Steal This Data
“The ruling class in the United States,” as McKenzie Wark puts it in the recent special issue of Theory and Event on the Occupy movement, “is less and less one that makes things, and more and more one that owns information and collects a rent from it.” Every time you buy a CD or DVD, even every time you stream from YouTube or Netflix, you’re not funding artists. You’re funding the 1% and their personal army of metropolitan police, whose major interest right now seems to consist of gassing students and tearing down barns. What’s a politically informed media junkie to do? Probably what you’re already doing – pirate.