelism has been a kind of exoticisation of the main-stream. If you spend enough time with all that noise, drone, UK dubstep, and minimal techno, if you tune out from the mainstream for long enough, then suddenly it’s the Top 40 that starts to sound foreign, to exert a certain exotic allure…In 2014, pop and non-pop feel closer than ever. Everyone loves pop these days. And they’re not ashamed to admit it.8

I was thinking of that through the lens of distribution, as to some extent within this is an idea that changing models of distribution have changed cultural hab-its, tastes, and texts themselves – what production actually does. I’m unsure if there’s a question here, but I was wonder-ing if you could talk to that at all?

I think there’s not so much a flattening, but more of an increased traffic between the high and low, the indie and the main-stream, between authorised culture and trash culture that is really noticeable. And a lot of new music really wears that proudly. You have artists who range re-ally freely between hip hop, between ex-perimental and noise sounds and disco. I think that those genres and their cultural contexts and the scenes that form around them are far less visible when you’re using 8. Parker, J & Croggon, N 2014, Pop & Non-Pop After The Conceptual Turn, Tiny Mix Tapes, <http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/pop-non-pop-after-the-conceptual-turn>.

certain kinds of platforms such as Spotify or YouTube, and it’s much easier to range across them. Obviously that’s great for consumers and for producers too, as it re-ally expands the palette of sounds you can work with, but it is as much a property of the distribution networks as it is of our increased globalised or more cosmopoli-tan sensibilities. So, for example, Netflix is fascinating because it actively pushes people towards more obscure content in their back catalogue, and that is partly be-cause they want people to be constantly discovering new things based on what Netflix knows about their tastes – and it is uncannily accurate at that. So it has that function of diversifying people’s tastes, or at least pushing them further into the long tail. But there’s an economic driver of that as Netflix wants you to be happy with its range of content so it doesn’t have to buy expensive content from the studios and the big blockbuster movies and com-pete on that terrain. The long tail is its business model. It isn’t doing this be-cause it values independent or subcultural texts, its doing it because it has a business model around that. It’s very interesting, and music especially is probably more vibrant and diverse than it has been in a long time, but it is very much about the distribution networks.

To return to piracy, I’d like to pick up from where your article The cyberlocker gold rush9 ends, to talk about the current 9. Lobato, R & Tang, L 2014, ‘The cyberlocker gold rush: tracking the rise of file-hostingsites as media distribution platforms’, Interna-tional Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 5, <http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/vital/ac-cess/services/Download/swin:32788/SOURCE1>.

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state of play in internet piracy.

Sure, the broad pattern is still wack-a-mole, where enforcement moves in one direction and the pirates just keep mov-ing faster in the other direction. I think the major change has been the increas-ing convenience of legal online delivery platforms, especially mobile where easy purchase of songs is just built into those platforms so thoroughly now that it is easier to do that than to use torrents. So I think we are going to see a shift over the next three or four years where it just becomes more work to seek out the free alternative than just pay the 99 cents or whatever. When it gets to that point then that will be the tipping point. Not back to an all formal future but a lot of what we call piracy is just latent demand for con-tent, and where some of that demand will be soaked up by the legal markets.

So the strategy is just to make it inconve-nient rather than stamp it out?

Yes, that’s all they can do, and I think they know that really well. The more media executives now talk about the war against piracy being about identifying the types of activity that do compete with legal pur-chasing (which isn’t all forms, as a lot of piracy doesn’t have that substituting func-tion) and then just satisfying that as much as you can. I think the next major shift on the horizon is when kids who have grown up with smartphones get credit cards and where the mobile rather than the PC is the main point of contact with the internet, with what they are going to do and what

they’ve been trained to do along the way. We don’t really know that yet.

The cyberlocker gold rush is kind of writ-ten at the fall of a number of these plat-forms, and you write: “one consequence of these events is that petrabytes of con-tent have simply disappeared from the internet. Many intermediary linking sites now resemble ghost towns: dead links are everywhere”10. A few things are interest-ing here. Firstly, there wasn’t the fall of the cyberlocker, as they still operate in various ways, but it is not as well estab-lished and more difficult to use. Not only that, but there is a restructuring of that cyberlocker economy, where it is trying to rebuild itself in various ways. Yet it has lost something through that.

Yeah definitely, and the outlawing of the rewards schemes was the end of those Wild West years. Since then we have seen a lot of fragmentation in that mar-ket, cyberlockers have often shut down and then reappeared as more underground services, while others have tried to re-brand themselves as business services (which has mostly failed). Then you have dropbox and skydrive and all the other mainstream cloud services coming in and actually being used a lot for piracy. Ob-viously they’re much more responsive to take down notices and have much stron-ger corporate governance and that type of thing, but in terms of the platform itself it is still as good a pirate platform, and in fact is much better in a lot of ways. So there will be this constant battle between a distribution network’s built-in proper-10. ‘The cyberlocker gold rush’, p. 8.

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ties and the uses to which people put it, and then the kind of governance frame-works on top of that. In the case of cyber-lockers and cloud computing generally, their inherent nature is really at odds with copyright.

At the same time, there’s cultural dimen-sions where certain cyberlockers are pi-rate networks, and others that aren’t; and this is a result of branding and usage. So I don’t really think of dropbox as a pirate platform even though it is exactly the same as another one you’d use to rip off music from; and that isn’t only a result of action on take down notices, but of perception and so on. So I thought it was interesting that a certain technology in combination with varying forms of policing, branding and usage you can find you have either a pirate network or a legitimate one.

And you can never quite predict what us-ers are going to do with things anyway.

The other thing I was thinking of was par-ticularly with blogspot and these type of platforms or intermediary linking sites, they were used as a kind of archive. I guess it was interesting in relation to the idea of online stuff being there forever. After what happened to many of these cyberlockers, a lot of archival blogs kind of stopped operating. Many of them were trying to post stuff like digital versions of obscure mid-90s bands or whatever, put-ting stuff on mediafire and linking to it from a blog. They acted as a something of a cultural archive, and that archive was gutted when these sites disappeared or

got taken down for various reasons.

Yeah it really was, and it’s much the same with YouTube where there is this constant to and fro between postings and take down notices – although less so now where there are the monetisation options that are more attractive to rights holders. But yes, it is actually quite hard to think of any online archive that has significant user involvement that isn’t very ephemer-al. That’s kind of part of the brittle nature of online communities.

Because that does really run counter to the general notion that once it is on the internet it is there forever, that in the fu-ture there won’t be issues of losing re-cords and so on. But as you say, it is very ephemeral and brittle.

I think in many ways it is still a function of popularity and demand, and perhaps the internet is as much of a beauty contest as other mediums because the obscure mid-90s band may disappear but the Jen-nifer Lawrence pics probably are going to be floating around for decades to come. And that’s kind of literalised in bit torrent where if it is not popular enough then it doesn’t exist; you need at least a couple of dedicated seeders. So it’s fascinating the ways these different platforms shape not just availability but taste and value; it’s just endlessly interesting.

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formationss w i n p o s i u m . t u m b l r . c o m