Occasionally an article catches one’s eye that genuinely opens a raft of interesting new thoughts. That happened to the other day when I read this Guardian piece about a new area of Pirate Bay that offers templates for 3D printers to clone figures for Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Lord of the Rings table-top games.

Up until now, media piracy – as opposed to nautical banditry – has been concerned with freeing up access to information. In the 17th Century, with characters such as Henry Hill the Book Pirate (see this excellent short history of book piracy here), this was about giving the poor equal access to textual information by way of cheap editions of books and illicit pamphlets that were uncensored by the church or crown.

In the digital age this pirate spirit of free access to information was made orders of magnitude more easy as so much – words, music, images, videos, programs – was now no more than a package of 1′s and 0′s. That has wreaked havoc with the industries concerned with protecting their products and trying to make money out of them, but up until now the physical world has remained somewhat immune.

Sure, you could always buy a knock-off Rolex if you wanted to, but that still required some manufacturing work – even if it was substandard. That protection from digitised sharing afforded by the physical is now beginning to crumble. As Pirate Bay spokesman Winston Q2038 put it:

One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour.

This is still some way off, as 3D printers are still prohibitively expensive, but it wasn’t that long ago that the same could be said for DVD burners. What we are looking at in the near future is a world where many physical objects will be able to be pirated and copied right in the home. Like the design of that lampshade? Go to Pirate Bay and download the code for it. Lost a Scrabble tile? Just print one off. Found out where Paris Hilton lives? Print off a key to her house. Everyone will have one.

Of course, there will be symbiotic reaction from the physical world too. We will no long have keys – they’ll just not be safe. And true craftsmen will return to materials that will be more difficult to pirate. But others will embrace this world, and deliver extraordinary things to customers… bespoke will become ordinary; there will be no more original.

This dissolution of the physical into the digital has interesting implications for all art and craft… something I blogged about from a different angle way back in 2005 (ouch!):

“A work of video art is simply a video signal on a tape. Early analog video technology is termed ‘lossy’ – meaning that with every successive copy there is a noticable degradation in quality. Analog technologies still had some claim to the construction of an ‘original’ – the photograph had the negative, and the video has the master copy, from which further copies are struck. The negative and master thus have more value than their offspring.

“Digital video formats released by Sony in the 1990′s changed this condition completely, as they allowed for perfect reproduction. Video is now simply a piece of code – a string of ones and zeros that, unlike its analog parent, is wholly duplicable. Enabling the production of infinite clones with no discernable value hierarchy thus renders ‘original’ a meaningless term.”

That ‘perfect reproduction’ may well be heading out of the hard-drive, and onto the (physical) desktop. And, as ever, pirates will be there to chase down those who want to profiteer. Going to be interesting times.

I’ve not yet read the full book that Alain de Botton has been promoting recently, but I’ve read a number of interviews and heard him speak, and browsed his website: religionforatheists.com and I wanted to post a couple of first-thoughts about his thesis.

Firstly, he’s being unashamed to say that he is ‘picking and mixing’ from different religions. As he puts here, ‘even if religion isn’t true, can’t we enjoy the best bits?’

It seems that there is a twin move here. Atheists like de Botton are moving towards religion, to try to colonise the secular space which still values ritual, and many religious people are moving towards an atheist reading of their faith… both agree that ‘God is dead’… but what to do with the carcass?

It seems to me that de Botton and others want to pick over the beautiful, to grab rituals and art and the ‘awe-some.’ One of de Botton’s earlier books, which I like a lot, is The Consolations of Philosophy, and I wonder now if this is simply an upgrade: religion as no more than consolation. We feel lonely, we suffer, we don’t earn enough…so here’s a smash and grab on some religious ideas that seem to have helped console people in the past.

I don’t think this is enough. I think religion as consolation is little more than religion as emotional crutch. It’s low challenge, middle-class angst with stained glass windows, and intellectually and psychologically impoverished.

The religious who are turning to an atheist reading of their faith are doing something different. God is dead, but that means that we have to take up the challenges of that absence… and that’s perhaps a more demanding road. I can’t speak from anything more than a Christian perspective on this, but it seems to me that this is not so much gaining ‘ahhh’ moments from beautiful buildings, but taking a long hard look at the scorched earth once those buildings have been torched, and wondering what is left.

Because an atheist reading of Christianity is not about polite rituals and ‘big society’ moments of collective goo. It is not about human beings rejecting God and becoming atheists. It is about God rejecting God and becoming an atheist himself. The core of Christianity is as radical as that. Jesus beat de Botton to ‘religion for atheists’ by about 2000 years; the problem is, the path he set out was so challenging that it has been almost totally rejected. Why? Because the move from religion to an atheist reading of religion is not about experiencing the sacred in the remains of religious beauty, but about experiencing the abandonment and desolation, the responsibility to the rest of humanity, when we realise the sacred is not found in the stain glass, but in the slum outside the church.

God’s life created fissures within society between the believers and unbelievers. It seems God’s death will be no less divisive… but this time I wonder if the polite ‘crutch’ accusation will be made the other way.

In the most high-profile action against the US Senate’s ‘Protect Intellectual Property’ Bill (PIPA) and the House of Representatives’ ‘Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Wikipedia has begun an English language black-out of its main site.

As you’ll know if you read here often, I’m in the depths of a book-length piece on piracy. The aim is to look at the multiple forms of piracy – from Somalia to the internet to music to books to historic figures, fictional heroes and children’s fascination with everything pirate – and formulate some general principles that link all of them together.

It’s an ambitious project, but it’s going well, and I do believe that the thesis is not only a good one, but a timely one too. Piracy, and interest in it, is exploding in all areas of culture and commerce. So it seems high time to think intelligently not just about what piratic activity is going on, but why it is happening.

What I find interesting about these cases is that the US have become the world leaders in trying to battle piracy – and protecting their own intellectual property… and yet this is a country which was founded on pirate principles of minimal copyright. Why? Because the founding fathers understood that progress was only possible if the poorest had free access to knowledge – which at the time meant books. For decades the US refused to sign up to international book copyright agreements.

It seems that PIPA and SOPA are laws designed to protect the wealthy. These are people who have enclosed things that many consider should be part of the ‘commons’ – knowledge, code, biology, songs – and are unwilling to allow access that doesn’t go via their paywall. That may be good for their share price, but is no good for, as Henry Hill the book pirate of 1680 put it, ‘the benefit of the poor.’

The key question that has to be asked is this: why is piracy proliferating? Is it because people are naturally tight, and don’t want to pay? I don’t think so. I think it’s becoming so common because people are so fed up with the narrowed and capitalised world that demands taxation and profit at every turn.

If you’re reading this blog post, you are almost certainly doing so on a digital device made in China. And that means you’re almost certainly doing so on a device made in Shenzhen.

Don’t know where Shenzhen is? Neither did I. It’s here:

View Larger Map

It’s a city bigger than New York or London, yet it was built only in the last 30 years. It’s one of China’s largest manufacturing hubs, and thus where ‘all our shit’ gets made. By hand. In 15 hour shifts. By workers as young as 12.

Conditions are poor. Really poor. You would not want to do this, and you would not want your children to do this. No one is allowed to speak while on shift.

If you use these products, which we all do, and if they’ve helped save you hours of labour time by speeding up communication, then you can damn well afford the 40 mins it will take to sit and listen to this piece on This American Life about a reporter who went to the factories of Shenzhen, and what he found. Let me put it more clearly: if you are reading this, you have a duty to listen to this.

Do it now.

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Having listened, I’ve been thinking about the workers there, and it seems that things are coming to a head in terms of protest. Here’s a Reuters report from yesterday:

Thousands of Chinese workers protesting over compensation and job security at a Sanyo Electric Co Ltd plant clashed with police in southern Shenzhen, media said on Monday, the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China’s manufacturing hub.

In case that leaves you panicked – don’t be. The article continues: ‘No impact was expected on clients from the stoppage at the factory…’ Phew. All your devices will still get made.

The FoxConn plant, which makes pretty much all of Apple’s products, as well as things for other major brands, was also in the news as a ‘mass suicide’ was planned a few days ago by 150 workers protesting at appalling conditions there.

I’ve blogged about this here before (Expensive Machines Made by Cheap People), but I do think it’s high time that people began to take more notice, and put pressure on Apple and others to demand that conditions are improved. Yes, that’ll mean we pay more for products… but do you not kind of think that that’s worth it?

With the writing I’m doing on piracy I have been mulling whether conditions in these factories are in any way analogous to the oppressive regimes sailors found themselves in in the early 1700′s. In both cases they were doing semi-skilled hard labour that made other people incredibly rich, but left them injured and impoverished. The question is, what would a Chinese manufacturing piracy look like? Hijacking of containers of new iPhones ready for export? Now THAT would get the Hipsters in a twist to do something…

It seems extraordinary that in a Communist country workers are having to battle for fair access to the wealth that is being created… but as Western capitalism finds a new host with cheaper labour, it’s perhaps not surprising at all. I’m really not sure what the best step forward is here, and how it might best be possible to put pressure on Apple and others… any ideas or links, do share please.

“If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, then you and I will still have one apple. But if you have an idea, and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” George Bernard Shaw.

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” Thomas Jefferson.

“The Iliad and The Odyssey can be spread throughout the world without anyone being deprived of them as a consequence.” Lewis Hyde

I’ve been thinking about these ideas (known in economics as non-excludable and non-rival goods) in relation to a novel I’m writing.

One of the things that’s struck me is that the shared project of human progress has moved away from these non-rival principles and become ‘excludable.’ The principles of profit mean that ideas that might be placed in the commons for the benefit of all are high-fenced, so only those who can pay get a look in, and those who consider themselves the ‘creator’ get infinite compensation for their stroke of genius. Feels a long way from Jefferson’s original American vision…

I received a present the other day – a book through the post from an ex-colleague: ‘Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition.’ It’s a fascinating read.

Admittedly, I was a little wary: there’s a long history of ‘actually, they were gay’ books which would have us believe that Jesus, St Paul, Shakespeare and even George Michael (ok, fair enough) were all gay… but this book is not that at all.

As the author points out, it would be tempting to think ‘yes, there was probably homosexual activity on ships, because, like prisoners, they didn’t have any other outlet.’ But this is to entirely miss the point. Pirates had escaped the prison conditions of the naval ships. They were free men. And some of them – not all – but some of them formed intentionally all-male communities.

Why is this important? Firstly, for reasons that are non-purient. I’m just not interested in an ‘exotic’ twist to the piracy thesis. I think it’s important because it shows, again, how pirates emerged to create TAZ spaces in which taboos could be broken. The emergence of these ‘transgressive’ communities began the process of the deadened orthodoxy being challenged and changed. This is the archetype I’ve been working on in the book from an economic, religious and social perspective… but I’m really glad to be able to expand that into sexual politics too.

Challenging material for some, I’m sure. But that’s what this is all about. As the author writes in the introduction:

‘the major portion of the literature has been concerned with piratical deeds than with pirates. Its appeal, one would surmise from the content, is to an audience of small boys, retired naval officers, and other primarily concerned with cannon, cutlass, gore and decks awash with blood… the opportunity to investigate one of the unique groups in human history has been ignored.’

So, yes, if you thought all this pirate stuff was just about eye-patches and children’s parties, think again. What these challenging and marginal communities of (mostly) men did at the turn of the 18th century has an enormous amount to offer us as we seek to challenge the hegemony of white, Christian capitalist, hierarchical and misogynistic power structures that fanned out in Empire building and did damage that we still suffer today.

I’m hoping to have the 1st draft finished in the next couple of months… just taking time.

Apologies (really, I’m saying sorry? For what?!) for not posting much recently. It’s not that I’ve had nothing to say…just not much to say in public right now. Lots of writing getting done, so watch this space (if you like watching space.)

Anyways, something I’ve been pondering the last couple of days: the importance of transgression in ‘salvation’ narratives. By these, I mean stories that have a basic arc of saving something or some group from some evil or monster.

For various reasons I’ve been spending a fair bit of time thinking through the Harry Potter books recently – a series which I’ll defend against anyone in terms of their thematic seriousness and literary merit – and what is interesting is that this pattern is very much on show here. As I expressed in a recent tweet:

One thing we can be sure of: if there is a ‘forbidden forest,’ our hero will be bidden to enter it.

If you know the stories at all (yes, I know the films are crap) you’ll know that in every book Harry ends up breaking either school rules or ‘Wizarding Law’  - but does so not as a rebel, but as a ‘saviour.’ He is ‘the orthodox heretic.’

As the series continues we see that ‘the law’ turns more and more heavily against him and, by labelling him a serial transgressor, the community ostracise him to a pretty horrific extent. He is cast out of the school, a price is put on his head, and is turned into a figure of hatred by those in charge.

We can see how this turns out: our hero’s transgressions turn out to be the very thing that redeems the law and those who make it. Sometimes the law needs to be broken, in order that it may be remade properly.

The parallels with Christian theology should be fairly easily worked through; my current interest is more with how this plays out with the work on historic piracy that I’m writing, and how this impacts the current ‘Occupy’ movements.

I picked up an old copy of a 1970 ‘Ladybird’ book on piracy recently, which has this brilliant introduction:

In those days a man might legally be seized in the street by a ‘press-gang’ and compelled to serve for years as a sailor in a ship of the King’s Navy, often without his wife or family knowing what had happened to him. Sailors were badly fed and brutally punished, and sometimes they mutinied, murdered their hated officers and became pirates in well-armed ships. Pirates […] were mainly scoundrels and a menace to all honest folk.

This is the classic tension: the law has been broken, so these people must be branded a menace, and yet we can see why the law needs breaking and reforming.

The problem comes with the line at which orthodox heresy becomes violent transgression. Were the murders of their brutal Captains by pirates excusable? How much leeway should we give them for their historical context?

These are all questions I’ll be working through in the book… and looking at how this arc of redemptive transgression works out… Hope you’re still looking forward to it.

“We fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that’s the end.” Hamlet, Act IV, Scene III

In the previous post I tried to set out a distinction between death (which can remain beautiful – a frozen moment just beyond life) and decay (which is always grotesque – all beauty drain and consumed by maggots) and then examine how, in ecological terms, decay is healthy, while unrotting death fails to complete the cycle of life. It is only once decay sets in that a body can become useful again.

All ecosystems require the evolution of appropriate agents of decay to remain healthy. I finished by expressing a hunch that ritual can be seen as an agent of decay in our culture, and that currently it is lacking. There is plenty of death – plenty of redundancy and refuse – but little decay. The end result of this is a lot of dead material to trip us up, but fewer and fewer resources released back into the ground to fund newness.

I’ve been re-reading Hamlet recently, and re-reading Will in the World – How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare alongside it too. The section that deals with Hamlet describes the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet (occasionally corrupted as Hamlet in various public records). Reading into the events of the time, the funeral of the boy must have had added strain: Shakespeare’s family had definite Catholic leanings, and yet the ceremony in 1596 would have had to have been a strictly Protestant affair. As such, families such as Shakespeare’s may well have grieved the loss of the more colourful and rich Catholic ritual that expressed a far more open relationship with the dead.

“It is possible that he found the service, with its deliberate refusal to address the dead child as ‘thou’, its reduction of ritual, its narrowing of ceremony, its denial of any possibility of communication, painfully inadequate.”

The theatre of funeral was removed; the agent of decay reduced. Bodies were lowered, cold, into the ground, like coal. Unfit for transition. At the same time, the theatres in London were regularly shut by the Protestant moralisers. Early 17th century London was a society unsure of how to decompose the dead material that surrounded, and use it to regenerate.

It feels as if we are at a similar place today. With the economic crisis and accompanying political crises, as well as the crumbling of trust in the press with phone-hacking scandals and the Leveson inquiry, it seems as though there is a lot of ‘dead’ material around. What we can now see is that the problem is whether we can evolve appropriate agents of decay to help process this dead material and reformulate it.

The Occupy protest movement is perhaps part of this process. Right-wing observers like to portray those involved as dirty maggots and bottom-feeders anyway, but this should perhaps be taken as a compliment. They are crawling over the dead matter, trying to work out what can yet be reused, and how these rich resources can fund new directions.

It strikes me that this is precisely where the church ought to be basing itself. As a faith based on death and resurrection, Christianity’s natural habitat is decaying matter. This is what others fled from in disgust – the lepers, the sick – but what Jesus went straight towards, mixing mud and spit.

Locating oneself in this place of decay is going to be profoundly uncomfortable. There is something heroic about those who can preach death of faith: it is cold and hard, steel sharp and cutting. But the reason why the communities that Pete Rollins is talking about in Insurrection offer such a shocking vision is that they are not based around the death of faith, but around the putrid decay of faith – the decomposition of it into something more base, more akin to shit, to soil, to raw earth… where, as compost, it can feed newness.

This is perhaps the best description of Ikon: a putrid community. One that embraces not just death, but decay and decomposition.

There is a theological problem here though. The orthodox idea of Jesus’ physical resurrection is very keen to affirm that Jesus’ body did not see any decay. To evangelical belief the idea of Jesus’ bruised and broken dead body carries with it a mystique of martyrdom and heroism… but the idea of it entering a state of decay is totally taboo. And yet, there is a sense in which it was only by the decaying of this body that its riches could be released.

In 2 Corinthians 4:16, Paul says that

“though outwardly we are decaying, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day…”

Perhaps we need to see this not as a negative-positive construction, but as a positive-positive one. The outward decay is to be welcomed…is the very thing that funds the inner renewal.

Either way, what we must certainly do is ensure that the theatre of ritual remains… that agents of decay are encouraged and given space, and that we do not hold on to our dead too tightly. The old, embalmed Lenins we all keep must be allowed to warm and rot.

Micah Redding has an interesting post bouncing off some of the thoughts I’ve posted here, which reflects on baptism, and whether this represents a ‘ritual to signify the end of rituals.’

My immediate thought was of the lines from the Bhagavad-Gita, made famous by J Robert Oppenheimer in an interview in which he recorded his thoughts in the aftermath of the first atomic bomb test:

‘We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.’

Funny how these things go, but I then caught a few minutes of a BBC4 programme yesterday – ‘After Life – The Strange Science of Decay.’ (around on iPlayer for 6 days from today) and that threw up some interesting connections.

So, here we go… some quick thoughts on death, rituals and a theology of decay…

Firstly, I think it’s interesting to highlight the difference between death and decay. We might even say that it is not death itself that we are afraid of, but the process of decay that comes after. The just-dead body appears still to be of this world, or at least functionable for use in another world, whatever or wherever that might be. The embalmed or preserved body is frozen in time, still holding the tension between this life and the next.

But once decay sets in, things turn nasty. The decaying body is a thing of horror: beauty takes quick leave, and the ‘frozen’ nature of the corpse thaws into warm rot. Zombies are dead bodies in decay. The fear of the decaying body is this: it is no longer fit for transport or use elsewhere. The decaying body is returning to this earth; breaking down into its elemental substances, ready for re-use. The decaying body thus tells us something about our place in the material cycle of things: we are not elevated, we are atoms, chemical bond… we were dust, and will be dust again.

This fear of decay leads us to desire, if not eternal life, then at least some preserving medium which will keep our material bodies from disintegration. But in terms of ecology, this is a disaster: decay is a vital process, without which life on earth would cease to exist.

Without organic decomposers (bacteria and fungi) decaying dead organic matter, vital nutrients would be trapped and never be released back into the soil. Plants would therefore be unable to grow and every ecosystem would collapse, as plants are at the base of every food chain: the cycle of life would grind to a halt. Not only that: if nothing decayed, the dead bodies of all living creatures and plants would litter the globe. We would literally be climbing over undecayed bodies.

Actually, there have been periods in history where this has (partially) been the case. In the carboniferous period, large quantities of wood were buried and not broken down because the bacteria and insects that could effectively digest them had not yet evolved. These fallen trees were laid down as coal deposits, dark and cold and undying.

In other words, death will come to us. But decay – the transition from death into the new cycle of life – requires ‘agents of decay.’ Without these agents there is nothing can be broken down and reused.

So what the hell has this got to do with baptism? Well here’s my hunch: rituals are agents of decay. And at the moment they are seriously lacking.

I want to expand on this in the next post, as this is getting far too long for the average digital attention span [joking!], but, in brief, I want to propose that not only are we living in a culture – theologically and otherwise – where death is taboo, but, more seriously, we have  a paucity of communal ritual which moves in post mortem to bring about healthy decay. And the result of this: dark, undying deposits which are unavailable to be broken down and re-used.

Now here’s the thing: what I think Pete Rollins is doing with Insurrection is offering not only a path by which people can experience death (of poorly-thought-out beliefs) but also a way of participating in decay: the breaking down of these beliefs that can open them up for re-use.

But via Hamlet, Catholic persecution and the Occupy movement, I’ll get to that in the next post.

Fall

You were well furnished once,
abundantly appointed and
basking before Fall…
…Now the quicksilver
falls quickly and,
Job-like in stoic silence,
you refuse to ask why, but shed
all that fed you, coloured you,
until bare-limbed you stand
trunk-naked
in the slipping light,
the bracken carpet
sheep-trodden at your root;
wooden, still,
you arbor aparition,
your silvered armature
birched by the wind but
untroubled by the chill,
animation suspended
bronchi in apnoea
trusting only in Spring
and the promises rings hold.

(c) KB 2011