Kester Brewin

Just got back from a couple of weeks holiday where I took a proper break from posting. Space to think about other stuff really, and ‘Devon’ and ‘Wireless Network’ are not immediately at home in the same sentence yet. This weekend I’ll be off to Greenbelt, where I’m doing two talks expanding on some of [...]

Being in that part of the UK for holiday, and hearing on the grapevine that a few people are interested in exploring the thinking I’ve been doing around Hakim Bey’s work on pirates and TAZ, I thought I’d round up a few things here… Firstly, the series of posts I did on ‘A Plea for [...]

One of the things I like about the web is that one can drop a pebble into it… and the ripples appear elsewhere. For those (few, I know) who may have followed here but not elsewhere, there has been quite a lot of reaction to the posts on piracy, mostly ignited by Richard Sudworth’s repost [...]

[ Piracy 1 ] | [ Piracy 2 ] | [ Piracy 3 ] | [ Piracy 4 ] | [ Piracy 5 ] [ Piracy 6 ] We began this series with a question – why is it that we are happy to allow our children to go to pirate parties, and involve themselves [...]

[ Piracy 1 ] | [ Piracy 2 ] | [ Piracy 3 ] | [ Piracy 4 ] | [ Piracy 5 ] What pirates do, as a rule, is emerge from the underbelly of a ‘stuck’ orthodoxy and, by way of actions that are initially perceived as heretical, reinvigorate that practice. The heresy [...]

[ Piracy 1 ] | [ Piracy 2 ] | [ Piracy 3 ] | [ Piracy 4 ] Captain Mission’s capture of a Dutch slaver, and his demand that those who claimed an enlightened view of God should have a more enlightened view of the whole of humanity, can be seen as a signifier [...]

[ Piracy 1 ] [ Piracy 2 ] [ Piracy 3 ] Pirates are so hated by corporations because they represent a critique of the capitalist establishment, an insurrection by those who have been marginalised by the supertanker of economic growth and greed. It is well known that pirates robbed ships and made off with [...]

[ Piracy 1 ] | [ Piracy 2 ] In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to build an argument that piracy functions not as the enemy of all mankind (hostis humanis generis) but as the shadow of mankind: umbris humanis generis. As rebels against a social order that is oppressing them, those who [...]

[ Piracy 1 ] In the previous post I set out the tension between the godly meditations that St Paul urged us to – whatever is good, and pure etc. – and the raucously popular stories about pirates that outsold everything else in a bookshop around St Paul’s Cathedral. In Captain Johnson’s A General History [...]

Just got back from Greenbelt yesterday, and rather shocked to have to go into work today after 7 or so weeks summer holiday. It was a fantastic festival, with an excellent mix of talks from all angles and eclectic music too. Good hang out a bit with Rob Bell, Roman Krznaric as well as old [...]