Response to Roger F. Malina, 'Rethinking Space Art in 2026 as Pirate Philosophy in Action'

Roger, 

Thanks for sharing this. I really like the move from thinking up to thinking down, and especially the idea of an 'underview effect'.

The question that occurs to me on reading 'Rethinking Space Art in 2026 as Pirate Philosophy in Action: No Thinking Up Without Thinking Down ### No thinking Fast Without Thinking Slow etc.' is: What would it mean to pirate not just space, but the ways in which space is known, imagined and organised? Or, to put it another way: What would a space programme look like if it were itself organised according to pirate principles? 

Would addressing such a question have the effect of moving the discussion through something like the following four stages?

1st stage) Space art about the present space system

2nd stage) Testing the space system itself

As you put it, this would mean testing the 'assumption that outer space belongs principally to governments, military agencies, billionaires [e.g.Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos], engineers and corporations. They would challenge the enclosure of satellite data, astronomical knowledge, launch facilities, radio frequencies and planetary resources'. 

But it could also involve a redistribution - or, perhaps better, a predistribution - of funding and resources to others (people, groups, communities - both humans and nonhumans), 'beneath the satellite, rocket trajectory, mine and AI data center', capable of generating approaches to, and understandings of, space that are more diverse, and certainly less Euro-Western, humanist and liberal (and white, male and middle-class, for that matter).  

We need to give others the time, funding and resources to help bring these different futures about (see stage 4 below). They need to be able to control the conditions of production for the space system, and this requires a significant investment in them and their communities; and perhaps also the defunding of others.

With regard to AI, for instance, one can imagine money and resources going to towards making SLM AI engines, datasets, tools and infrastructure available to communities on a commons basis. This could make it easier for a diverse range of smaller, more politically and ethically responsible (and so visible, unmasked), independent and non-profit entities to be part of the AI ecosystem. It also connects with what some have been thinking about in terms of ‘good AI’: AI that is green, community-led (‘whether it takes the form of a workers' cooperative, an open source collective, stewardship by an academic or NGO, or some other simple format for sharing the work and the tech’), accessible and genuinely open-source.

3rd stage) Testing space art itself

This would indeed include the pirating of our own professional identities as artists, scientists, engineers, philosophers and editors. But it also connects with a larger question I guess I've been pursuing for some time: if we want to change things radically, is changing our radical theories about the world enough? Or do we also need to change the technologies, institutions and material practices through which those radical theories are created and circulated?

For me, that is where 'piracy' becomes more than a metaphor. The pirate philosopher doesn't simply think differently. The pirate experiments with different ways of being a thinker, researcher, artist, scientist or institution. The point, as you say, is not to romanticise the outlaw, but to use piracy as a method of putting our own practices to the proof. If we are not prepared to change, how can we expect others to?

This is part of what distinguishes a pirate philosophy, if we want to continue using the term, from simply having a more critical philosophy of space. The latter can leave the underlying organisation of knowledge intact: we produce a critique of the space system using the same institutional, technological and disciplinary arrangements that produced the space system in the first place. (Indeed, the critique is very much part of the existing system.) Pirate philosophy asks whether we can change those arrangements too. 

IP and copyright could certainly be part of this. But so could the unique author, the real name, the immutable book, the single-voiced narrative, originality, subjectivity, artistic authority, the rational (and possessive) human individual, for-profit income streams, and the apparatus of celebrity and elite scholarship. 

So: no critical thinking about space without experimenting with the organisations, infrastructures and economics through which that thinking takes place.

4th stage) Space art experimenting with alternative space - and Earth - systems

Systems that do indeed 'resist both state and corporate enclosures without treating Indigenous knowledge, community data or other worlds as freely available material.' The point, then, is not simply to criticise the existing space system, but to create the conditions in which other systems can emerge. And with them very different futures – for both space (including space environments, technologies, data and institutions), and for Earth, life, intelligence and the cosmos. 

These are the kinds of futures Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher would say modern capitalist society is haunted by: futures (for people, communities, technologies, institutions, space, Earth... ) that are being closed off by the current cuts in funding and support to libraries, museums and universities, and within them to the humanities, in favour of the technical specialists of STEM.

These cuts seem to be motivated by more than economics. They increasingly look ideological, too. In the UK, for example, they are hitting the 'new' universities particularly hard. These are institutions that have traditionally provided educational opportunities for non-traditional students, including those from working-class, Black and global majority backgrounds. They were also pivotal in promoting fields such as media studies and critical and cultural theory, fields that are now being positioned as ideologically problematic. Recent data indicates that 820 pure humanities jobs and 240 arts jobs were cut, with all but 110 of the total losses in the sector occurring in such non-Oxbridge and non-Russell Group universities.

So perhaps space piracy in action isn't - as you do indeed indicate it isn't - only about getting onto the vessel and questioning its destination, ownership and design. It is also about asking who gets the resources, time and institutional capacity to imagine and build other vessels - and other spaces, and other Earths - in the first place.

That's where the idea of pirate philosophy or pirate space art becomes particularly interesting. It isn't simply about resisting the existing system. It's about experimenting with the conditions under which different systems, and therefore different futures, can become possible.

Best, Gary