2003: Contagious Transmission 32

The tower block, condemned as a vertical slum by a Control that would rather update its architectural dimension into forms more amenable to representation ... becomes an “incubator.” The thicker the forest of towers, the more antennae perched above the city, the more the Radiant City, botched, radiates.
—Matt Fuller, Media Ecologies (2005)

The summer of 2003, holed up in a small room on the twelfth floor of a residential tower block in Bow, East London, the sweat running down the inside of the walls. The floor is carpeted in grime and dust. The room is built inside a larger room, a hastily constructed endo-architecture to cocoon the studio, protecting the pirate transmission and transmitters from intruders. The electrics are sporadic but functional. A decimated fan makes what little air there is circulate in the room, generating a turbulent microclimate of dust and smoke. Wires snake their way out of messily drilled holes (also working as steam valves), out through windows, trailing and flapping against the outside of the block, leading up to the transmitter on the roof. Inside this pirate radio studio, the megalopolis is screaming through the MCs at a rapid rate that seems to exceed the limits of the human system of vocalization. The pressure of millions channeled through a few mouths. They call out the name of their rivals in a lyrical assault and battery so cutting, so acerbic that even the DJ winces at the verbal violence as he drags the record backward, halting the proceedings only to return to the edge and roll again, this time building the intensity level that little bit higher.

For a moment, the scene freezes. The MC stops insulting and becomes an “encryptor.”1 His mouth becomes a modem, transmitting an asignifying stream of digits to the audience distributed across London’s airwaves: “out to the 365, the 768, the 976, 315.” Signaling that you are locked into the station’s transmission is made by phoning the studio number, letting it ring once, then hanging up. Acknowledgment of this signal is provided by the host/DJ/MC reciting the last three digits of phone numbers from his log of missed calls on the studio handset. The connection made, the transmission swells, the rate of text messages incoming to the studio escalates, while the studio phone vibrates. Matt Fuller has noted how, within the media ecology of pirate radio, mobile phone rings “have developed as a way to use the telecommunications architecture at no cost to receiver or sender and to process a relatively large number of feedback signals at speed ... they work as a password. In this case, they don’t so much allow the user to gain access—they are that access.”² Unusually one caller persists. A private number. Most callers hang up on one ring, the missed call functioning as a request code for the DJ to rewind the current track to the beginning. But the phone keeps ringing. The MC’s focus shifts from his rivals to the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), and now Offcom, the branch of the British state responsible for policing the radio spectrum.³ “You know how we do ... no private numbers. DTI get bun!” Answering the mobile phone to a private number potentially allows Offcom, monitoring signal transmissions over the airwaves, to locate the studio much more easily. A whole circuit of connections and disconnections, of contact and evasions. A veritable sonic war machine temporarily occupying a slice of radiophonic territory, hacking the national grid in a logistics of infection. Offcom—a centralized radio disease control agency monitoring outbreaks of “viracy” in the frequency spectrum.

Although London pirate radio has its own specific history of predator and prey, Offcom’s low-intensity war on “viracy” now converges with a global tendency that has been tagged “war in the age of pirate replication.”⁴ Piracy, in all its strains, pulses blocks of affect in from the system periphery, either external or internal, feeding the viral nature of digital capitalism. The auditory dimension of this viral culture is exemplified by the contagious transmissions of East London pirate radio. Meanwhile, conceptually, a set of problems is thrown up by piracy, problems that demand some fine tuning of the audio virological approach.

An audio virology seeks to illuminate some of the affective dimensions of pirate radio. According to Gaston Bachelard in his essay “Reverie and Radio,” radio engineers should be accompanied by what he calls a “psychic engineer” to aid in creating a mode of radio that communicates the unconscious: “It is through them that it will find a certain universality, and that is the reason for the paradox: the unconscious is something we know little about.”⁵ But the average pirate radio broadcast from East London is driven by what is more accurately described as “affect engineering,” where the throbs of sonic contagion pulsed across the radio waves are processed directly on the body. As Fuller points out, the “sonic unconscious is material that is collectively produced and is gated and intensified by multiple layers of processing—it becomes malleable, potentiated, in reception. These are types of music that are fundamentally synthetic. They declare the whole spectrum of vibrations at any speed or frequency subject to their inventive power.”⁶ Cerebral radio listening is short-circuited to be overridden by the “full-body-ear-drum” of the skin, via a sometimes mobile, distributed network of bass delivery systems.⁷

An audio virology must take into account what Matt Fuller has recently termed the “affordances,” “potentials,” and “activated relations” of “media ecologies” within the shifting biotechnical meshwork of sonic culture. It draws attention to pirate radio’s zones of transmission, incubation, its electromagnetic war for bandwidth, its bacterial nomadism within the vertical city, its asignifying contagious trade in numerical code and sonic fluids, and its power to generate virtual collectivity. Instead of merely making connections between individual cells, an audio virology probes the mutational potential of pirate media, asking what aesthetic transformations, what new modes of contagious collectivity and what rhythmic anarchitectures such sonic microcultures may provoke.

The first problem confronted by an audio virology concerns this planetary context of “war in the age of pirate replication.” The early-twenty-first century is a strange time to be an audio pirate, whatever the strain. Under the slogan of “piracy funds terrorism,” the war on terror has made a point of forging together the vast secret economies of pirated media (producing millions of unlicensed copies of CDs and DVDs, particularly from Southeast Asia), anonymous, illegal online file trading (using an array of p2p platforms) with ubiquitous, decentralized insurgency networks such as al Qaeda. From the point of view of agencies of control attempting to produce one global system, this multitude of targets is linked by the general dread of transmedial viral invasion—economic, electromagnetic, biological, terrorist, audiovisual. In fact, the virus constitutes the model for all threats to cybernetic control societies. Ubiquitous digitalization has intensified pirate replication, fueling the viral nature of cybernetic capital.

A second, and related, problem derives from the politicized discourse of underground media versus mainstream media and the mutual parasitism between them. Whether as a temporary autonomous zone of pirate Utopia (Hakim Bey) in “parasitic rejection” of (Bruce Sterling⁸), or in a campaign of resistance through “symbolic warfare” (Simon Reynolds⁹) against major technocultural networks, the fear for anticapitalist pirates is of incorporation into the body of the beast that feeds off its innovations, depriving originators of their just rewards. However, such formulations have a tendency to become overly unilateral, ignoring the actual symbiotic relationships that characterize emergent media ecologies within the intrinsically viral culture of late capitalism. The complex intertwining plays out in relation to both radio and file trading culture. Pirate radio, for instance, is parasitic of a state media space only insofar as this bandwidth is already colonized by parasitic antimarket media systems. Who exactly is the bigger pirate here? Instead of incorporation modeled on the hierarchical binary of underground-mainstream, illegal-legal, an audio virology is more concerned with transversal propagation vectors across an array of standard and nonstandard sonic ecologies and new trading and transmission channels opened up by accident.¹⁰ An audio virology must probe beyond the apparent contradiction between both the intellectual property protection and radio licensing and their violation, focusing instead on the complementary, symbiotic functioning of these media ecologies, expressed in the movements of pirate deterritorialization and formalized reterritorialization.

This complex symbiosis plays out in digital music markets as well as radio piracy. Is there really a necessary contradiction, for example, between unrestrained file trading and the subsequent reterritorialization of this into pay-for-downloads, or is it merely a change in speed of propagation? Trading activity is channeled through a labyrinth of credit card transactions, slowing transmission but simultaneously untapping a potential for escalation by feeding cash back into production labs and bolstering the zone of parasitic mediation that sustains corporate bodies in capitalizing on and monopolizing mass listening. Peer-to-peer file trading damages corporate margins, allows music to flow more freely (increasing the potential audience for the music), while simultaneously depriving some artists of income outside of the majors. Older critical models struggle to keep up with these complexities.

Once pirate and mainstream culture enter this tighter symbiotic relationship of affective contagion, the distinction between pirate or DIY microcultures and a co-opting capitalism becomes flattened. Now a new problem emerges in relation to the possibility of identifying invention when it occurs. This problem of differentiating innovation from its capture is confounded by what Matt Mason has termed, in his book of the same name, the pirate’s dilemma.¹¹ Mason, whose book often reads like an introduction to the youth culture of the past thirty years for corporate capitalists, is keen to sing the praises of the constructive power of cultural piracy in transforming capitalism to the point where we are all now, he claims, happy pirates.¹² Yet in his rush to celebrate decentralized networks, his argument often seems to whitewash the fact that power no longer needs to operate in a top-down fashion. The book starts off with the example of everyday sonic warfare in the form of signal jamming using merely an iPod and an iTrip. Mason runs through a list of similarly fascinating examples, from the effect on morale of pirate radio propaganda broadcasts from the world wars through to Vietnam and Iraq, through to underground music pirate networks in East London, even flirting with a virological theorization to correctly emphasize the aesthetic wealth of pirate culture in London: “Instead of exposing themselves on the open seas, this new breed of pirates began to operate cloaked in the anonymity of urban sprawl... the estimated 150 pirate stations on the FM dial in the United Kingdom act as musical Petri dishes—they have spawned new genres and cultures for decades, and attract as much as 10 percent of London’s radio audience.... Pirate radio is an incubator where new music can mutate.”¹³

Mason catalogs a long list of pirate invasions of media platforms, with innovative ideas and formats delivered in stealthy fashion, adopting various tactics of camouflage and anonymity. From the tidal waves of Schumpeterian creative destruction triggered by innovation in technology or technique, to the perpetual subversion, hacking, and remixing that the nonstandard use of these technologies facilitates, the law can only but lag behind. For Mason, this has signaled the end of top-down mass culture. Youth culture has reinvented, or rejuvenated, capitalism to the point that piracy has now become just another business model, a mutation from subversive cultural weapon to business plan; the situationist projection of art into the everyday becomes merely branding. So his instruction to capitalists is that to succeed, they should really compete with piracy instead of merely fighting it: “Pirates highlight areas where choice doesn’t exist and demand that it does. And this mentality transcends media formats, technological changes, and business models ... successful pirates adapt quickly to social and technological changes but this is true of all entrepreneurs.... Once these new ideas are broadcast, they unavoidably create a pirates dilemma for others in the market. Should they fight the pirates, or accept that there is some value in what they are doing, and compete with them?”¹⁴

In such a scenario, global and local pirate economics no longer merely function as a “parasitic rejection of the global order.” Rather, these hybrid mixtures of formal and informal economy indicate a voracious turbulent globalization in which waves of innovation sweep in from the periphery that surrounds and transects the core in ever decreasing time loops between innovation and mass marketing. These time loops approach zero, shortened by the voraciousness of viral marketing, futurology, and cool hunting. This is the somewhat bleak side of his story that Mason fails to acknowledge. The challenge is whether pirate cultures can retain autonomy as major corporations switch from aggressive conflict to aggressive competition. Can they develop their own preemptive mechanisms to ward off capture? How exactly tactical media (localized do-it-yourself pragmatism engaged in jamming, hacking, and short-circuiting communication and power grids) at the periphery will continue to coalesce with sound system cultures and an aesthetic of mongrelized music is, of course, unpredictable and subject to local conditions. But perhaps it is this random element that is the most powerful weapon against attempts to preempt and harness their affective power.