PUNTOEXE

PUNTOEXE investigates 18th-century pirate information networks and their parallel with contemporary digital infrastructures.

Pirates and privateers created an "information network" that enveloped the globe: primitive and devoted to forbidden business, it worked admirably. Scattered along it were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be provisioned. Some of them kept "intentional communities": mini-societies that lived consciously outside the law.

We are the children of Copy-Paste, fed by Click to Download, raised by the school of p2p, overstimulated by pop-ups and apprentices in the art of dodging adware, bloodhounds of malicious files and spiritually detached from the massive loss of information.

We inhabit volatile, interdimensional psycho-planes held up by cobwebs between slashes that talk to dots, and where a ñ appears as a stone in the road of an ever more naturalized language.

Could we be the pirates and privateers who, by raising their own islands in an ocean dominated by the 5 eyes, achieve the endurance of the liberto-informatic practice? Let us enlarge our bitmap, trace routes that exceed the terrains that indexed us, and keep painting our islands in ASCII to disorient the navies of the captcha, until the 5 eyes are remembered as the 5 shipwrecks.

• Hakim Bey — TAZ ↗
• Five Eyes ↗
• Peer-to-peer ↗