Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy 39 OF PIRACY, ANONIMITY, AND PARAMETRIC POLITICS AN INTERVIEW WITH NED ROSSITER AND SOENKE ZEHLE Krisis 2015, Issue 1: Pirates & Privateers www.krisis.eu In an (in)famous postscript, Gilles Deleuze traces the emergence of a soci- ety of control, whose passive danger is jamming, and whose active danger lies in piracy and viruses. Media jamming and piracy, hacktivism and vi- ruses are all rampant today: the internet is their natural breeding ground, to the point of becoming trivial occurrences in everyday life. Technology moves fast, but the means of understanding its movements do not, given the new media theory’s obligate and persistent homage to Deleuze’s early nineties programme. The gratuitousness of this reference today, combi- ned with the lack of specificity concerning contemporary implementati- ons of cybernetic modes of machinic governance, might just as well in- troduce a kind of theoretical laziness concerning the concrete stages of their development. In their collaborative research efforts, Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle ex- plore the consequences of new economies of capture and the enclosure of experience. For this edition of Krisis, they were willing to respond exten- sively via email to questions about their research, the directions it is tak- ing, and the methodological and conceptual innovations they feel are needed in order to address the complexity of the present, so as to better grasp the most recent incarnation of that eternal and ambiguous figure at the center of this special issue, the pirate. The latter offers an entry node into some of the more intangible and abstract issues that permeate so- called network societies. As the focal point of a cognitive mapping, the interview addresses debates on the common(s) and its multitudes in their flight from wage labor, as well as the antinomies of informational capital- ism, which frees up and mobilizes with one hand what it blocks entry to with the other. Fire and pay walls prevent access from what could be freely available to all, an idea that drove Aaron Swartz to disclosing JSTOR’s database of academic articles. As big data and dragnet surveillance increase the costs of identity, opting out becomes a viable alternative. What lies beyond is still uncertain, as the boundaries of the political im- plode to fuel a civil society whose weight existing democratic institutions cannot carry, without at least a sense of its ‘parametric’ dimensions. Daniël de Zeeuw Pirate practices often involve theft and property violations without clear- cut ideological motives, as is the case with most torrent trackers. For this reason they are often dubbed apolitical, in a pejorative, delegitimizing sen- se, namely as ‘merely’ criminal, directed towards private gain and against the public interest. More often than not, repression of what is deemed private is much stronger than what is said to be of public significance, ma- king this repression less contested as well. Similarly, hackers’ targeting of information and communication infrastructure is depoliticized, or delegi- timized under criminal conspiracy acts. Instead you claim that contempo- rary forms of piracy involve both contestations of ownership, new forms of use and an alternative politics of the common. Does this mean you re- ject the above framing of piracy as apolitical? Under what conditions may pirate practices involve genuine political acts? Or should they be evaluated according to other norms and categories altogether? To talk about how such framings operate as devices of depoliticization, we should perhaps revisit the distinction between politics and the political that also informs reflections on piracy. As Derrida has noted in his reading of Schmitt’s account of the friend/enemy distinction as an existential an- tagonism – implying the ever-present possibility of physical killing – that is constitutive of the political, Schmitt’s attempt to deduce the political from a place where it did not yet exist requires a definition of the enemy as such, one that is linked to the possibility of a proper war – that is, an exis- tentially political war. It is a distinction whose disappearance in the wake of modern warfare Schmitt both acknowledges and resists. It should be noted that in his post-war writings, Schmitt has discouraged readings of