Act like a swarm: What can Ukrainian online pirates teach us about civic activism and resistance

Starting from the first publication of Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s Eneida by the effort of a book pirate, the dissemination of unauthorised content has been a significant element of national resistance in Ukraine, which suffered censorship and assimilation efforts from the Russian metropolis. Even during independent years, the cultural content market was not only generally dominated by the Russian language content, but the legal distribution system itself was subordinated to the Russian one. In such circumstances, pirate spaces suggesting ‘unofficial’ Ukrainian dubbing were a reasonable option for consuming cultural content in the native language. Moreover, P2P torrent libraries and file-sharing platforms became the only spaces where Ukrainian classical movies, scanned rare books, documentaries, and LPs could be accessed. Pirate practices in Ukraine definitely had certain national identity connotations.

By applying postcolonial optics (Ngũgĩ 1986; Chernetsky 2007), the presentation explores how torrent use is connected to civic expression and activism. I describe different levels of civic engagement performed within their community via observations and in-depth interviews with users of the biggest Ukrainian torrent tracker. Via conscious consumerist choices, grassroots advocacy and acts of archival solidarity, the users accumulated Ukrainian language content online and facilitated its expansion within the legal market. By creating informal structures – the underground distribution system for ‘unofficial’ dubbing – they filled in the gap in the legal market by the available means. Therefore, in the late 2000s-2010s, this torrent community acted as an agent of decolonisation by promoting the Ukrainian language online, encouraging popular demand for Ukrainian language content on the legal market.

Kateryna Boyko is an IRES PhD student currently finalising her dissertation in media and communication studies. Her doctoral research explores civic cultures of online pirate communities in Ukraine. She focuses on conjunctions and interplays between civic and file-sharing practices, particularly, how and under what conditions pirate practices can contribute to social change. In addition, she has taken part in several projects dedicated to the response of the Ukrainian media environment to Russia’s full-scale invasion regarding strategic communication, changes in news media and novel aspects of participatory warfare. She has recently contributed to the anthologies Digital Warfare: Media and Technologies in the Russo-Ukraine War (Transcript), focusing on weaponisation of piracy, and Post-Soviet Women: New Challenges and Ways to Empowerment (Palgrave Macmillan), where she wrote a chapter about representations of Ukrainian women during the Russo-Ukrainian war.