Kateryna Boyko: Online Piracy Against Empire: A Digital Ethnography of Torrent Civic Culture in Ukraine

Abstract

While online piracy is commonly examined through the lens of copyright and resistance to it, its potential contribution to civic culture, enactment of national identity, and decolonisation processes remains insufficiently explored. This gap is particularly evident in the context of Ukraine, a country that has experienced cultural, political, economic, and kinetic aggressions from its coloniser, Russia. Through online observations and interviews with users of the largest Ukrainian-language torrent tracker, this dissertation explores the civic culture emerging around torrent practices in Ukraine, particularly its implications for political participation among online pirates. The results suggest that the Ukrainian postcolonial context, which includes Russia’s media imperialism, ubiquitous bilingualism, and the politicisation of language choice, among other factors, has contributed to the political salience of pirate practices. It has fostered the torrent community to develop a civic culture that enhances multiple connective actions to challenge the prevalence of Russian-language content online, including creating and disseminating unofficial Ukrainian dubbings, digitising books, and preserving media files from endangered websites. It is a mediated civic culture, shaped by media practices and alternative media infrastructures that users turn to in order to satisfy their civic and cultural needs. There, popular culture serves as an entry point for engagement, while civic and national aspects of users’ identities, together with the values of self-reliance and solidarity, underpin political participation. The torrent users disrupt postcolonial structures by introducing and popularising texts in the Ukrainian language through informal distribution infrastructures, bypassing intermediaries from the former metropolis, Russia, and thereby intervening in knowledge production and circulation. The research advances piracy studies by highlighting a direction for approaching Eastern European piracy from a postcolonial perspective, in which pirate resistance is directed not only against neoliberalism, Western cultural hegemony, and copyright regimes. More importantly, in this particular case, it is also a means of reclaiming the Ukrainian language, enacting national identity, and advancing cultural decolonisation. Beyond piracy and area studies, the dissertation enriches media studies as it theorises the workings of the mediated civic culture of a marginalised community, contributing to nation-building through informal means.