Crack and release: a study of pirate culture, community, and folklore

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the culture and folklore of a digital media pirate community at the late Kickass Torrents (KAT) on the eve of its shutdown. Seized in 2016 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, KAT had been home to a community that was rich in folklore, folklife, and illegal file-sharing. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at KAT, I argue that piracy is a vernacular tradition in which digital media are materially and symbolically appropriated, transformed, and reproduced as folk variants to create in a virtual pirate commons. Digital media piracy is highly contentious, yet, as a cultural practice, it is more nuanced than commonly depicted in discourse. Understanding it requires contextualizing it within a set of contested histories. Although legally considered a tort of copyright infringement, media piracy has for centuries been rhetorically linked with the crime of maritime piracy. This association is used strategically by anti-piracy campaigns but also by pirates themselves as they draw on folklore and outlaw folk heroes as they discursively create their identities. Similarly, media piracy is intertwined with the histories of and sociocultural anxieties surrounding the ideological origins of copyright and industrial mass production. Piracy calls into question issues of ownership and authenticity, values which lie at the heart of modernity. Far more than illegal downloading, piracy becomes a symbolic threat to the social order. With digital technologies increasingly integrated into everyday life, media piracy is an issue that will only continue grow in significance. Although there is considerable literature on it, very little of it is ethnographic. I address this through interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation at KAT and I show how a folkloristic approach is best suited for interpreting the vernacular ways in which pirates negotiate illegality and a contested discourse by creating community and expressive culture.